participation & programming [is52026b social computing - week 6]

8/3/2019 Participation & Programming [IS52026B Social computing - week 6]

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IS52026 Social ComputingWeek 6: programming & participatory culture

dan mcquillan

http://mitpress.mit.edu



by bixentro | Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Napster

from friends sharing to mass... delegation ofinformation to a socio technical ecosystem ofinformation technologies and a plurality of users.

Campaigns against home taping and the litigationagainst the VCR

copying = theft

if someone steals a purse, the purse is actually takenaway from its

owner, whereas a file that is copied does notdisappear.

Battle = discourse, tech, law



Business model – no longer mechanical scarcity

attacks by the Recording Industry Association ofAmerica (RIAA) and its equivalents in Europe... the music industry triedto establish monetary punishment as a new business model.

Users who copy = thieves & robbers. Harassing mothers. Pushing unisto filter.

→ counter productive

Illegal downloaders 'spend the most on music', says poll 2009

“The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegallydownloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33more than those who claim that they never download musicdishonestly.”

"Only recently the DCMS told us that they have no evidence of theeffects of copyright infringement,

http://www.out law.com/en/articles/2011/november/foi request reveals plans for

Drm. playing’ involves ‘copying’. Recall doctorow.

2005: Sony rootkit. Deinstall → more! copy protection software wasitself infringing copy

rights by using open source code.Dmca → acta



Bittorrent

estimated that it accounted for roughly 43% to 70% of all Internet traffic (depending on

geographical location) as of February 2009

BitTorrent client uses "optimistic unchoking", whereby the client reserves a portion of itsavailable bandwidth for sending pieces to random peers (not necessarily known goodpartners, so called preferred peers) in hopes of discovering even better partners andto ensure that newcomers get a chance to join the swarm

# Facebook uses BitTorrent to distribute updates to Facebook servers.[29]# Twitter uses BitTorrent to distribute updates to Twitter servers.[3film communities translated and subtitled audience for undervalued films by

reintroducing them

tech/framework – ratio rules – both currrency & reputation

Hackers affiliated with these communities develop software required to accomplish manyof the tasks outlined above: subtitle authoring and synchronization; transcoding; toolsfor working with audio and video streams; database management; improveddistribution protocols and clients.

“/book: CollaborativeFutures”, n.d. http://www.booki.cc/collaborativefutures/.



by pingnews.com | Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY SA 2.0)

Participation – in production & distribution – but both ways

“on one hand, the quality of the new technologies described in chapter 3 constituted

an extension of production and distribution channels into the realm of the user, buton the other hand, the culture industries started to extend themselves into users’media practices by integrating user activities into new platforms and services.”Mirko Tobias Schafer, Bastard Culture!: How User Participation Transforms Cultural

Production (Amsterdam University Press, 2011).

Immaterial labour “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of thecommodity”.

“Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Tiziana Terranova“the Internet is always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist

economy. “remember: if the product is free....fb, youtube, flickr...Lawrence Lessig ‘the sharecropper of the digital age’.

"are we really meant to see people who sit at their computers modifying code or typingout responses to TV shows as ‘exploited’ in the same way as those who endureappalling conditions and pay in Indonesian sweatshops?



http://filter blog.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html

Oreilly v black foam

O’Reilly points out ‘the value of software is proportional to the scale and dynamism

of the data it helps to manage’

web 2.0 has been described by Tim O’Reilly as an ‘architecture of participation’(O’Reilly 2005). In this programmatic text, O’Reilly advocates the rigorous imple mentation of user activities into software design.

meta information users generate on Flickr or Delicious, for instance, contributesto search requests on Yahoo and helps the company to improve their search engine

My experience – 1) build us a user community 2) mine the data

‘archi tecture of exploitation’ (Petersen 2008).

BandwidthThe estimated traffic costs of Google subsidiary YouTube are inthe region of $30 million a month

cultural resource Google Earth and Google Maps,

“The APIs were developed to be powerful gatekeepersof information flow and regulate to a large extent how open a system is and what

data and functions can be embedded or shared.”Schafer, Bastard Culture! p22



Piratenpartei Deutschland

Explicit participation is driven by motivation, and is diverseImplicit participation is channeled by design, by means of easy to

use interfaces,and the automation of user activity processesEasy to use by designNot customer support but ‘user and software governance’.companies and users = ‘society’law like texts = ‘terms of use’.

Less products, more public spaces. → if citizens, then corp = =

gov?

Valuestransparentprivacyabolish patents and limit copyright.



Spot The Pirate Party Member Berlin

850,000 votes they won in national electionsOrigin sweden

fight against software patentscriminalization of copyright monopoly violations by downloading(It was important to pretty much everybody except the politicians)December 14, 2005, the European Parliament had passed the

Data Retention Directive.Pirate bay raid 2006September 18, 20119 percent Berlin parliament, several seats.



http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html

Supporters: Public Knowledge | EFF | Free Software Foundation | Mozilla |Demand Progress | Fight For the Future | PPF | Creative Commons | Wikimedia

These examples also indicate thata strict enforcement of copyright law inevitably

invades citizen privacy and thereforeconstitutes a means of repression.

SOPAadvertising + credit cards. Wikileaks.Break DNS. Ban tools.

blacklistOverreach...chinaDEA



ANT. Ecosystem. affordance, design andappropriation.

All successful online music services are provided bycompanies which do not originate from the

established music industry.

Last.fm

The audioscrobbler enables Last.fm to establish anexact count, while performance rights organizationscan actually only give an estimate.

open db



Version control + dvcs

Google Code began supporting Mercurial,Cannonical, /Ubuntu free Bazaar hosting to open source projectsGitHub.com “social coding” site which provides Git hosting and rich

social networking tools.

“SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people… A worldof programmers forking, hacking and experimenting. There ismerging, but only if people agree to do so, by other channels…

GitHub gives me my own place to play. It lets me share my codethe way I share photos on Flickr, the same way I sharebookmarks on del.icio.us. Here’s something I found useful, for

what it's worth… Moreover, I'm sharing my code, for what it's worth to me to share my code… I am sharing my code. I am notlaunching an open source project. I am not beginning a searchfor like minded developers to avoid duplication of efforts. I amnot showing up at someone else’s door hat in hand, asking forcommit access. I am not looking to do battle with Brook’s Law at

the outset of my brainstorm”—Gutier



It is therefore necessary to take a step beyond understandingparticipatory culture as merely appropriating consumer goods;

instead, it can be seen as the constitution of a technologicallyaware society where new media practices transform manyaspects of everyday life, including politics, the economy, andpublic discourse.

Nike

Hitler parody

participation & programming [is52026b social computing - week 6]

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