Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives 2
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EDITED BY GEERT LOVINK AND MIRIAM RASCH INC READER #8 The Unlike Us Reader offers a critical examination of social media, bringing together theoretical essays, personal discussions, and artistic manifestos. How can we understand the social media we use everyday, or consciously choose not to use? We know very well that monopolies control social media, but what are the alternatives? While Facebook continues to increase its user population and combines loose privacy restrictions with control over data, many researchers, programmers, and activists turn towards MIRIAM RASCH designing a decentralized future. Through understanding the big networks from within, be it by philosophy or art, new perspectives emerge. AND Unlike Us is a research network of artists, designers, scholars, activists, and programmers, with the aim to combine a critique of the dominant social media platforms with work on ‘alternatives in social media’, through workshops, conferences, online dialogues, and publications. Everyone is invited to be a part of the public discussion on how we want to shape the network architectures and the future of social networks we are using so intensely. LOVINK GEERT www.networkcultures.org/unlikeus Contributors: Solon Barocas, Caroline Bassett, Tatiana Bazzichelli, David Beer, David M. Berry, Mercedes Bunz, Florencio Cabello, Paolo Cirio, Joan Donovan, EDITED BY Louis Doulas, Leighton Evans, Marta G. Franco, Robert W. Gehl, Seda Gürses, Alexandra Haché, Harry Halpin, Mariann Hardey, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Yuk Hui, Ippolita, Nathan Jurgenson, Nelli Kambouri, Jenny Kennedy, Ganaele Langlois, Simona Lodi, Alessandro Ludovico, Tiziana Mancinelli, Andrew McNicol, Andrea Miconi, Arvind Narayanan, Wyatt Niehaus, Korinna Patelis, PJ Rey, Sebastian SOCIAL MEDIA MONOPOLIES Sevignani, Bernard Stiegler, Marc Stumpel, Tiziana Terranova, Vincent Toubiana, AND THEIR ALTERNATIVES Brad Troemel, Lonneke van der Velden, Martin Warnke and D.E. Wittkower. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2013 ISBN 978-90-818575-2-9 SOCIAL MEDIA MONOPOLIES AND THEIR ALTERNATIVES 2 Unlike Us Reader Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives Editors: Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch Copy editing: Rachel Somers Miles Design: Katja van Stiphout Cover design: Giulia Ciliberto and Silvio Lorusso Printer: Joh. Enschedé, Amsterdam Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2013 ISBN: 978-90-818575-2-9 Contact Institute of Network Cultures phone: +31205951866 fax: +31205951840 email: [email protected] web: www.networkcultures.org Order a copy of this book by email: [email protected] A PDF of this publication can also be downloaded freely at: www.networkcultures.org/publications/inc-readers Join the Unlike Us mailinglist at: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/unlike-us_listcultures.org Supported by: CREATE-IT applied research, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) and Stichting Democratie en Media Thanks to Margreet Riphagen at INC, to all of the authors for their contributions, Patrice Riemens for his translation, Rachel Somers Miles for her copy editing, and to Stichting Democratie en Media for their financial support. This publication is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. SOCIAL MEDIA MONOPOLIES AND THEIR ALTERNATIVES 3 EDITED BY GEERT LOVINK AND MIRIAM RASCH INC READER #8 4 Previously published INC Readers: The INC Reader series is derived from conference contributions and produced by the Institute of Network Cultures. The readers are available in print and PDF form. INC Reader #7: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, 2011. INC Reader #6: Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles (eds), Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, 2011. INC Reader #5: Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer (eds), Urban Screens Reader, 2009. INC Reader #4: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, 2008. INC Reader #3: Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds), MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries, 2007. INC Reader #2: Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen and Matteo Pasquinelli (eds), C’LICK ME: A Netporn Studies Reader, 2007. INC Reader #1: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (eds), Incommunicado Reader, 2005. All INC Readers, and other publications like the Network Notebooks Series and Theory on Demand, can be downloaded as a PDF for free from www.networkcultures.org/publications. Or check www.scribd.com/collections/3073695/INC-Readers for print on demand, and www.issuu.com/instituteofnetworkcultures for online reading. SOCIAL MEDIA MONOPOLIES AND THEIR ALTERNATIVES 5 CONTENTS Geert Lovink A World Beyond Facebook: Introduction to the Unlike Us Reader 9 THEORY OF SOCIAL MEDIA Bernard Stiegler The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies 16 David M. Berry Against Remediation 31 Ganaele Langlois Social Media, or Towards a Political Economy of Psychic Life 50 Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey The Fan Dance: How Privacy Thrives in an Age of Hyper-Publicity 61 Martin Warnke Databases as Citadels in the Web 2.0 76 Andrea Miconi Under the Skin of the Networks: How Concentration Affects Social Practices in Web 2.0 Environments 89 Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin Collective Individuation: The Future of the Social Web 103 CRITICAL PLATFORM ANALYSIS Korinna Patelis Political Economy and Monopoly Abstractions: What Social Media Demand 117 Jenny Kennedy Rhetorics of Sharing: Data, Imagination, and Desire 127 Mercedes Bunz As You Like It: Critique in the Era of an Affirmative Discourse 137 Caroline Bassett Silence, Delirium, Lies? 146 Ippolita and Tiziana Mancinelli The Facebook Aquarium: Freedom in a Profile 159 PLATFORM CASE STUDIES Mariann Hardey and David Beer Talking About Escape 166 D.E. Wittkower Boredom on Facebook 188 Leighton Evans How to Build a Map for Nothing: Immaterial Labor and Location-Based Social Networking 189 Andrew McNicol None of Your Business? Analyzing the Legitimacy and Effects of Gendering Social Spaces Through System Design 200 6 Robert W. Gehl ‘Why I Left Facebook’: Stubbornly Refusing to not Exist even After Opting out of Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Graph 220 ARTISTIC INTERVENTIONS Simona Lodi Illegal Art and Other Stories About Social Media 239 Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio Face-to-Facebook, Smiling in the Eternal Party 254 Louis Doulas and Wyatt Niehaus On Pleaselike.com and Facebook Bliss 259 Brad Troemel Art After Social Media as a Rejection of Free Market Conventions 264 Tatiana Bazzichelli Disruptive Business as Artistic Intervention 269 ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL MEDIA USES Marc Stumpel Facebook Resistance: Augmented Freedom 274 Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Nelli Kambouri The Tactics of Occupation: Becoming Cockroach 289 Tiziana Terranova and Joan Donovan Occupy Social Networks: The Paradoxes of Using Corporate Social Media in Networked Movements 296 ALTERNATIVES Lonneke van der Velden Meeting the Alternatives: Notes About Making Profiles and Joining Hackers 312 Sebastian Sevignani Facebook vs. Diaspora: A Critical Study 323 Florencio Cabello, Marta G. Franco and Alexandra Haché Towards a Free Federated Social Web: Lorea Takes the Networks! 338 Solon Barocas, Seda Gürses, Arvind Narayanan and Vincent Toubiana Unlikely Outcomes? A Distributed Discussion on the Prospects and Promise of Decentralized Personal Data Architectures 347 APPENDICES Unlike Us Research Agenda 364 Unlike Us Conferences 373 Unlike Us #1 in Limassol Unlike Us #2 in Amsterdam Author Biographies 376 SOCIAL MEDIA MONOPOLIES AND THEIR ALTERNATIVES 7 8 INTRODUCTION 9 A WORLD BEYOND FACEBOOK: INTRODUCTION TO THE UNLIKE US READER / GEERT LOVINK SOCIAL MEDIA FACEBOOK WEB RESEARCH INTERNET USERS NETWORK INFORMATION TIME PUBLIC GOOGLE 10 Social slogans of the day: ‘Das Ich ist nicht zu retten’, Ernst Mach – ‘I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a genera- tion of idiots’, Albert Einstein – ‘I can buy a Ford, Toyota, BMW or Smart car and drive on the same roads and use the same fuel. Everything is interchangeable about them except the key that gets me in and starts the engine. It’s a good model for how our communication systems should work, at all levels’, Dave Winer – ‘Take a position, be an author’ – the European concert of networks – ‘I am inspired by the internet’, Johan Sjerpstra – ‘It is a small step from distributed to dispersion…’ – ‘Neither information nor a drug fix ever gives any happiness when you have it, but will make you miserable when you don’t’, Michel Serres – ‘I am traveling a lot, online’. Whether or not we are in the midst of yet another internet bubble, we can all agree that social media dominates the use of the internet and smartphones. The emergence of apps and web-based user-to-user services, driven by an explosion of informal dia- logues, continuous uploads, and user-generated content, have greatly empowered the rise of ‘participatory culture’. At the same time, monopoly power, commercialization, and commodification are on the rise as well, with just a handful of social media plat- forms dominating the social web. Tensions are increasing with the question of what to make of the influence and impact of ‘social media’? Two contradictory processes – both the facilitation of free exchanges and the commercial exploitation of social re- lationships – seem to lie at the heart of contemporary capitalism: empowerment and control, freedom