Epistemographer

Bridging S&TS and Communication Studies: Scholarship on Media and Information Technologies
Pablo Boczskowski and Leah Lievrouw

Context: Chapter for New STS Handbook
Goal: To reflect on scholarship at intersection of fields; map the territory

• Three patterns of shared interests, each typically based on a binary “duality”:
  • causality – determination and contingency
    • Often viewed as opposition b/w technological and social determinisms
  • recent trend toward “mutual shaping” of technical and social elements
  • process – production and consumption
  • orientations deeply enmeshed in trends in Communication
  • movement toward embedding consumption in production, or vice versa
  • consequences – continuous or discontinuous
  • discontinuity: focus on technical features, major transformations (still dominant mode in popular culture)
  • continuity: focus on larger contexts of history, power, practice, etc.

• recent work looks at discontinuities in the context of larger continuous context

Two trends:

• MIT (media and information technologies) no longer ‘belong’ to particular fields or specializations in an obvious way

• lots of people interested in this across lots of disciplines

Problems:

• lack of common vocabulary, analytic tools

Performative Whack-a-mole (or what happened when the freaks, geeks and queers colonized Friendster)
danah boyd

Friendster originally started as FOAF dating site
Who joined?

• Started by silicon valley types, passed by word of mouth to geeks and then (via0 bloggers
• ex-girlfriend of founder went to Burning Man, meme spread through crowd super-fast

• Large gay male population adopted quickly

Each group thought it was a tool primarily for them

Mechanics

• Profile mimicry (you tended to be invited by other users) led to homogenization of profiles
• What your friends’ profiles say is as important as what you yourself say to your constructed identity

• Example: a friend of danah’s put up a profile featuring a photo of an older, balding white man; other users start e-mailing her asking for her Suicide Girl profile, assuming that she’s also doing porn (younger woman with old white maile friends = porn star)

Activities

• Ego surfing
• People lookup
• Social maintenance
• Play and games
  • Drug distribution

• Sale of popular profiles on eBay

Flattening of social networks

• Example of high school teacher whose students had found her profile, and formed assumptions of drug use and friendships with pedophiles based on her friends’ profiles

Fakesters

• Famous people
• Universities and other institutions (use of system to extend functionality beyond original intent)
• Play and competition: goal to get as many friends as possible (US v. UK, for example, represended by Burning Man vs. Ali G)
• Profiles killed for presumption of being fakesters (in some cases actually real people)
• Fakester revolution
  • Manifesto
  • rl protests
• “Whack-a-mole” – Friendster kills one profile, users create many more

• Fakester actions predicated on notion that “none of this is real” – since all online identity is constructed, why couldn’t they stretch theirs more

Ultimately, passion faded, fakesters left, with MySpace and Facebook dominating.

Methods question: “How do you know this?”

• was an early adopter herself
• kept a blog of what was going on

• Friendster users began e-mailing her

Internet Stories; WOM and Internet Use in Accra, Ghana
Ken Anderson

Intro to Ghana
Stories of Youth and iCafes in Accra

Internet Cafes

• Primary way of accessing internet
• ~ 60 cents/hour
• 185,000 users in Accra
• One of only places of privacy (no private rest rooms, bedrooms, etc.)

• Escape from elders/control

What they do (did)

• Build social capital: Lots of chatting, development of friends (sometimes romantic, sometimes not)
• Why?
• look for advice, maybe philanthropists (rarely successful)
• Build economic capital: Scams and fraud
• credit card fraud
• misrepresentation (more common)
• scamming doesn’t come from laziness, but rather a perceived lack of legitimate opportunities

• scamming in fact requires quite a bit of work and coordination

Malam

• essentially a “fetish priest” for help with getting fraud money from the Internet

• consults the Koran as a sort of “recipe book”

Stories and rumors

• stories make the internet their own, more local
  • stories about Bill Gates being a dropout, then rising to the top
  • resonated with local experience
  • 20K chat partner, who posed as a woman, got someone to pay for a school course, cashed out tuition and bought a business
• life can be transformed by internet
• internet as way to make contact with foreigners

• lots of talk about CIA

Ambiguous stories of locals

• Scams Bad
• “Damn Nigerians!!”
• moral righteousness

• sense of rebalancing social inequality

Doug Thomas, discussant
what does it mean to shift from material culture to information culture when discussing production/consumption?
why do we keep repeating narratives that are patently untrue? (“Lothar, lothar, stop writing on the walls!”)

battle over friendster “fakesters” is a battle over the commercialization of identity on the net
(hmm, interesting thought: what’s the relationship between dating and porn as activities that are early uses of communication technologies?)

Technorati Tags: 4S, notes

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