Robert W. Gehl

The archive and the processor: The internal logic of Web 2.0

In Web 2.0, there is a social dichotomy at work based upon and reflecting the underlying Von Neumann Architecture of computers. In the hegemonic Web 2.0 business model, users are encouraged to process digital ephemera by sharing content, making connections, ranking cultural artifacts, and producing digital content, a mode of computing I call ‘affective processing.’ The Web 2.0 business model imagines users to be a potential superprocessor. In contrast, the memory possibilities of computers are typically commanded by Web 2.0 site owners. They seek to surveil every user action, store the resulting data, protect that data via intellectual property, and mine it for profit. Users are less likely to wield control over these archives. These archives are comprised of the products of affective processing; they are archives of affect, sites of decontextualized data which can be rearranged by the site owners to construct knowledge about Web 2.0 users.

Power/freedom on the dark web: A digital ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network

This essay is an early ethnographic exploration of the Dark Web Social Network (DWSN), a social networking site only accessible to Web browsers equipped with The Onion Router. The central claim of this essay is that the DWSN is an experiment in power/freedom, an attempt to simultaneously trace, deploy, and overcome the historical conditions in which it finds itself: the generic constraints and affordances of social networking as they have been developed over the past decade by Facebook and Twitter, and the ideological constraints and affordances of public perceptions of the dark web, which hold that the dark web is useful for both taboo activities and freedom from state oppression. I trace the DWSN’s experiment with power/freedom through three practices: anonymous/social networking, the banning of child pornography, and the productive aspects of techno-elitism. I then use these practices to specify particular forms of power/freedom on the DWSN.

Skin self-examinations and visual identification of atypical nevi: Comparing individual and crowdsourcing approaches

PURPOSE Skin self-examination (SSE) is one method for identifying atypical nevi among members of the general public. Unfortunately, past research has shown that SSE has low sensitivity in detecting atypical nevi. The current study investigates whether crowdsourcing (collective effort) can improve SSE identification accuracy. Collective effort is potentially useful for improving peoples visual identification of atypical nevi during SSE because, even when a single person has low reliability at a task, the pattern of the group can overcome the limitations of each individual. METHODS Adults (N=500) were recruited from a shopping mall in the Midwest. Participants viewed educational pamphlets about SSE and then completed a mole identification task. For the task, participants were asked to circle mole images that appeared atypical. Forty nevi images were provided; nine of the images were of nevi that were later diagnosed as melanoma. RESULTS Consistent with past research, individual effort exhibited modest sensitivity (.58) for identifying atypical nevi in the mole identification task. As predicted, collective effort overcame the limitations of individual effort. Specifically, a 19% collective effort identification threshold exhibited superior sensitivity (.90). CONCLUSIONS The results of the current study suggest that limitations of SSE can be countered by collective effort, a finding that supports the pursuit of interventions promoting early melanoma detection that contain crowdsourced visual identification components.

Real (Software) Abstractions On the Rise of Facebook and the Fall of MySpace

This paper argues that the failure of MySpace and the rise of Facebook in the social networking site market is due in part to the degrees in which either site associates users, technology, and marketers into a successful “real software abstraction.” Real software abstraction is a synthesis of the software engineering concept of abstraction and the Marxian concept of the real abstraction. This concept is used to examine MySpace and Facebook at the levels of aesthetics, code, culture, and appeal to marketers. I argue that instead of creating an architecture of abstraction in which users’ affect and content were easily reduced to marketer-friendly data sets, MySpace allowed users to create a cacophony of “pimped” profiles that undermined efforts to monetize user-generated content. In contrast, Facebook has proven to be extremely efficient at reducing users to commodifiable data sets within a muted, bland interface that does not detract from marketing efforts.

Sharing, knowledge management and big data: A partial genealogy of the data scientist

This article is a partial genealogy of the data scientist, meant as a contribution to understanding how both big data and the subject who mines it have come to be. It adds to the growing criticism of data mining by considering how big data might be used to manage the very workers who ostensibly command it. The article traces the concept of ‘sharing’ as it appears in discourses about the knowledge economy, arguing that knowledge sharing produces messy excesses of data. It then traces what is not shared: the knowledge workers capable of mining that data to produce value. It concludes by tracing how the act of sharing knowledge is used to undermine the power of the very subject called forth to command the excesses of sharing. It concludes by describing a reversal: data will become scarce while the ability to mine it ubiquitous and cheap.

The Case for Alternative Social Media

What are “alternative social media”? How can we distinguish alternative social media from mainstream social media? Why are social media alternatives important? How do they work? Why do people make them? What do they tell us about contemporary corporate social media and its related phenomena: surveillance, privacy, power, self-expression, and sociality? This essay answers these questions by theorizing alternative social media. The empirical data for this alternative social media theory are drawn from previous work on alternative sites such as Diaspora, rstat.us, Twister, GNU social, and the Dark Web Social Network. These cases are used to build a generalized conceptual framework. However, this article does not solely theorize from these examples, but rather seeks to contextualize and historicize alternative social media theory within larger bodies of work. In addition to generalization from examples, the theory is informed by two threads. The first thread is the work of alternative media scholars such as Nick Couldry, Chris Atton, and Clemencia Rodriguez, who have done the historical and theoretical work to define alternative media. The second thread is a synthesis of works exploring the technical side of contemporary media, coming from new fields such as software studies. The threads and empirical analyses of sites such as Diaspora, Quitter, and rstat.us are combined into a theoretical matrix that can account for the processes and technical infrastructures that comprise social media alternatives and explain why they are distinct from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, as well as why they are important.

Pinning the Feminine User: Gender Scripts in Pinterest's Sign-Up Interface

Popular social media site Pinterest is known for its strong female user base, something often attributed to the links, images, and ideas available on it. We argue that Pinterest’s popularity with women can also be attributed to a kind of gendering that occurs during the sign-up process. We see the sign-up process as a ‘gender script’ that inscribes specific gender performances into Pinterest itself by ‘pre-scribing’ adherence to a dualistic conception of gender and encouraging users to cooperate rather than to compete with each other, to curate content rather than to create it, and to interact affectively with images rather than with text. These behaviors have connections in the broader public imaginary to traditional performances of femininity, thus the kind of introduction and instruction the new user receives when signing up encourage a perception that Pinterest is for women, a perception that is then materialized in user behaviors. We close by arguing for the sign-up interface as an important site of study in new media scholarship and by discussing the ways in which gender scripts might be resisted.

Building a Blog Cabin during a Financial Crisis: Circuits of Struggle in the Digital Enclosure

In their studies of online media, political economists of communication have examined how firms like Google enclose users in a web of commercial surveillance, thus facilitating the commodification of their online labor. However, this focus on enclosure tends to overlook the political possibilities highlighted by autonomist Marxist theory—namely, that users, under certain circumstances, can appropriate these applications to contest conditions of exploitation. This article offers an analysis of Blog Cabin 2008, a cable home improvement show, in order to explore this tension between autonomy and enclosure. Our findings suggest that producers indeed used the show’s blog to exploit fans’ free labor. However, fans also used the blog to form social bonds, to press demands on the show’s producers, and to make connections between the show’s class politics and the wider financial crisis. A concluding section explores the theoretical and political significance of such unanticipated uses of the show’s blog.

Critical approaches to communication technology – the past five years

ABSTRACT Critical approaches to information and communication technology have seen five very busy years as the central trends of ‘communicative capitalism’ have consolidated and taken distinct shapes hand in hand with the proliferation of social media. This article offers an overview of some of the key developments that have preoccupied the attention of critical scholars over that period. With some inevitable gloss-over and reduction of complexity and nuance, it can be argued that the most prominent targets of critique have been: digital labour and its exploitation; big data and the process of datafication of social life; and social media platforms with their inherent algorithmic control over users’ behaviour and sociality, and the subjectivation and commodification of individual selves.

The Politics of Punctualization and Depunctualization in the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA)

ABSTRACT Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), this essay explores the politics of punctualization and depunctualization by closely examining the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), an online advertising and marketing trade consortium. I deploy two concepts from actor-network theory, punctualization and depunctualization, as key lenses through which to see the shifting contours of the Digital Advertising Association as it confronts other actor-networks.