Hacking the Web 2.0 User Agency and the Role of Hackers As Computational Mediators
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Hacking the Web 2.0 User agency and the role of hackers as computational mediators andrea rota Thesis submitted to the Department of Sociology of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. London, January 2016 With amendments (April 2016) I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. Additionally to the above copyright notice as required by the School, I declare that I release this dissertation under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. 1 Abstract This thesis studies the contested reconfigurations of computational agency within the do- main of practices and affordances involved in the use of the Internet in everyday life (here labelled lifeworld Internet), through the transition of the Internet to a much deeper reliance on computation than at any previous stage. Computational agency is here considered not only in terms of capacity to act enabled (or restrained) by the computational layer but also as the recursive capacity to reconfigure the computational layer itself, therefore in turn affecting one’s own and others’ computational agency. My research is based on multisited and diachronic ethnographic fieldwork: an initial (2005–2007) autoethnographic case study focused on the negotiations of computational agency within the development of a Web 2.0 application, later (2010–2011) fieldwork in- terviews focused on processes through which users make sense of the increasing perva- siveness of the Internet and of computation in everyday life, and a review (2010–2015) of hacker discourses focused on tracing the processes through which hackers constitute themselves as a recursive public able to inscribe counter–narratives in the development of technical form and to reproduce itself as a public of computational mediators with capacity to operate at the intersection of the technical and the social. By grounding my enquiry in the specific context of the lifeworlds of individual end users but by following computational agency through global hacker discourses, my re- search explores the role of computation, computational capacity and computational me- diators in the processes through which users ‘hack’ their everyday Internet environments for practical utility, or develop independent alternatives to centralized Internet services as part of their contestation of values inscribed in the materiality of mainstream Internet. 2 Contents 1 Introduction 9 1.1 Enter the Read/Write Internet ....................... 9 1.2 Overview ................................... 13 1.3 Research focus and research question ................... 19 1.4 Thesis outline ................................ 23 1.5 Contributions to previous research ..................... 30 2 Conceptual framework 34 2.1 Assembling pre–Read/Write Internet ................... 35 2.1.1 The early Internet as a mediated environment . 37 2.1.2 The ethnographic turn in Internet studies . 40 2.2 Assembling Read/Write Internet ...................... 42 2.2.1 Unfolding the Web 2.0 narrative . 42 2.2.2 Read/Write culture ......................... 44 2.2.3 User–generated content and engagement . 46 2.2.4 Critiques of Web 2.0 ........................ 48 2.3 Internet and lifeworld ............................ 51 2.4 Conceptualising power struggles around the Read/Write Internet . 53 3 Research methods: choices and challenges 59 3.1 Introduction ................................. 59 3.2 Researching computational agency: fieldwork sites and contexts . 62 3 4 3.2.1 From a failed Web 2.0 experiment to ethnography of student ac- counts ................................ 62 3.2.2 An ethnographic project? ...................... 65 3.3 Researching user accounts ......................... 67 3.3.1 Recruitment and selection of fieldwork participants . 67 3.3.2 Natives of Read/Write Internet? Demographic considerations . 70 3.3.3 The ordinary user .......................... 71 3.3.4 The interview process ....................... 75 3.4 Making sense of fieldwork stories ..................... 78 3.4.1 Prior knowledge and the role of the researcher . 78 3.4.2 Between autoethnography and participant observation . 81 3.4.3 Beyond the field: following the actors . 84 4 Mainstream lifeworld Internet: material architecture and the role of compu- tation 90 4.1 Introduction ................................. 90 4.2 From Web 2.0 to Read/Write: the architecture of lifeworld Internet . 93 4.3 Deconstructing the telos of progress .................... 99 4.3.1 Narratives of versions . 103 4.4 Topology and agency: client/server over peer–to–peer . 105 4.5 The computational turn of the Internet . 113 4.5.1 Key traits .............................. 116 4.5.2 An example: narratives of computational versions . 127 5 Assembling lifeworld within Web 2.0: negotiations and normativity 130 5.1 Introduction ................................. 130 5.2 Design of the Goldsmiths 3D Graduate app: composing information mashups133 5.3 Institutional knowledge and information politics . 136 5.4 User lifeworld and Web 2.0: a complicated relationship . 140 5.5 Web 2.0 and development constraints . 145 5.6 Engineering negotiations: actual configurations . 149 5 5.7 Conclusion .................................. 151 6 Re-assembling lifeworld Internet: user accounts 153 6.1 Introduction ................................. 153 6.2 Five years of Web 2.0 promises: what really happened? . 156 6.2.1 Producing content on the Read/Write Internet . 156 6.2.2 Aggregating content, connecting meaning . 161 6.3 Reconfiguring practices . 164 6.3.1 Downloading, consuming and sharing content . 165 6.3.2 Dealing with social norms online . 170 6.4 Reconfiguring computational infrastructure . 175 6.4.1 Read/Write practices and meaning: a complicated relationship . 175 6.4.2 Hacking lifeworld Internet: advanced practices . 178 7 Hackers as recursive public: constitution of computational mediators 184 7.1 Introduction ................................. 184 7.2 Inscribing recursion in computational infrastructure . 187 7.2.1 Negotiating computational complexity from context diversity . 188 7.2.2 Material grounding of new Internet standards . 192 7.3 Read/Write hacker learning and reproduction of hacker knowledge . 194 7.3.1 ”Civilized discourse” as environment for informal learning . 197 7.3.2 Computational platforms for hacker learning . 201 7.3.3 Taking code for granted: learning to write by reading others’ code 205 7.3.4 Beyond visibility of code: learning computational thinking . 211 7.4 A recursive public of hackers . 213 7.4.1 Peer-induction to hacker discourses . 217 8 Computational Read/Write Internet: assembling alternative rationalizations221 8.1 Introduction ................................. 221 8.2 Self-hosting: the IndieWeb . 223 8.2.1 Owning one’s own content on the web . 223 6 8.2.2 Reading and Writing on the web: IndieWeb strategies . 225 8.2.3 Balancing control and convenience: taking part in social conver- sations on the web . 228 8.2.4 IndieWeb hackers: motivations and peer support . 231 8.3 Decentralized Read/Write Internet: reassembling p2p infrastructure . 236 8.3.1 Countering centralization: hacker motivations . 238 8.3.2 Computational turn and decentralization: from user-to-user to machine-to-machine configurations . 240 8.3.3 Redecentralized Internet: strategies and configurations . 242 8.4 Alternative rationalizations and computational mediation . 248 8.4.1 Redecentralization efforts and end user engagement . 248 8.4.2 Convenience and trust in decentralized configurations . 252 8.4.3 Agency and computational capacity: the contested execution of code ................................. 256 8.4.4 Political economy of redecentralization . 260 8.5 Conclusion .................................. 266 9 Conclusion 269 9.1 Review of research findings . 270 9.2 Answering the research question . 273 9.3 Suggestions for future research . 276 A Profiles of students interviewed during fieldwork (2010-2011) 281 B Sources for the textual analysis of hacker publics and their projects 285 B.1 Magazines (printed or digital) . 287 B.2 Social news websites ............................. 288 B.3 Blogs and microblogs of individual hackers . 289 B.4 Engineering blogs .............................. 290 B.5 Conferences and hacker conventions . 291 B.6 Interviews and podcasts . 292 7 B.7 Source code and project websites . 293 B.8 Academic and professional journals . 293 References 295 List of Figures 4.1 ’Nanobots’ (from xkcd comics) . 111 7.1 Schematic chart of software infrastructure for a typical mid-2000s Web 2.0 app versus a typical post-computational turn web app . 190 7.2 User profile on Stack Overflow . 200 7.3 User activity summary on Stack Overflow . 201 7.4 Code and electronics assembly instructions from a maker zine . 206 8 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Enter the Read/Write Internet In retrospect, it was like I was killing my time waiting for the web to show up. [...] I sometimes feel like I was born too