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FCJ-190 Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives GNU social, Quitter, rstat.us, and Twister
Robert W. Gehl The University of Utah [Abstract] Introduction: Universalised Twitter Meets Its Alternatives Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) explores the moments when a universalised practice (for example, global capitalism) gets a grip on a local context (for example, in an Indonesian rain forest). When the slippery universal, which in some circles might be lauded as ‘frictionless’ (as in ‘frictionless capitalism’), meets local contexts, frictions occur. Friction traces the move from the desire for frictionless ideals to its awkward and messy contact with situated realities. Friction is resistance, but it is also productive and necessary for any energetic system. Taking up this idea, this paper traces the friction between Twitter and Twitter alternatives. In this sense, Twitter is situated as ‘universalised’ (Koopman, 2013: 19), which is to say that it is now an idealised form of online communication. Twitter has established a format of online communication—microblogging—that…
FCJ-189 Reimagining Work: Entanglements and Frictions around Future of Work Narratives
Laura Forlano Illinois Institute of Technology Megan Halpern Arizona State University [Abstract] Introduction This paper discusses the ways in which labour advocates are enmeshed and entangled in narratives around the role of emerging technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics in the future of work. The article draws on literature from science and technology studies and media studies in order to critically analyse narratives about the future of work in the mainstream media. Based on interviews and a design workshop, we argue that participatory design methodologies are one way to engage with and explore the frictions inherent in these future of work narratives in order to find productive ways of bridging the philosophies embedded within labour activism and technology. Technologies such as crowdsourcing platforms, ‘just in time’ scheduling software, big data tracking, and robots are at the forefront of discussions around the future of work in the mainstream media….
FCJ-188 Disability’s Digital Frictions: Activism, Technology, and Politics
Katie EllisCurtin University Gerard GogginUniversity of Sydney Mike KentCurtin University [Abstract] Introduction Increasingly, disability is acknowledged as a key part of society, public and private spheres, and everyday life. Moreover, disability has achieved notable recognition and endorsement as an area of inequality, oppression, and discrimination that requires concerted global and local action. We see various markers of this transformation in the social relations of disability. In the legal realm there is the enactment of the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Arnardóttir and Quinn, 2009; Flynn, 2011), and the cumulative effect of many important laws and regulations enacted by governments around the world (Francis and Silver, 2000; Waddington, Quinn and Flynn, 2015). Related positive developments include greater visibility and potency of people with disabilities in public spheres and counter public spheres. There is increasing acknowledgement of the specific gender, class, race, and sexuality dimensions of disability…
Announcing FCJ Issue 25: Apps and Affect
We at the Fibreculture Journal are very happy to announce a new issue: Apps and Affect. FCJ25 Apps and Affect edited by Svitlana Matviyenko, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, and Andrew Murphie. Issue 25 features; FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway Svitlana Matviyenko, Patricia Ticineto Clough & Alexander R Galloway FCJ-180 ‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps Tanya Kant FCJ-181 There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as Commodity Jeremy Wade Morris and Evan Elkins FCJ-182 Middlebroware Frédérik Lesage FCJ-183 iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media Henry Adam Svec FCJ-184 Interpassive User: Complicity and the Returns of Cybernetics Svitlana Matviyenko FCJ-185 An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic Regulation Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy FCJ-186 Hack for good: Speculative labour, app development and the…
FCJ-187 The Droning of Experience
Mark Andrejevic Pomona College [Abstract] Recent debates over the fate of automated weaponry raise the question of pre-empting pre-emption: might it be possible to thwart the seeming ineluctable development of so-called ‘killer robots,’ that can respond to perceived threats more efficiently and rapidly than humans? The processes of disarmament and pre-emption collided in the ‘bold action’ of a top United Nations official who issued a call to ban the ominously-acronymed Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs). ‘You have the opportunity to take pre-emptive action and ensure that the ultimate decision to end life remains firmly under human control,’ UN Director-General Michael Moller told the participants in a 2014 conferenced on killer robots (Agence France Presse, 2014). The difference between LAWs and other lethal weapons lies in the command decision – that is, the final determination regarding whether to fire (bomb, destroy, etc.). If the command decision always incorporates a human at some…
FCJ-186 Hack for good: Speculative labour, app development and the burden of austerity
Melissa Gregg Intel Corporation, USA [Abstract] In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. (Reagan, 1981) At a time when the technology sector offers hope for a revitalised economy, particularly in the United States, the working conditions typical in this highly prized industry take on special significance. This paper analyses the rise of ‘hackathons’ – code- and data-sharing events that inspire participants to accomplish specific challenges in a condensed time frame – to understand their role in the ecosystem for app development and the qualities of work they promote. Hackathons are emblematic of broader trends in high-tech labour in that they reflect the difficulties, opportunities and compromises young workers face in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. They are a symptom of a broader transformation affecting career preparation and training as stable paths for recruitment give way to the velocity of…
FCJ-185 An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic Regulation
Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Western University, Canada [Abstract] Let us begin with indefinition (the indefinite): specifically the question of information —proceeding from there to the myriad methods and mechanisms used to capture and control (or ‘net’) it. There is no single, unified mechanism governing the definition and distribution of information today, and this may account for some of the major tensions and tendencies in the so-called ‘information era’. The concept of ‘information’ itself has no single, unified definition, even though there are various theories that have been put forward to conceptualise it — as some ‘thing’ akin to a commodity-cum-object that can be possessed (indeed purchased), traded and legislated, or alternatively (for example) as a ‘process’ akin to signal-transmission, feedback- and/or stimulus-response circuits (‘information transfer’ and ‘information flow’). Hence, although information may be a useful and much-used idea, there is as yet no agreement on its basic definition…
FCJ-184 Interpassive User: Complicity and the Returns of Cybernetics
Svitlana Matviyenko University of Western Ontario [Abstract] …cybernetics gets more and more complicated, makes a chain, then a network. Yet it is founded on the theft of information, quite a simple thing. Michel Serres, The Parasite (2007: 37). No boundaries This essay explores the properties of mobile apps – and ‘smart’ technologies in general – that return us to the allegedly ‘old’ questions of governance and control raised by cybernetic theory. I argue that mobile apps are different from other software due to the role they play in transforming the configuration of actors in the human-machine assemblage. The significance of such radical reconfiguration is veiled by the discourses of ‘innovation,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘sustainability,’ ‘productivity,’ and ‘transparency’, which advocate the extensive use of cloud based technology for the sake of generating more data. This results in an environment where ‘the body-across-platforms as the body with the data’ becomes ‘the body as the…
FCJ-183 iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media
Henry Adam SvecMillsaps College [Abstract] Introduction It has been tempting, for fans of folk music, to celebrate the creative possibilities afforded by Web 2.0 as a sign of the resurgence of something like a folk revival. [1] David Dunaway (2010), for instance, has divided the history of folk revivalism in the United States into three periods. His first wave lumps together a wide range of collectors, researchers, and activists, from ethnographers to the more overtly political and propagandising efforts of Alan Lomax and others in the thirties and forties. Next is the ‘folk boom’, which featured the mass-commercial success in the fifties of the Weavers and then the Kingston Trio (Dunaway, 2010). Happily, the folk revival has returned again, according to Dunaway, beginning in the late eighties and early nineties, and the World Wide Web has been a key source of the new varieties of folk expression recently on offer:…
FCJ-182 Middlebroware
Frédérik Lesage Simon Fraser University [Abstract] Introduction In the introductory chapter to Software Takes Command, Lev Manovich (2012: 31) justifies his decision to focus his study on software applications instead of ‘the activity of programming’ by arguing that the former – for the most part commercial application software like Photoshop, AfterEffects, and Final Cut Pro – represent the tools of ‘mainstream cultural practices’ of digital media production while the latter represents an exceptional practice. Manovich’s self-justification serves as a useful starting point for this paper because it draws attention to two sets of interrelated questions regarding contemporary digitally mediated cultural production. The first set of questions stems from Manovich’s acknowledgement that digital media producers, including people who program, represent a significant group of cultural producers (Dovey and Kennedy, 2007; Mackenzie, 2006: 32—33). But recognising programmers as cultural producers raises a classificatory challenge: is the practice of programming necessarily a distinct…
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