Here’s the final version of my thesis (called ‘Persistence of Life-Streams – An Inquiry Into the Implications of Mixed Surveillance’) which covers the nature and implications of (participatory) surveillance in the field of social media, and specifically in life-streaming services like Twitter and Facebook. (PDF can be downloaded here).

Introduction:

In this thesis, I will investigate the use and organization of so-called ‘life-streams’, a term that is described by blogger John Borthwick as “real time, flowing, dynamic [streams] of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are are a part of this flow” (Borthwick, 2009). The life-streams as core interface can be found on different social media platforms, most famously being Twitter, Facebook and the recently introduced Google Buzz.

These life-streams could be seen as the contemporary model for social networking in which relations are instantiated through a data-stream of updates on someone’s activities. The life-stream’s interface, which is called the ‘timeline’ in the case of Twitter, consists of a chronologically ordered list of messages, with users following other people’s life-streams and engaging through dialogue a social relation emerges. Significantly, many of these networks do not all incorporate the term of ‘friend’ at all, opposed to the more traditional social network sites such as MySpace, Friendster or Facebook. The fundamental difference on life-stream environments like Twitter is that users amongst each other don’t necessarily share a mutual relationship. For instance, the Twitter-account of Jesus has over eighty-thousand followers, yet he does not follow back a single user.

Moreover, motivations for participating in these networks can also differ greatly; it could be used to get insight into the public opinion as a politician or to help customers out as a business customer relations service, although it is clearly widely used for sheer fun and personal interests amongst friends. Although these practices are much in favor of pervasive surveillance practices, theorists like Anders Albrechtslund emphasize on the created vertical power-relations of ‘participatory surveillance’, which he describes as “a way of maintaining friendships by checking up on information other people share” (Albrechtslund, 2008).

Furthermore, as researcher Anne Helmond explains in Life-tracing: The Traces of a Networked Life, this kind of willingly engagement can be seen as ’sousveillance’, a term coined by Steve Mann: “Surveillance is the act of watching performed from above by organizational structures, whereas sousveillance is the act of watching from below by individuals” (Helmond, 2009). In contrast to participatory surveillance, sousveillance seems to focus more on the empowerment by transparency amongst the multitudes rather than on a social function on micro-level.
This openness of very specific personal detail, according to Cnet.com editor Tim Leberecht, with these life-streams as a social (and self-imposed) reality, we now slowly move from ‘privacy’ to ’sociality’ as the norm:

“Privacy understood as sociality [...] grants us the ability to control who knows what about us and who has access to us, and thereby allows us to vary our social interactions with different people so that we can control our various social relationships at different levels of intimacy.” (Leberecht, 2010)

Also, Leberecht explains that the trust between people on the social network sites like Facebook can’t permit themselves to be exploited by profound regulations imposed companies economically, as the networks run on an enormous collective trust which is otherwise disturbed by a collective distrust in both the system, and consequently the community. However, users themselves are already stretching the boundaries of control they have over the digital applications, mainly since access is granted to third-party developers through an API (or another developer framework) which results in a wide variety of tools that alters the way content is produced and shared throughout life-streams. However, the empowerment of the developers in these frameworks often tends to lead back to the centralized power relations.

By building onto these ideas, I would examine how power is distributed within these life-streaming networks, and to what extent software-specific implementations influence create new modes of surveillance. First I will discuss the medium-specificity of the Web (Qvortrup, 2006) and specifically of life-streams. Thereafter, I will elaborate on two cases wherein privacy issues occurred due to failed expectations of privacy (Nissenbaum, 2004). Later on I will focus on various existing surveillance theories, like the panopticon (Foucault, 1977, Poster, 1990), participatory surveillance (Albrechtslund, 2008), and lateral surveillance (Andrejevic, 2005). Finally I will propose the term ‘mixed surveillance’ as the concept in which values amongst users and corporations intertwine, and the increasingly opaque modes of interaction. Therefore the central question, in this thesis will be: How did participatory surveillance become increasingly integrated into social media (such as life-streams), and what are the implications of mixed surveillance?

We are a deeply social species and we engage in “social grooming” all the time, i.e. acts that have no particular informational importance but are about connecting, forming, displaying and strengthening bonds, affirming and challenging status, creating alliances, gossiping, exchanging tidbits about rhythms of life. I personally doubt that there is substantially more social grooming going on today, on average, compared to the pre-Internet era. The only difference is that the Internet makes it visible. What used to be spoken is now written and published potentially for the world to see. That’s it. There isn’t more or less of it. What has happened has resulted in the shuffling of the traditional understandings of private and the public, and as such, it has enormous consequences but it does not signal that we are dumbing down. We were always this dumb.

The full critique can be found here.

“Mumblespeak makes potentially interesting works unreadable, contributing to their esotericism. Good editing does not involve cutting material, but cutting chaff. I’d wager that the average scholarly book’s length could be reduced by 1/3 to 1/2 without removing any actual content. Such effort would do two things: first, it would reduce the size of books, making them more approachable, affordable, and legible to a broader readership. Second, it would incrementally reduce the costs of printing, since fewer pages costs less on a digital or an offset press.”

The comments to the post are also very worth-while.

(I’m planning on posting quotes and links more frequently, since Twitter is often too limited for this).

Anyhow, I still won’t publish the work for reasons mentioned in an earlier post. I did however take some time to gather some more statistics from the thesis, namely the appearances of each author. I could elaborate on how I adore every author from the list, but it’ll (hopefully) show from my writings when it’s finally published.

Number of mentions:

UvA related authors (graduates, professors, Ph.D’s) formerly known as ‘all-stars’:

Other notable winners:

Wrapped kitteh.

With weeks of social isolation, and an increasing amount of repetitive strain injuries, last week was finally the time to hand in the New Media master thesis! After having the essential meetings and discussions with UvA professor R. Rogers (honestly, planning is still not my strongest point), I finally got some grip on the main topic of life-streams (such as fast-paced update and comment environments like Twitter or the Facebook News Feed). With an theoretical inquiry I looked into existing models of surveillance, and specifically how they are imposed, reinvented, or modified in the life-stream services. Eventually I coined the term ‘mixed surveillance’ to describe the popularization of tracking tools aimed at ‘the crowd’ while at the same time companies mine large amounts of personal data. Here, openness has thus become a commodity for both companies as well as individuals. The piece is titled as ‘Persistence in Life-streams: An Inquiry Into The Implications of Mixed Surveillance’.

I will publish my thesis on the blog once it’s graded and (when necessary) corrected. For the time being, here’s a tag cloud to get a general idea of the text:

‘Variety’ is inspired by the fact that several art forms – sound, animation, graphic compositions – are transformed easily in both appearance and being. During the evening local performers share the stage with the Wojciech Kosma, Vladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Kristin Lucas, Adrian Piper, Pierre Bismuth and Claire Fontaine. With dictions, videos, dance and music performances, ‘Variety’ ties together in a way that they are experienced as performances, and thus allow original interpretations to emerge.

Tickets cost €5 (student fee is €2,50), you can reserve seats by e-mail (reservations@nimk.nl) or phone (020 6237101). Also, tickets can be bought (in advance) starting at July 8th, at the NIMk institute (starting 6pm) or at De Brakke Grond (starting 7pm). The show starts at 8.30pm at the Rode Zaal in De Brakke Grond. Official press release (Dutch) can be found here. (While the press release says local artists will join the performance, I’m not sure in what language it will be. I’ll keep you posted on that.)

Additionally, at the same night, there’s another edition of Test_Lab will be held V2_ (Rotterdam) called ‘The Invisible City’, here’s a copy of the press release:

Opening: Theo Deutinger (AT/NL), TD Architects

Demonstrations: Selena Savic (SRB), Piet Zwart Institute | David Benque (FR), Royal College of Art | Michael Dotolo (US), Frank Mohr Institute | Renee Hulshoff (NL), Royal Art Academy | Gabriel Vanegas (CO), Academy of Media Arts Cologne | Oliver Goodhall (UK), Royal College of Art

Performance: Joram Kroon, a.k.a. Prace (NL), Utrecht School of the Arts

As Italo Calvino illustrates in his classic novel Invisible Cities, the notion of ‘city’ extends far beyond its visible physical architecture. A city is characterized as much by the ways in which its urban life is organized, the problems and threats it faces and the memories, desires and fears of its inhabitants, as by the buildings and spaces that define its physical form. Due to the rapid and ongoing process of urbanization – resulting in half of humanity now living in urban environments – we are forced to radically rethink our cities. While we can see our physical urban environments transforming at a rapid pace however, who is rethinking the ‘invisible’ counterparts that Calvino wrote about almost forty years ago?

Artists, architects, and designers play an important role in revealing ‘invisible’ aspects of cities, often providing new insights into how our cities function and develop. To rethink the ‘invisible city’ under the pressure of rapid urbanization, this edition of Test_Lab will feature a selection of freshly graduated artists, architects, and designers from European art and design academies whose projects explore the invisible aspects of our contemporary urban environments. The selected projects range from artistic representations of invisible cities, to simulations of urban economy and concrete scenarios for urban production and energy development. As it is custom to the Test_Lab event series, the audience will form the critical test panel for the demonstrated works and will be invited to examine each graduation project ‘hands-on’.

The evening kicks off with an introduction by the Rotterdam-based urban mapping expert Theo Deutinger, features a special opening of Disrupting Systems (see inset), and closes with a live music set about one of the world’s most conflict-ridden places.

Although both events look good, without being aware that they’re held simultaneously, I registered for Variety. Test_Lab’s line-up seems solid as ever, and it’s likely to be less abstract than Variety, I would also highly recommend it. Cheers.

The film has been released today and will be screened this week througout The Netherlands (Utrecht, Eindhoven, Nijmegen, Den Haag, Amsterdam) along with Q&A with the director afterwards. Judging from the trailer, the film tells a story of virtual immersion, relationships and escapism, here’s the synopsis coming from the official site:

Jitze, a young Dutch professional gamer, travels the world to compete in video game tournaments. During a stay in Taipei his arm starts to hurt and he’s forced to take a few days rest. A night in his hotel, Jitze meets a girl and starts realizing what it means to be human in the age of the virtual worlds.

While there have been interesting cinematographic explorations of the (full) disembodiment in for example Submarine’s My Second Life or the online performance I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL), it’s good to come across a narrative in which material and virtuality characteristics intertwine as a part of the plot. As a side-note, it’s also ironic to see that Second Life is turning into a tool for film-makers and artists (treating the environment as one that has never actually existed), now that it’s largely abandoned by commercial parties.

Finally, here are this week’s screening dates, and the film’s trailer:

Thursday evening at 19.30, the 10th of June at ’t Hoogt, Utrecht

Wednesday evening at 19.30, the 16th of June at Eindhoven Plaza

Thursday evening at 20.30, the 17th of June at Kriterion Amsterdam

Friday evening at 20.00, the 18th of June at Nijmegen LUX

Saterday evening at 19.30, the 19th of June at Filmhuis Den Haag

Sunday evening at 19.30, the 20th of June at EYE Amsterdam

Anyhow, although UvA professor Jan Simmons is involved in the first session, I have really no clue of what to expect from this workgroup’s aims and/or findings, more or less the same goes for the rest of the program with exception for Karen Lancel’s ‘Tele_Trust‘ project which I’ve been following since it first (?) appearance at V2_’s Test_Lab.

Here’s a copy of the official press release:

An evening conversation on interface studies.
Location: NIMk
Date: Friday June 18, 2010
doors open 8:00 p.m., program begins 8:30 p.m.
Entrance free
Please make reservations (elena@salto.nl)
(English spoken)

At this evening session, the Interface Studies Group will present the ‘interface’ as the centre of technology mediated experience and will reveal trends, notions and tangible prototypes that stretch and challenge the still predominant screen – spectator arrangement.
In contrast with traditional cinema and TV, in what may be called the ‘post-PC’ era, mobile and haptic interfaces and Reactive Environments are putting the embodied presence of the user back on stage. By engaging other senses and modalities such as touch, voice, movement and mobility and by taking into account the user’s sensorial and affective dimensions, new forms of interaction, knowledge production, and forms of sociality are made possible.

Program:

20:00 Doors open with DJ/VJ Emile Zile. Artist and Performer.

20:30 Welcome by Heiner Holtappels, Director of NIMk.

20.35 hrs Jan Simons – Beyond the desktop’. Presentation of the Interface Studies research group and lecture.
Media Theory author and researcher, Associate Professor ASCA/UvA.
20.55 hrs Ben Salem – ‘Designing reactive environments’.
Architect, Assistant Professor TU/e. Going beyond Ambient Intelligence into enhanced environment. (http://bsalem.info/)

Break

21.30 hrs Lilia Pérez, – ‘Just Touch’. An overview on touch as a paradigm for human-computer interaction. (http://liliaperez.net/)
Digital Artist, Interaction Designer and Researcher, PhD Candidate
21.45 hrs Jorge Alves Lino, ‘Responsive environments in the context of public space and large scale installation’ (http://jorgelino.com/)
Concept Designer, PhD Candidate TU/e
22.00 hrs Noam Knoller, ‘Interface Visions of Storytelling’ (http://www.knoller.com/)
Interaction designer/artist, filmmaker, PhD Candidate ASCA/UvA
22:15 hrs Karen Lancel, ‘TELE_TRUST in the context of artistic interfaces’
Digital artist, PhD Candidate ASCA/UvA. (http://lancelmaat.nl/)

22:30 Feel the bodily turn! – Drinks, Music and Interaction!

After the lectures, works in progress and interesting prototypes will be presented by guest artists and designers and made available for the public to try.

Special guest Installation: Social Soundmachine – feeling the music!
by Ramon Schreuder (Lewis & Davis – studio for experience design)
“Social Soundmachine is an interactive tabletop, on which people can create electronic music together. It uses a special multi-touch surface with a number of tangible game pieces.” URL: http://socialsoundmachine.com

Hope to see you all there!

Update: I just couldn’t resist to create this playlist:

Uploaded by Makz on Flickr.com, Some Rights Reserved.

Later this month an extraordinary evening will be hosted at the Waag Society by Rob van Kranenburg. While you might know him from his recent publication The Internet of Things (which covers the society of control and hacktivistic approaches), I’ve come to meet him a couple of times during discussion groups organized by a fellow student, Ramses Petronia. In these multidisciplinary discussions groups, topics like distributed, open networks, and appropriate democracies for the digital age have been covered a lot, and were overall quite exciting. (Let me know if you’d like to join these discussions sometime).

With this upcoming event, an international panel will discuss the micro-politics that emerged in the Pakistani city, Karachi, where organisation and intellectual property are constantly reinvented by local parties. Geert Lovink will also join the discussion by elaborating on his notion of ‘organized networks’ as a political structure.

Here’s some more information on the event coming from the mailing-list:

Rumana Husain, author of Karachiwala will launch her book in the Netherlands
Mukhtar Husain, author of ‘100+1 Pakistani Architects and their Own Houses‘
Atteqa Malik, from Mauj Collective Karachi skyping in
Geert Lovink, from Institute of Network Cultures on Organized Networks

(Rumana Husain) Karachiwala describes the diversity and change within Karachi, as a microcosm not only of Pakistan but of the entire south Asian region. A Subcontinent within a City : “I have always been curious about different peoples: who they are, where they come from, the languages they speak, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, what their beliefs are, the varied customs and traditions they observe, and what they do for a living.

This book is a study of — and a tribute to — that diverse mix of people who inhabit Karachi.”

A noted architect and interior designer, Mukhtar Husain did something unusual cataloguing and presenting the houses architects have designed for their own living. The pictorial volume shows the personality, design philosophy and lifestyle of each architect.

(Atteqa Malik) Mauj Collective for Open Technology, Art & Culture. Mauj Collective is conducting a study on e-Culture and New Media practices in Pakistan. It covers the arts, social development, business and nonprofits.

Geert Lovink will discuss ‘Organized Networks‘. The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily forgets the political dimensions of labour and life in informational times. Why have radical social-technical networks so often collapsed after the party? What are the key resources common to critical network cultures?

Host: Rob van Kranenburg
This evening is made possible by the Prince Claus Fund and Waag Society.

See you the 24th.

While I therefore missed the interview with photographer Robert Overweg, luckily, his work will be exhibited at Amsterdam’s Concrete Image Gallery starting later this month! Below’s a copy of the press release:

On friday the 18th of june, TAG opens the new exposition Robert Overweg: photographer in the virtual world at the Concrete image gallery in Amsterdam. Overweg ends his successful artist in residence period at TAG with an exhibition where he shows the results of this residence.

Overweg dwells through the virtual worlds of first and third person shooter games. He looks into the similarities, differences and borders between the virtual and the physical world. Borders which are being tested and stretched by Overweg.

He sees the virtual world as a direct expansion of the “real” world, the virtual places where players come together in multiplayer maps are for Overweg the new public spaces of contemporary society. For him it is logical to document his experiences and research through his photography. While making use of the new possibilities the virtual world give him.

Link to Robert’s invitation.