Andrew Richard Schrock

YOUTUBE, TWITTER AND THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT: Connecting content and circulation practices

Videos stored on YouTube served as a valuable set of communicative resources for publics interested in the Occupy movement. This article explores this loosely bound media ecology, focusing on how and what types of video content are shared and circulated across both YouTube and Twitter. Developing a novel data-collection methodology, a population of videos posted to YouTube with Occupy-related metadata or circulated on Twitter alongside Occupy-related keywords during the month of November 2011 was assembled. In addition to harvesting metadata related to view count and video ratings on YouTube and the number of times a video was tweeted, a probability sample of 1100 videos was hand coded, with an emphasis on classifying video genre and type, borrowed sources of content, and production quality. The novelty of the data set and the techniques adapted for analysing it allow one to take an important step beyond cataloging Occupy-related videos to examine whether and how videos are circulated on Twitter. A variety of practices were uncovered that link YouTube and Twitter together, including sharing cell phone footage as eyewitness accounts of protest (and police) activity, digging up news footage or movie clips posted months and sometimes years before the movement began; and the sharing of music videos and other entertainment content in the interest of promoting solidarity or sociability among publics created through shared hashtags. This study demonstrates both the need for, and challenge of, conducting social media research that accommodates data from multiple platforms.

Civic hacking as data activism and advocacy: A history from publicity to open government data

The civic hacker tends to be described as anachronistic, an ineffective “white hat” compared to more overtly activist cousins. By contrast, I argue that civic hackers’ politics emerged from a distinct historical milieu and include potentially powerful modes of political participation. The progressive roots of civic data hacking can be found in early 20th-century notions of “publicity” and the right to information movement. Successive waves of activists saw the Internet as a tool for transparency. The framing of openness shifted in meaning from information to data, weakening of mechanisms for accountability even as it opened up new forms of political participation. Drawing on a year of interviews and participant observation, I suggest civic data hacking can be framed as a form of data activism and advocacy: requesting, digesting, contributing to, modeling, and contesting data. I conclude civic hackers are utopian realists involved in the crafting of algorithmic power and discussing ethics of technology design. They may be misunderstood because open data remediates previous forms of openness. In the process, civic hackers transgress established boundaries of political participation.

The democratization of hacking and making

We have framed the theme of this issue as “The Democratization of Hacking and Making” to draw attention to the relationships between action, knowledge, and power. Particularly, hacking and making are about how practices of creation and transformation generate knowledge and influence institutions. These acts concentrate and distribute power through publics and counterpublics. Yet, the very mutability of hacker and maker relations makes them a challenge to identify and research. Hacking and making collectives have proven capable of constituting and reconstituting themselves in physical and virtual spaces. They integrate across infrastructures, collaborative systems, socio-economic divides, and international boundaries. Hacking and making movements are plural and diverse, but in no way are they entirely new. These movements have specific histories, cultures, and traditions. As they quickly sprawl across national and geographic boundaries, they tend to forget those stories and lineages. This function of forgetting also occurs in a cyclical fashion in the public and research communities. The public has become aware of the popularization of hacking and making mostly through moments of emergency and scandal. Forgetting serves a function for the public, allowing them to get on with their own interests. Concurrently, this public forgetting allows hackers to regain their spaces of creativity and action. Maker culture, too, forgets in order to find a perpetual sense of novelty in their very existence. Forgetting, an important social and cultural project, is also part of the democratic project. Democracies forget to put aside old tensions and re-form in order for the public to support them. Thus, although each article considers fundamentally democratic concerns of access, participation, and collaboration, these questions are couched in just one set of

Reconnecting Here and There The Reactivation of Dormant Ties in the United States and Japan

This article examines the reactivation of dormant ties in Japan and the United States. Using the institutional approach to culture developed by Yamagishi et al., it is hypothesized that respondents living in Japan will be less likely to reconnect with dormant ties when prompted than respondents living in the United States. It is further hypothesized that interaction with kin and work ties will help to explain lower levels of reconnection in Japan than in the United States. To examine these hypotheses, we developed a field experiment in which 95 adults living in Japan and 68 adults living in the United States were prompted by a smartphone application to reconnect with dormant ties. The results of this study show strong support for the hypothesis that respondents living in Japan are less likely to reconnect with dormant ties than respondents living in the United States when prompted. There is also mixed support for the hypothesis that interaction with kin and work ties helps to explain lower levels of reconnection in Japan than in the United States.

HTML5 and openness in mobile platforms

HTML5 is an open standard that enables new functionality in the mobile web ecosystem. Speculation by companies around its potential presents an opportunity to view how notions of ‘openness’ are employed to create and support mobile platforms. Particularly, Internet-based companies such as Google seek a foothold in mobile industries which have traditionally been dominated by carriers and device manufacturers. I compare two paradigms of openness and suggest a third in this article. Open source describes the development of the HTML5 standard by multiple stakeholders in online industries. Open innovation is a process where value is being constantly created and captured, such as when companies make app developer tools public but carefully manage the point-of-sale ‘app stores’. A third type – rhetorical openness – describes claims that strategically bolster a corporate position. Rhetorical openness is increasingly necessary for mobile companies needing to balance multiple stakeholders, appeal to developers, and convince the public of their good intentions. Disputes around the politics of online and mobile media will be increasingly conducted through, using, and around these three forms of openness.

The politics of information and data: Interdisciplinary perspectives on digital power.

We are at a curious moment in interdisciplinary scholarship on digital politics. Politics and technology have always had a contentious relationship. Boosters initially believed the Internet would be a boon to civic engagement. Critics were leery of these claims and saw its veneer of participation hiding deeper issues of power. In communication and political science information became the common currency for discussing power. On the horizon, data and algorithms loom as the heirs apparent. Jordan and Kreiss narrate this moment using historical precedents that define a landscape where information, politics, and data are mutually entangled. Each paints a picture that is nuanced and troubling, yet at times profoundly hopeful. Jordan and Kreiss are both intellectual hybrids of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Communication. Each makes a well-reasoned argument about the changing field of digital politics. Beyond these similarities, they could not have more distinct interests and approaches. In part, this essay came from a desire to speak to New Media & Society’s interdisciplinary audience and put European and United States traditions into conversation. Daniel Kreiss comes from Stanford, where he worked with Fred Turner. He previously authored a book on the Obama presidential campaign, titled Taking Our Country Back. Tim Jordan emerged from the “strong program” of STS at the Edinburgh School and is particularly known for his writing on hacking and activism. Not surprisingly, these two authors narrate and explain recent political shifts using distinct theoretical and empirical lenses, starting with their conception of politics. Jordan is concerned with how information alters our understandings of politics as power. He regards the new digital landscape of social media networks and clouds as augmenting the way power is exerted and resisted. Kreiss is drawn to the sociology of political organizations, meticulously tracking the evolution of party-based electioneering in the United States. Their writing styles also excel in qualitatatively different ways. Jordan paints a grand theoretical vision as compared with Kreiss’ meticulous empiricism. I bring them 683946 NMS0010.1177/1461444816683946new media & societyReview essay review-article2017

Global Mobile Media, by Gerard Goggin. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011. xiii + 224 pp.

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