David M. Berry

Internet research: privacy, ethics and alienation: an open source approach

This paper examines some of the ethical problems involved in undertaking Internet research and draws on historical accounts as well as contemporary studies to offer an analysis of the issues raised. It argues that privacy is a misleading and confusing concept to apply to the Internet, and that the concept of non‐alienation is more resourceful in addressing the many ethical issues surrounding Internet research. Using this as a basis, the paper then investigates the Free/Libre and Open Source research model and argues for the principles of “open source ethics” in researching the online world, which includes a participatory and democratic research method.

Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source

Open source technology, like OpenOffice, has revolutionised the world of copyright. From downloading music and movies to accessing free software, digital media is forcing us to rethink the very idea of intellectual property. While big companies complain about lost profits, the individual has never enjoyed such freedom and autonomy in the market. Berry explores this debate in a clear and concise way, offering an ideal introduction for anyone not versed in the legalistic terminology that - up until now - has dominated coverage of this issue. Looking at the impact that the open source movement has had on journalism, printing, music and design, they show how the ideas that inspired the movement have begun to influence wider cultural and political transformations. This is a key text for students of media studies, journalism and anyone interested in new opportunities for creating a truly independent and democratic media.

The Poverty of Networks

The use of networks as an explanatory framework is widespread in the literature that surrounds technology and information society. The three books reviewed here — The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software by Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker — all make a claim to the novelty that networks provide to their subject matter. By looking closely at the way in which the network is utilized in each of the texts, this review attempts to question the extent to which a network analysis can ground a claim about a discontinuity in technology, society or economics.

The social epistemologies of software

This paper explores the specific questions raised for social epistemology encountered in code and software. It does so because these technologies increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment, and stretch across all aspects of our lives. The paper introduces and explores the way in which code and software become the conditions of possibility for human knowledge, crucially becoming computational epistemes, which we share with non-human but crucially knowledge-producing actors. As such, we need to take account of this new computational world and think about how we live today in a highly mediated code-based world. Nonetheless, here I want to understand software epistemes as a broad concept related to the knowledge generated by both human and non-human actors. The aim is to explore changes that are made possible by the installation of code/software via computational devices, streams, clouds or networks. This is what Mitcham calls a “new ecology of artifice”. By exploring two case studies, the paper attempts to materialise the practice of software epistemologies through a detailed analysis. This analysis is then drawn together with a notion of compactants to explore how studying tracking software and streams is a useful means of uncovering the agency of software and code for producing these new knowledges.

What Is Code

In this chapter, I want to consider in detail the problem we are confronted with immediately in trying to study computer code. The perl poem, Listen, shown below, demonstrates some of the immediate problems posed by an object that is at once both literary and machinic (Hopkins n.d.). Source code is the textual form of programming code that is edited by computer programmers. The first difficultly of understanding code, then, is in the interpretation of code as a textual artefact. It forms the first part of the development process which is written on the computer and details the functions and processes that a computer is to follow in order to achieve a particular computational goal. This is then compiled to produce executable code that the computer can understand and run. The second difficulty is studying something in process, as it executes or ‘runs’ on a computer, and so the poem Listen has a second articulation as a running program distinct from the textual form.

Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design

When examining our historical situation, one is struck by the turn towards the computational in many aspects of life. There have been numerous claims to epochal shifts from the post-industrial society, the technotronic society and the knowledge-based society, to name just three. Equally, with the introduction of softwarized technical systems, it is sometimes claimed that we live in an information society (for a discussion see Berry 2008). While numerous definitions exist, we now appreciate that around us algorithms running on digital computers mediate our lives by creating and re-presenting a world that appears more comfortable, safer, faster and convenient — although this may paradoxically result in our feeling more stressed, depressed or drained of meaning.

Visualizing translation variation: Shakespeare's Othello

Recognized as great works of world literature, Shakespeares poems and plays have been translated into dozens of languages for over 300 years. Also, there are many re-translations into the same language, for example, there are more than 60 translations of Othello into German. Every translation is a different interpretation of the play. These large quantities of translations reflect changing culture and express individual thought by the authors. They demonstrate wide connections between different world regions today, and reveal a retrospective view of their cultural, intercultural, and linguistic histories. Researchers from Arts and Humanities at Swansea University are collecting a large number of translations ofWilliamShakespeares Othello. In this paper, we have developed an interactive visualization system to present, analyze and explore the variations among these different translations. Our system is composed of two parts: the structure-aware Treemap for document selection and meta data analysis, and Focus + Context parallel coordinates for in-depth document comparison and exploration. In particular, we want to learn more about which content varies highly with each translation, and which content remains stable. We also want to form hypotheses as to the implications behind these variations. Our visualization is evaluated by the domain experts from Arts and Humanities.

A Network is a Network is a Network: Reflections on the Computational and the Societies of Control

In this wide-ranging conversation, Berry and Galloway explore the implications of undertaking media theoretical work for critiquing the digital in a time when networks proliferate and, as Galloway claims, we need to ‘forget Deleuze’. Through the lens of Galloway’s new book, Laruelle: Against the Digital, the potential of a ‘non-philosophy’ for media is probed. From the import of the allegorical method from excommunication to the question of networks, they discuss Galloway’s recent work and reflect on the implications of computation for media theory, thinking about media objects, and critical theory.

Real-Time Streams

The growth of the Internet has been astonishing, both in terms of its breadth of geographic cover, but also the staggering number of digital objects that have been made to populate the various webpages, databases, and archives that run on the servers. This has traditionally been a rather static affair, however, there is evidence that we are beginning to see a change in the way in which we use the web, and also how the web uses us. This is known as the growth of the so-called ‘real-time web’ and represents the introduction of a technical system that operates in realtime in terms of multiple sources of data fed through millions of data streams into computers, mobiles, and technical devices more generally. Utilising Web 2.0 technologies, and the mobility of new technical devices and their locative functionality, they can provide useful data to the user on the move. Additionally, these devices are not mere ‘consumers’ of the data provided, they also generate data themselves, about their location, their status and their usage. Further, they provide data on data, sending this back to servers on private data stream channels to be aggregated and analysed. That is, 1. The web is transitioning from mere interactivity to a more dynamic, real-time web where read-write functions are heading towards balanced synchronicity. The real-time web… is the next logical step in the Internet’s evolution. 2. The complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web. 3. More and more people are publishing more and more “social objects” and sharing them online. That data deluge is creating a new kind of search opportunity (Malik 2009).

The heteronomy of algorithms: Traditional knowledge and computational knowledge

If critical approaches are to remain relevant in a computational age, then philosophy must work to critique and understand how the materiality of the modern world is normatively structured using computation and the attendant imaginaries made possible for the reproduction and transformation of society, economy, culture and consciousness. This call is something we need to respond to in relation to the contemporary reliance on computational forms of knowledge and practices and the co-constitution of new computational subjectivities. This chapter argues that to comprehend the digital we must, therefore, know it from the inside, we must know its formative processes. We must materialize the digital and ask about the specific mediations that are made possible in and through computation, and the infrastructural systems which are built from it. This calls for computation and computational thinking to be part of the critical traditions of the arts and humanities, the social sciences and the university as a whole, requiring new pedagogical models that are able to develop new critical faculties in relation to the digital.