Adam Fish

BIRDS OF THE INTERNET

Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birders handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.

Digital labor is the new killer app

Research on digital labor tends to fall into idealized, oppositional binaries that are judgmental rather than based on detailed analyses of the actual system or site. Our goal in this article is to provide a view on digital labor that is grounded less in speculation but in narratives from the producers of the platforms and content of the digital economy. To provide original perspectives on digital work we emphasize the agency of the producers and freelancers working at the global outsourcing firm Samasource and the cable television network Current TV. Our analyses of these two cases reveal important questions regarding 1) the values and organizational culture of firm founders and executives and 2) the mobility of freelance workers within the networks of digital labor. In conclusion we interrogate how wealth is distributed within the network. Across these questions, we introduce a research agenda that considers to bridge the ethical challenges of labor exploitation as well as the promises of social entrepreneurship in the digital economy.

Internet Authorship: Social and Political Implications within Kyrgyzstan

This paper presents the results of our corroborated study of grassroots Internet sites and authors in the nation of Kyrgyzstan, exceptional in Central Asia for its deregulated Internet policy. The study presents a set of semistructured interviews with notable grassroots Internet authors and activists, including bloggers, forum participants, and journalists, and analyzes this data via a critical communication and media studies lens to point to significant implications on emergent social, cultural, and political movements in the nation.

Revolutionary Tactics, Media Ecologies, and Repressive States

Digital networks are part of a larger media ecology that works to spread awareness, scrutiny, and activism. Such networks help coordinate and mobilize physical assembly and protest and are also tools wielded to empower repression and oppression.

A computational study of how and why reddit.com was an effective platform in the campaign against SOPA

In this paper, we analyze the posting and voting activities of reddit’s users and show how these interact with the site’s structure to create an environment where information activists could build a resource base to oppose the 2012 US House of Representatives bill, Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). The broadcasting function of the ‘Front Page’ was important in raising awareness of SOPA among reddit’s users. Broadcasting the outcomes of collective voting back to the voters establishes an attentional feedback loop, and this imbued the collective action which followed with certain characteristics. Continuing a longitudinal investigation into changes in the ways that user attention and activity is distributed between the site’s 240,000 ‘subreddits’, we conclude by theorizing whether such collective action will be possible on the reddit of the present.

Networked idiots: Affective economies and neoliberal subjectivity in a Russian viral video

Idiot is usually a term of derision. In this article, we reconsider the common meaning as designating a stupid person and return to an earlier etymology as signifying a private and independent individual. In ancient Greece, being idiotic meant engaging in the contemplative process of becoming an individual. At times, this pursuit of individuation differentiated such individuals as their acts occurred in public and were seen as absurd, out-of-the-ordinary and, frankly, idiotic, as most now know the term. With the widespread use of social media and digital video, these once private or semi-public acts of individuation often become explicitly public acts for others to see, critique and mimic. Social media has made it possible for these explorations of self to circulate where their emotional intensities resonate with or are rejected by viewers, are captured for profit by media corporations, and leveraged by their producers into media careers. Using a case study from Russian social media, this article describes the affective economy of idiotic videos and how the history of one Internet video illustrates the circulation, capture and self-capitalization attendant with neoliberalism.

Edgework, state power, and hacktivists

Comment on Coleman, Gabriella. 2014. Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: The many faces of Anonymous. London and New York: Verso.

Silophication of Media Industries

Throughout my fieldwork with Current and FSTV, I encountered video producers discussing “silos,” “partnerships,” and “intersectionality” in order to frame and solve problems. While these framing exercises assist different sectors to cope with the complexity of modernity, they also reveal the contradictions inherent in the capitalist/democratic system that simultaneously requires fluidity in collaboration and employment and fixity in markets, policies, and personnel. The discursive frames such as silos and intersectionality are mechanisms to rationalize employment directives in a changing and complex work world.

Technoliberalism and the end of participatory culture in the United States

This book critically examines the turbulent media culture of amateurs and activists using new video technologies and regulations in order to access an otherwise privatized television. Based on historical accounts, ethnographic material, and over 80 interviews collected within the television and Internet industries in the US between 2006 and 2012, the book illustrates how the socially liberal ideals of equality and the free market ideals of competition clash on the battlefield of participatory culture.

Liberalism and Broadcast Politics

The video producers investigated here collectively challenge the socio-technical means of their professional livelihood through guerilla technological practices and policy oppositional models. They are not just broadcasters, pundits, television hosts, or behind-the-scenes waged producers. They are not just activists, seeking social justice for others. They are both broadcasters and media reformers who reform the technological and political conditions for their broadcasts. They dialogue on their future in meetings, panels, and in semi-private conversations. Their mission is how to achieve public goals such as improved democratic dialogue on private media systems while making a living. Throughout their history, video producers have modified their broadcasting approaches, how they addressed the public, and what reformist model they drew from in these pursuits.