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reflection

Linked to 23 items

from: Small, Clumsy, and Intimate Devices for Awkward Hybrid Settings (report)

During the reflection of the workshop participants, shared everything from DIY amplifying microphones and catapults directed at your screen, to wiggly character filters dancing around your camera and masks which partially cover your screen. With a small intervention, a clumsy device, and embracing awkwardness, we were imagining alternative modes of togetherness online. This did not translate into the plenary talk of EXPUB, presumably because of the change of venue and seating arrangements. Nevertheless, we’ve come closer to understand what space, albeit temporary, intimacy can hold in hybrid settings. reflection
from: Small, Clumsy, and Intimate Devices for Awkward Hybrid Settings (report)

The workshop offered insight into potential ways of utilizing awkwardness to offer alternative ways of being together online. It opened up a space of sharing uncomfortable moments of a time we were all forced to have a solely online interaction with the world. Sharing awkward online anecdotes spoke to a facet of hybrid existence that is only ever spoken of informally, and never addressed practically. Yet the making of small clumsy intimate devices addressed this topics with a tactical approach. It encouraged participants to challenge the formality of online meetings, and interact with the screen and people behind it, in a more imaginative way. red thread reflection
from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

These remarks were followed by the conference’s opening lecture: ‘Data Extraction, Materiality, and Agency’ by Catalan researcher and artist Joana Moll. Her lecture focused on the tension between interfaces and internet infrastructure. reflectionThe internet is perhaps the largest infrastructure ever built but, although it is ultimately physical and has very material consequences, it remains largely invisible to users. These can only access the internet through interfaces, to the point that, from their perspective, the internet becomes a synonym of the interface. Ever-prevalent, the interface dictates what we can and cannot do.
from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

In one of those occasions where entrepreneurial naivete somehow possesses an enlightening clarity, Moll quotes Bill Gates: quote'Power in the digital age is about making things easy'. Interfaces smoothen interactions, making them seem obvious or natural: quote'Some years ago we had to connect to the internet, today we have to disconnect from it', Moll stated. The places where interaction is streamlined are also sites of power struggles. This smoothening takes away agency from users and gives economic and informational power to big tech companies. Moll traces this back to the ideology embedded in the business model of these companies; what she calls, following other theorists, Cognitive Capitalism. reflectionThe wealth of technology companies is no longer produced by material goods, but through intangible actions, such as human communication, experience, and cognition, which are later translated into numbers - quantifiable terms that can be translated into electricity.
from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

User tracking spawned data markets and brokers. reflectionCompanies such as Acxiom and Oracle boast about having data for 700 million people and the ability to sort them under (absurd yet cynical) user profiles such as 'shooting stars' - gen Xers with expendable income, no children, and who are into jogging. These pseudo-sociological analyses claim to use over 3000 different attributes (in the case of Acxiom). Joana underlined how the mere idea of coming up with 3000 different attributes is absurd. Inviting us to reflect on how many distinct attributes we can come up with (100? 200?), she implicitly posed the question on how these analyses fetishize quantification without knowing exactly how and what they're quantifying. Moreover, she played a promotional video from Hotjar, a company that places cookies on websites to track every mouse movement and displaying them with heat maps. Heat maps show which areas the user is interacting more with and, therefore, those where interaction with advertisement can be maximized.
from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

reflectionIn a key slide of her presentation Joana detailed how our everyday use of technology is translated into datafiable interactions: browsing becomes use patterns, web searches into queries, smartphone use into call logs, app usage, and wifi or gps connection points. The machine is not concerned with our personal (metaphysical) identity or our reflexive (intentional) actions, but with very concrete patterns of movement. With this in mind, Joana stated that there is a huge difference between what we share, what our behaviors tell big tech companies, and what the machine thinks about us (how poor or rich we are and ultimately how likely are we to buy again). reflectionAt the end of the day, it really doesn't matter if the analysis is correct or true, what is relevant is that it is productive: that we click/buy again and self-fulfill the predictive prophecy. Even if seemingly understandable at first sight, this data is solely machine-readable, it doesn’t possess any meaning in the same way we think about meaning when interacting with text and images. That’s what Ad Tech analytic services are there for - to provide a resemblance of meaning to aggregated data (and of course charge a premium fee for it). So, it doesn’t really matter if regulation requires tech companies to give users the ability to retrieve “their” data. Even if this requirement is fulfilled, users receive unreadable spreadsheets (millions of interactions sorted out using thousands of attributes, which don’t make sense in isolation but only when aggregated with data from multiple users). The idea that we own our data in the same way that we possess an identity or private property falls flat. It’s a legal fantasy that ultimately benefits the very companies it wants to regulate.
from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

Finally, she concluded with a final reflection: we, users, don’t go to websites, the website is coming to us with cookies. Cookies don’t only suck data, but also energy from our computers. Joana closed her talk with a clear political proposal: energy consumption must be included in the privacy rights narrative. reflection
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

Aymeric Mansoux first comes to the stage, with a lot of technical preoccupations as part of his “half-improvised” presentation. “Jenga computing and precipice workflow” is the title of his intervention, announcing to the audience the complicated situation in which alternative infrastructure tries to survive. How to bring about sustainable mode of workflows, to maintain these autonomous technical infrastructures that we cherish and praise in theory, yet hardly work on actually sustaining, yet even deploy, in practice?reflection
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

“By 2017-2018, we were getting tired [in the alternative infrastructure ecosystem], fed up with everything”. Aymeric talks about “admin burnout”, which is a notion that I, and probably many other digital-workers in the room, can relate a lot to. Yet parallel to this exhaustion, was a collective excitement as to alternatives such as Mastodont, the Fediverse, which revived the discussion at the time.reflection
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

To conclude, Aymeric reminds us of the material complications driven by the socio-economic context we are living in, starting with the price of the rent that almost doubled: “this has an impact on what you can do, developp”. As he explains, “we started Lurk because we were old and priviledged enough to do it as a side-job”. Now, “Lurk is constantly on the precipice of the socio-economic situation” (starting with inflation). How can we run infrastructure sustainably in our context? Having these kinds of side-jobs is increasingly difficult…reflection
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

Facing such an out-of-reach cloud, it indeed seems to us that only a mystical approach of incantations can make it dissolve. This makes me think of people desperately dancing together for the rain to come, except that here, it is shouting alone at a cloud to make it disappear. The cloud, be it atmospheric or as a metaphor of digital servers, does indeed have a mystical resonance with us: a power we desperately try to seize, but that is beyond our actual will.reflection
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

As we move on to the third intervention of the session, and as we get emotionally drained by these different displays of our collective disempowerment by Big Tech or the socio-economic situation, nothing could be timelier than Nick Briz’ presentation on “the tactical misuse of online platforms”. Eventhough it must be noted that he appears to us through Microsoft Teams, which makes the audience giggle, especially as he struggles to share his screen.reflection mood
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

The first speaker on the panel is Tina Kendall, whose work focuses on boredom and the attention economy of networked media. She explains that as we are moving from the pandemic period into an era of permanent crisis TikTok has become the ideal tool for addressing the realities of home confinement, the “pandemic’s bored body problem”. She witnessed the response of creators when due to the pandemic their homes began to feel like prison cells or zoo enclosures. All of a sudden those stuck at home were coping with new realities and strange new temporalities created by the pandemic. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Performative TikToks contained creators lip syncing and performing dances which were all performing an important psychological function. These TikToks are essentially a performance of entrapment and are mirroring our shared experience of being stuck at home. The tone of these TikToks are playful, energetic and joyful. They are participatory, connective and create a co-presence between both creators and users. A social solidarity within the context of lockdown. It is with ambient play that this co-presence and intimacy are accessed, by moving beyond entrapment they create links with other creators who are also bored in their home. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Tina discovered that TikTok provides a set of tools to help produce powerful feelings of co-presence as well as enliven the rhythm and textures of the home. It introduces the home as a potentially endless party zone that yields to the whims of its inhabitants. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

At the start of the pandemic TikTok created the #HappyAtHome campaign in an effort to contribute to the global stay at home effort (https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/staying-happyathome-with-tiktok) which incorporated livestream elements. interesting-practice The platform benefited immensely from the global need to stay home and combat boredom. It relies on the bored body as a basic requirement of its model as well as domesticity as a condition of being bored in the house. The condition of being bored in the house can also be recognized as chronic to digital culture. As a result reflectionplatforms like TikTok embody both the potential for tactical reinvention of the home and confinement as well as digital capitalism and control.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

She begins by sharing the definition of a subculture in the context of her research, “a group of users that both possess and express a certain interest and ideas that in some way are not mainstream or are counter hegemonic.” She gives the example of the trend #cottagecore which elicits nods and chuckles from the audience. interesting-practice mood The cottagecore trend with its slow living, back to the earth aesthetic, possesses a lot of potential for quite obvious anti-capitalism. On the surface it rejects toxic productivity and attempts to rethink our relationship to labour. It encourages those witnessing it to slow down, reconsider and take up non-digital hobbies. It is a reframing of domestic labour and illustrates a way to function outside of the capitalist and patriarchal structure. Although it began as a seemingly inclusive and progressive space there is a very clear overlap with the tradwife movement which has ties to right wing extremist spaces online (https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ak8p8/online-rise-of-trad-ideology). interesting-practice This rethinking of domestic labour then becomes the idea that unpaid, unrecognized domestic labour should be expected from women. These very different sets of beliefs fall under an eerily similar aesthetic which creates a dangerous ambiguity in aesthetics online. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

One thing she discovered is that while corecore began as a sort of hopeless nihilism, now many videos tagged #corecore share the tags #hopetok and #philosophytok. She says that many subcultures exist as bubbles in a venn diagram and overlap in interesting ways. #hopetok videos contain more hope on the future of social media and societal relations and Agnieszka predicts that it may be a new direction we will be going with this type of discourse. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

moodJordi says he is interested in the topic of boredom and platforms taking advantage of boredom. He bring up the classic internet insult of telling someone to go outside and touch grass which elicits laughter from the audience. He doesn’t think that TikToks are just boredom killers, they have the potential to be so much more. Looking back on the history of cinema, it used to be considered a waste of time, going to the movies to kill boredom. Now we regard it as a good and productive thing to do, it doesn’t have the same negative implications. We can “modify the parameters of what is expected of us to do with these platforms” by resignifying, reinterpreting and rethinking the gestures that are expected. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

questionDunja asks what are the different sites of subversion, reconceptualization of the platform, things that might not change the platform so much but resignifying, recontextualizing what you’re already doing? What are the possibilities for the users to change their attitude towards those types of appropriations instituted by the platform? Users perceive platform powers as marginal, tolerated rather than defeatist, a kind of acceptance that “we’re trapped now in this environment.” We are fighting against platform power, tension between the two ideological struggles between corecore being left-wing, these ideologies mutating into right-wing ideologies facilitated by the platform, fighting the algorithm as an ideological battle. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Tina remarks that TikToks don’t actually make boredom visible at all, they instead show users what to do when bored. This is the paradox of digital formats. It is rendering boredom invisible, hiding it all together. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

And with that the floor opens to audience questions. Audience member Florian Cramer states that corecore has gone alt-right, as part of the manosphere it is where men scream their anguish. This is not just due to the algorithm, he wonders is this the new 4chan? Similar ephemeriality and dadaist form that becomes the alt-right medium. Agnieszka says that it is interesting to consider corecore as something that is already gone. She still has a sense of hopefulness within her that we haven’t lost it completely to the far right. Perhaps it is something that is mutating and transforming/overlaping into this niche side of titkok that has a hope angle, like #philosophytok or #hopetok, which have little no association with conservation politics. She leaves the possibility open, saying, “let’s see.” reflection