We build up this semi-random cloud of mental stuff to equip ourselves with a continually updated ‘feel’ for events—so that, when in the hazy future a need or opportunity arises, facts and intuitions will hopefully fuse into patterns that allow us to take actions appropriate to their context. We also hope that, while wandering and wondering in this space, we might stumble across valuable facts or ideas which, had we sought them, might not have been found. Let’s call this imaginary cloud ‘a space for half-formed thoughts’.

The space Tabor describes reminds me of the current Twitter-sphere in which every user reports of daily activities and continually moves across various conversations. Concretely, the sphere is also bound to never actually conclude a discussion because of the pace of updates, decentralisation of conversations, and the relentless character limitation.

However, the space is neither a good or bad thing by definition, as Tabor concludes: “Vagueness is sometimes a virtue, and clarity is sometimes a vice”.

The entire transcript can be found here.

Psst. They're reading!

(This article was cross-posted on the Masters of Media blog).

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?

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:

• Why wasn’t there a proper overview of who would be participating in this debate? If anythings essential for being able to discuss it’s knowing your opposition and the positions of each participant.
• Deriving from that: Where did all the representatives go? I didn’t notice any politician or entertainment industry spokesman contributing to the debate, why bother to have a discussion with just consumers? (Of course, consumers plea FOR Net Neutrality).
• Why Twitter? It has so many inappropriate aspects in respect to a proper debate. Real dialogue is nearly impossible due to several factors: (1) asynchronous messaging (2) following behavior: every user’s timeline differs, unless everyone knows how to find the #downloaddebat timeline, and (3) moderation is undoable because of lack of orientation.

Also, why would it be a good idea to discuss by using limited amounts of words? Of course, aphorism could be considered a poetic format in which people could express themselves, but is it useful in a debate? I don’t want to sound as a nostalgist, but aren’t nuance and elaboration two key features that mainly come to their right in a traditional debate? Maybe by using the communication platform, the Consumentenbond thinks it’s okay to have debates through mere oneliners? Or maybe they just wanted to get an estimation of the opinions across Twitter? (Why entitling it a ‘debate’ then?). It leaves me wondering what the initial intentions were with the discussion, and why Twitter would be considered a suitable platform for it.

Over the years Twitter has gradually developed, meanwhile its practices have also changed drastically. The contemporary celebrities took their places, the early adopters started exploring the potentials while lobbying about it and ultimately the platform rapidly started to expand in terms of functionality. Although the range of features on the site stayed very loyal to its core functions, there has been a recent announcement [1] of a Twitter Labs for testing out third party add-ons, following the succesful formula of Facebook Prototypes and Gmail Labs.

But besides all the fuzz, when it comes down to core functionality, what does Twitter facilitate in terms of content? We could say Twitter still maintains to be a text-based application, or rather an narrative-based one. This might seem obvious, but it might not entirely logical if this will remain the case. Numberous multimedia applications gain popularity within the network; music [2], video [3] or photos [4] can all be easily broadcasted without having to type anything.

As the well-known mediacritic Andrew Keen blogs about Twitter, he’s generally optimistic [5] about the possibilities it could have for ‘his kind’, namely writers:

(..) An electronic network for messages of under 140 characters, is an ideal venue for writers to distribute their clever, superior words to the Twitmasses. It is a shop-window for talent, a dream platform to build an army of “followers” — readers who literally follow and sometimes even redistribute my words. Twitter is dramatically more efficacious than any blurb on any book jacket. It’s a beautifully speedy way for writers to market themselves in real time to actual or potential consumers of their books.

Of course, the tool itself is very much capable of generating attention (or for building new relations), as many contemporary writers have succesfully build a fanbase [6]. Still, in this case there is a lack of evidence of the relations between their ‘actual’ succes and Twitter exposure, as most probably only the big get bigger (following the Long Tail model). Also, it’s not all that clear if there’s a strong linkage between the celebrity’s fanbase and the quality of the updates, as this networking behaviour relies on multiple factors. With leaving the cleverness in linguistics (or the marketing benefits of this) outside of the discussion, there’s not much of a reason to believe the established writers own their ‘Twitter-succes’ to their updates only.

Thus, in a broader debate, the question raises: how much do users, or does the incentive of the Twitter-network, care about the quality of textual narratives? The process of automation (e.g the format for updating your location with the Twitterific client [7]) within the microblog service imply that there’s already some preference to easy-to-use templates, instead a ‘hand-made’ message. Of course, writers would tend to defend the field of narrating, but there’s much doubt if this will hold when the aphorism trend carries on like it does.

Therefore it’s not so much the question if the tendency of shortening messages and communication will occur, but rather how this will manifest in media use. In an extrapolation of the update-culture you could ask where the point of a constant stream of generated data will be reached, operating rather fully as a datamining-mechanism. This turn would inherently introduce a different state of communication as the sender takes on the role of the medium itself. In this picture, the development of efficient data transmission would impose different adjustments to our current communication-model. The question remains which side Twitter will endorse as the it’ll supposedly change its form towards the will of the indie developers while incorporating the Twitter Labs expansions.

Finally, multimedia usage within the Twittersphere could be seen as more engaging or even more communicative, as a picture says more than 1000 words, even in a 140-character messaging system. Maybe this subject requires some more attention in future writings.

• [1] Twitter confirms ‘labs’ implementation (http://thenextweb.com/2009/10/02/twitter-labs/)
• [2] Twisten.fm, sharing music with Twitter (http://twisten.fm/)
• [3] Twiddeo, sharing video with Twitter (http://beta.twiddeo.com/)
• [4] Twitpic, sharing pictures with Twitter (http://twitpic.com/)
• [5] Blogpost Andrew Keen, ‘Why I’m on Twitter’ (http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=556&doc_id=174507)
• [6] Writers on the WeFollow directory (http://wefollow.com/twitter/writer)
• [7] Wikipedia entry on the Twitterific client (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitterific)

Nowadays, many of the popular social network sites are advanced platforms that more or less evolved from simple community platforms or fora. Where Myspace, Friendster and The WELL (later the Dutch De Digitale Stad popped up as a similar landmark) took off during the 90′s, Facebook, Hyves and hybrids (Morgan Currie earlier elaborated on this subject) like Last.fm emerged. These latter cases did benefit from the post-bubble internet revival that was presented as Web 2.0. As the 2.0 philosophy was fundamentally always present in the social network configuration, the emphasis for the new branch of services is much more on the facilitation of vast networks of interconnectivity. In practice, this results in tools which enable users to ‘network’ more effectively. The systems’ algorithms, along with its databases, needed to be revised to give new users a kind of starting-point for this manifestation. This is made clear by the directed recommendation-systems that basically scans and compares the different user-profiles. However, as of today this often results in plain and predictive references that depend on singular data. By saying this I’d like to exclude the Last.fm ‘neighbours’-technique, as it focuses not on the personal data, but rather on the capturing over time that generates a more accurate listening-profile.

As the current network sites streamline this connectivity of nodes differently, there’s a devious (though popular) network in the uprise: Twitter. Often described as a ‘microblog tool’, I find this case to be evenly (or more) a networking tool, since it (according to the Wiktionary definition) somewhat facilititates “the act of meeting new people in a business or social context”. I use the word ‘somewhat’ because the software is never genuinely transparant on the interconnectivity of its users, and doesn’t recommend similar users as on the other network sites. The system could easily be critized for the usage threshold, since the many of the real successors seem to be already established celebrities or people who tend to work in marketing or networking-reliant sectors. There also are numberous of blogs and books dedicated to the subject of effective networking on Twitter, this tendency also underlines the difficulty of positioning and maintaining accounts properly. Then again, this does not in any way exclude other low-end usage from being capable within the network, though it does identify the system as not very accesible in terms of communication.

Another obstacle in this efficient way of networking is formed by the active mode the platform demands from its users. The user’s networking strategies (consisting of medium literacy) fully determine for the succes or lack of it, this entirely breaks with the passive profiling tradition that encompasses filling in profile endless webforms or by protocological input. On Twitter, profiling is much more inferior to the actual (140-character) microblogging it facilitates. In this sense, the user profile becomes less of a static ‘personal branding poster’, but rather a representation over time. No longer is the user’s profile fixed on just one conception, it could be stated the Twitter microblog is inherently positioning the users more as a organic – being able to adept or adjust thoughts over time in the form of updates.

This character of real-time (or real-life) streams of data causes new challanges in terms of the abilities for sustainable networks to develop. This is partially why the previously mentioned marketeers are so eagering to develop efficient networking-tools, as their business largely consists of consultancy and services. Sites like Mr. Tweet have already begun on programming toolsets, although they rely too on the old tradition of comparing biographical information instead of the actual messages. One of the current tools to plow through the information masses is by using Twitter’s search function. Although this search engine offers some advanced features, it again demands dito query input. One might impose that this is an effective way to find anyone regardless of the updating behaviour, but the fact is high-end users obviously dominate pushing more passive users below the surface.

Another option is to index your the followers of the people you already follow, which again can turn out to be a arbitrary task. This method again pushes the super-connectors forward, leaving the incidental encounters as the network’s structure remains more or less hidden.

In conclusion maybe Twitter could (or should) be seen as a more hybrid network, as it mainly connects users on the basis of their updating behaviour (leaving out the super-connectors) that leads to the unpredictable network dynamic. Ironically, the system doesn’t connect anyone to anything by itself and simply eludes the term ‘friends’ in the node-to-node relation in contrast to ‘old’ networking-sites, which makes it all more confusing for low-end users. In future research, the actual relations between the user’s productivity and the criteria for emerging interconnectivity should be outlined more clear, as well as an outline of the obstacles in the development of networking tools, as those would have to rely more on the language than on profiling in the case of Twitter.

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