Christopher Kelty

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.

Responsibility and nanotechnology

In this paper we argue that the concept and practice of responsibility is being transformed within science and engineering. It tells the story of attempts by nanotechnologists to make responsibility ‘do-able’ and calculable in a setting where the established language and tools of risk and risk analysis are seen as inadequate. The research is based on ethnographic participant-observation at the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN) at Rice University in Texas, during the period 2003 to 2007, including the controversies and public discussions it was engaged in and the creation of the International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON). CBEN began as a project to study ‘applications’ of nanotechnology to environmental and biological systems, but turned immediately to the study of ‘implications’ to biology and environment. We argue here that the notion of ‘implications’ and the language of risk employed early on addressed two separate but entangled ideas: the risks that nanomaterials pose to biology and environment, and the risks that research on this area poses to the health of nanotechnology itself. Practitioners at CBEN sought ways to accept responsibility both as scientists with a duty to protect science (from the public, from defunding, from ‘backlash’) and as citizens with a responsibility to protect the environment and biology through scientific research. Ultimately, the language of risk has failed, and in its place ideas about responsibility, prudence, and accountability for the future have emerged, along with new questions about the proper venues and ‘modes of veridiction’ by which claims about safety or responsibility might be scientifically adjudicated.

Beyond Implications and Applications: the Story of ‘Safety by Design’

Using long-term anthropological observations at the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology in Houston, Texas, the article demonstrates in detail the creation of new objects, new venues and new modes of veridiction which have reoriented the disciplines of materials chemistry and nanotoxicology. Beginning with the confusion surrounding the meaning of ‘implications’ and ‘applications’ the article explores the creation of new venues (CBEN and its offshoot the International Council on Nanotechnology); it then demonstrates how the demands for a responsible, safe or ethical science were translated into new research and experiment in and through these venues. Finally it shows how ‘safety by design’ emerged as a way to go beyond implications and applications, even as it introduced a whole new array of controversies concerning its viability, validity and legitimacy.

Seven dimensions of contemporary participation disentangled

Participation is today central to many kinds of research and design practice in information studies and beyond. From user‐generated content to crowdsourcing to peer production to fan fiction to citizen science, the concept remains both unexamined and heterogeneous in its definition. Intuitions about participation are confirmed by some examples, but scandalized by others, and it is difficult to pinpoint why participation seems to be robust in some cases and partial in others. In this paper we offer an empirically based, comparative analysis of participation that demonstrates its multidimensionality and provides a framework that allows clear distinctions and better analyses of the role of participation. We derive 7 dimensions of participations from the literature on participation and exemplify those dimensions using a set of 102 cases of contemporary participation that include uses of the Internet and new media.

Disentangling Public Participation In Science and Biomedicine

BackgroundThis article provides a framework for disentangling the concept of participation, with emphasis on participation in genomic medicine. We have derived seven ‘dimensions’ of participation that are most frequently invoked in the extensive, heterogeneous literature on participation. To exemplify these dimensions, we use material from a database of 102 contemporary cases of participation, and focus here on cases specific to science and medicine. We describe the stakes of public participation in biomedical research, with a focus on genomic medicine and lay out the seven dimensions.DiscussionWe single out five cases of participation that have particular relevance to the field of genomic medicine, we apply the seven dimensions to show how we can differentiate among forms of participation within this domain.SummaryWe conclude with some provocations to researchers and some recommendations for taking variation in participation more seriously.

Too Much Democracy in All the Wrong Places: Toward a Grammar of Participation

Participation is a concept and practice that governs many aspects of new media and new publics. There are a wide range of attempts to create more of it and a surprising lack of theorization. In this paper I attempt to present a “grammar” of participation by looking at three cases where participation has been central in the contemporary moment of new, social media and the Internet as well as in the past, stretching back to the 1930s: citizen participation in public administration, workplace participation, and participatory international development. Across these three cases I demonstrate that the grammar of participation shifts from a language of normative enthusiasm to one of critiques of co-optation and bureaucratization and back again. I suggest that this perpetually aspirational logic results in the problem of “too much democracy in all the wrong places.”

Competition and Extinction Explain the Evolution of Diversity in American Automobiles

One of the most remarkable aspects of our species is that while we show surprisingly little genetic diversity, we demonstrate astonishing amounts of cultural diversity. Perhaps most impressive is the diversity of our technologies, broadly defined as all the physical objects we produce and the skills we use to produce them. Despite considerable focus on the evolution of technology by social scientists and philosophers, there have been few attempts to systematically quantify technological diversity, and therefore the dynamics of technological change remain poorly understood. Here we show a novel Bayesian model for examining technological diversification adopted from palaeontological analysis of occurrence data. We use this framework to estimate the tempo of diversification in American car and truck models produced between 1896 and 2014, and to test the relative importance of competition and extrinsic factors in shaping changes in macro-evolutionary rates. Our results identify a four-fold decrease in the origination and extinction rates of car models, and a negative net diversification rate over the last 30 years. We also demonstrate that competition played a more significant role in car model diversification than either changes in oil prices or gross domestic product. Together our analyses provide a set of tools that can enhance current research on technological and cultural evolution by providing a flexible and quantitative framework for exploring the dynamics of diversification.

Piracy and Social Change: Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable discussion draws together researchers with an interest of overcoming purely juridical treatment of piracy in their work. Christopher Kelty and Gabriella Coleman consider the aspects of cyberculture, which conflictually engage with intellectual property rights, through various communities of technology practice, including hackers. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s work on fair use addresses the growing opportunities for creators in the United States to utilize the tradition in their creative fields. Jonas Andersson Schwarz and Patrick Burkart, co-editors of this special issue, have researched user motivations and political activism around copyright and software patent reforms, partially explaining the emergence of dozens of European Pirate Parties, beginning with the Swedish Pirates in 2006.

This Is Not Your Mother’s SamoaComing of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. By Tom Boellstorff. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

There are at least two things at stake in Tom Boellstorff’s new book, Coming of Age in Second Life. One is that he wants you to take virtual worlds and their residents seriously, and the other is that he wants you to take cultural anthropology seriously. A third thing might be that he wants to convince you that these two are connected. Second Life is an Internet-based, role-playing, graphical program in which users who log on interact via avatars with other users and their avatars. Second Lifers insist that it be called a “world” and that they be referred to as residents of that world (not “users,” “players,” “gamers,” or any other term that emphasizes the computer-mediated aspect of it). Second Life is one of a new generation of such programs that emphasize “user-generated content” and as such allow residents to spend much time customizing, building things from “prims” (“primitive” digital components), buying such bespoke items, and displaying them on or about their homes or avatars. Taking virtual worlds seriously should not be that hard. One only needs to hear a couple of stories of real-life murder over the theft of magical flaming swords or of in-world love affairs and marriages to realize that the whole virtual/real distinction no longer holds. But in the absence of signing up for such worlds and spending hours online, it is hard to grasp what has happened in anything but the abstract. Enter Coming of Age in Second Life (CASL). The book is absolutely invaluable for anyone who wants to understand what’s happening with virtual worlds. Like the very best of ethnography, it transports; it is classically thick with descriptions of everything from the linguistic and the proxemic to the metaphysical and the erotic. Ever wonder how time and space differ in virtual worlds? CASL does an excellent job of explaining how space can be virtualized while time cannot. What does death mean in these places? Both the death of the player behind the avatar and the death (disappearance?) of an avatar from the social world are discussed. Ever wonder what the difference is between

Two modes of participation: A conceptual analysis of 102 cases of Internet and social media participation from 2005–2012

ABSTRACT In this article we analyze 102 case studies of Internet or social media-enabled participatory projects, technologies, platforms and companies in operation between roughly 2005–2015. We assign each case a “signature” representing the degree of presence/absence of seven dimensions of participation and then cluster these signatures to look for patterns of the most common ways of “doing participation” today. Two main clusters become apparent: 1) a “radical-direct” mode that emphasizes direct individual autonomy and influence, commitment to having a voice and setting goals, and individual or collective control over resources thereby produced; and 2) an “experiential-affective” mode that emphasizes the experience of being or becoming part of a collective, and the affective, communicational, and educational features of that experience.