Media In Transition 8 was a very enjoyable conference – I took the train up last Friday, dropped my bag off at the hotel and went immediately to the opening proceedings. I was really impressed with the way the organizers had stacked so many compelling sessions throughout the day, which really made it difficult to choose where to go and what to attend. There were a lot of familiar themes, if you’re paying attention to the current trends in media research and work - surveillance, algorithms, big data, “spreadability” and “oversharing.” I personally enjoyed the more “transgressive” concepts discussed in panels on activism, pirate politics and counterpublics. Some of the presenters I was really impressed with include Christobal Garcia’s network analysis of the Chilean Student Movement, Thomas Poell’s work on media activism and representation, and Patrick Burkart and Martin Fredriksson work on pirate politics and what someone termed “liquid democracy.” I have so many notes to yet dig through…

I was also very happy to present along with Luis Bohorquez, Carlotta Cossutta & Arianna Mainardi, and Tom Pettitt, in a session the organizers dubbed “Media Spheres” which wound up having a great deal more to do with a reconstituted sense of self via our relationships in network society than public sphere stuff. Cossutta and Mainardi were talking about subverting surveillance and reconstructing alternative expressions of the self, Bohorquez talked about finding a sense of home and belonging in a highly mediated community, and Pettitt (a medievalist at a media studies conference) gave us a historical context for the changing perception of self and what he calls the “Gutenberg Parenthesis,” something that really interested me and I am still processing mentally – I feel it somehow relates to ecology and anti-androcentrism, two things I am very interested in.

Unfortunately I seem to have lost my business card holder where I was storing all the contacts I made at the conference… very frustrating, since there were a great deal of very insightful people I met! So if we bumped into each other, feel free to reach out.

I would write more about my own work, but I’ll save that for when I’ve collected my thoughts – several weeks ago I finalized my thesis proposal which was accepted (far as I know!) and I’ll be working on it over the summer and this fall. My earlier post on the Yackathon Hackathon shows how I was able to complete a PAR-styled event or exercise and was incredibly useful for my research… but also needs to be fully processed still!

We provided a means for people to submit topics and came up with a rough agenda beforehand, but the more intimate nature of this hackathon (focused around conceptual work and ideation) with a smaller crowd meant conversation flowed more organically through the entire group – instead of splitting into our breakout sessions as planned, we started with smaller groups that came together for our first “panel,” which flowed into the next and focused on two main themes: Hackathon methodologies, tools and outcomes, and the tension between civic hacking and data activism. We were fortunate to have a diverse set of perspectives and motivations at the event - VJ Um Amel and Willow Brugh joined us via GoogleHangout and we had a fairly casual conversation with well-thought out input from all the participants.

For me, a key outcome was the sense of the hackathon as a method that has many different iterations and is not beholden to a particular ethos or inherent quality – it focuses on not merely volunteerism, but invested participation, which can be cooped by commercial interests as “cheap labor.” This was something we could all agree on, however, the ideological divide between the hackathon as a model of cooperation versus competition was something that also reflected schisms between hackathons organized to contribute to municipal and governmental goals, versus those which are more activist in spirit and intent.

Another interesting point which I wish we could have devoted more time to is the divide between big data and observable community results. Hackathons draw from a spectrum of skill sets by encouraging participation from people who know how to do more than just code. However, they are not always inclusive – for the activist and even the civic mode, it can be difficult to involve people who can’t just build something on a computer in a day or two. In addition, there’s a need to address the agenda and viability of data (is it alive or dead, and who creates it for what purpose?). One possible answer we thought of was to incorporate some of the methods from citizen science, and to organize hacakthons in a series, where data collection methods are planed and tools are created, then people are trained and can go out to build the dataset themselves, and return to work on it at future events. This way, people of varying skill levels have greater agency, participation and investment in the project as it develops.

This is also important, because as VJ said, “People in the West fetishize data to the detriment of its content” – it may be convenient for us to build tools that are practical and feasible, but do they really solve any questions we need answers to? Are we building things that people need, or just making a wasted effort for the sake of the exercise?

On a final note, there needs to be a set of reusable tools that can be adapted from one hackathon to the next. There may not be a universal set of “best practices” for hacakthons across the board, but there are some outputs (experience) that can be applied, and documenting them is difficult. The “case study” and working groups approach OccupyData has taken is useful, but hackathons in general suffer from a lack of institutional memory and high frequency that dilutes their effectiveness. I’d argue that the most important output of a hackathon is the community that develops as people experiment with each other from one event to the next, but if a hackathon is a platform for building a concrete product rather than concepts, there needs to be more structure to their organization. Unfortunately, this diminishes the agency and representation of participants… the hackathon is a tool itself, a way of organizing, that is contextual and suited towards unique purposes depending on the organizers and the participants. The variety of options between those purposes and motivations reveal the tensions that exist when we try to think of the hackathon as having a singular format and structure, and organizers must try to align the way the event is held with their motivational values.

A lot of early online identity work focuses on personal identity through the weak individualism perspective. This is the “second life” of Sherry Turkle, the virtual “rape in cyberspace” described by Jullian Dibbell, and the multiple personas and characters that were promised as positive experiments in identity construction. The anonymity we were accustomed when interacting with others online let us play different roles, made us weary of strangers, and allowed us to vanish when we shut off the computer.

Today, there is a persistency to that online identity, because our self is integrated with our online identities so that we have a strong individualism perspective. Companies like Facebook and Google push users to use their real names.  Privacy and tracking worries us in different ways when we continually offer up the “selfie,” tag photos with our location and monitor our behavior through devices like Fitbit and self-tracking apps. We understand that users are the products of the social media that they use, being offered up to advertisers and seemingly unhuman corporations, and we are subject to algorithmic data apps that are all watching us. Sometimes we see ourselves as disjointed, isolated, and further alienated from each other, despite the supposed interconnectedness of the internet. We worry about how digital media affects our physiology as we grow closer to it (such as in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows).

The strong collectivism concept is how we are used to thinking about people in groups – the “smart mob,” the riot, which comes together to destroy and wreak havoc for a brief time before dissipating with no essence. It is very temporary but powerful, tenable yet unstable. It is Anonymous, or a legion of botnet zombie computers controlled by people who seem as bland as the beige on old PC cases. They are a monolith, like the old Soviets, and when they disappear there is nothing left.

In contrast to this, I believe the most useful important perspective is the weak collective which I see as a recursive public (to borrow Kelty’s term). It is flexible, it adapts, and it is formed out of the relationships and collaboration of individuals who work together, rather than march in step. OWS was an interesting example of this – the relationships formed during the physical protest (which resembled a mob) actually resulted in loose networks of people which transitioned from the demonstration spectacle to community programs that later provided needed services to others (such as the OccupySandy groups). These is the ideal the “network society” Marcuse writes about.

The hackathon is an interesting site for recursive publics, because attendees are distinctly individualistic, with differing agendas and motivations, but they come together and form relationships in this temporary space which, as one attendee put it very recently,  as participants are “collecting ideas from one hackathon and apply them to the others. this can lead to interesting mashups. i look at a hackathon as kind of like an Ouija board for geeks —  a weird discovery process with other weird people like you.”

I got to hear another panel and a half speak before I had to get ready for the panel I was presenting in – probably my favorite thing I heard during the conference was Mateusz Halawa’s work on “Lifelogging: A Technology of the Self.” Halawa identified the sort of archival work that we do with social media, creating assemblages of meaning out of an otherwise meaningless datastream, as a “technology of the self” as described by Foucault. I’m actually not familiar with this term or idea, so I’m eager to look into it myself.

My presentation was a recap of the pilot work I did with Danny Kim on hackathons and collective identity, but I was able to incorporate some of the ideas that I’ve been drawing from as I’ve expanded it into thesis work. Namely, more Castells, some Galloway, and especially Christopher Kelty’s ideas on recursive publics, which I can’t believe I didn’t know about. My second reader brought it up to me in a review meeting a few weeks ago (I was meaning to post about that, but I’ve been crazy busy as I’ve been revising the proposal).

It was interesting to see the way other presenters on the panel viewed publics – our respondent, Edward Byfield, felt this was the underlying theme that connected our works. The other panelists’s projects were “Digital Uncanniness: Art from Google Street View,”“Flash Mobs: Seizing Space “In A Flash” with Digital Technology,” and “The socio-politics of virtual private networks” which mainly focused on the Iranian intranet and use of VPN’s to overcome censorship. I argued that the public is becoming more public by conceptualizing it as “nested publics” of counterpublics (Nancy Fraser) and private publics (Papacharissi) which overlap and bump up against each other.

On that note, I’ll be talking about public/private identity and these virtual communities at Media in Transition 8 in May! Two conferences in a month… at least my thesis proposal is virtually done.

This issue of solutionism comes up in Evgeny Morozov’s new book, which he describes something which “presumes rather than investigates the problem it is trying to solve, reaching for the answer before the questions have been fully asked.” I’d seen David Sasaki examination of Morozov’s idea previously, the issue of how a hackathon is structured to certain aims (as app contest or not) points to how the ultimate goals of the event itself help determine whether or not those project are sustainable. Events that are structured as contests can draw people together for good reasons, but as one OccupyData attendee told me, they don’t always work. Winning things creates an  intentional conflation of civic engagement and trying to make money, and the way they present it to a hacker seems very strange – for some datafests, saving a company money somehow equates to some civically minded, ethical endeavor.

Then again, not all people at a hackathon consider themselves hackers. I met Andrew Schrock at TTW13, and he said he also found this in his work on hackathons. There was a lot of great stuff at the conference – one of the things I found most applicable to my own work was Stéphane Vial’s presentation on “There is no difference between the “real” and the “virtual”: a brief phenomenology of digital revolution” – tech is a extended phenomenotechnique which creates ontophanic shifts, shaking up the technological process and thus shaking our perceptions and feeling in the world.

Vial’s slide on explaining the transition from digital dualism to “digital ontophany”

Vial was attempting to dispel a myth of “two realities,” that there is no difference in the real and virtual as essence, and digital and physical is only separate as different materials. The distinction is between the identity and the self. Later in conversation he used the example of clothes versus the body, where we put on different outfits but always exist in the same skin. Since we then have different identities working through different materials, I wonder if we can conceive of those as a multiplicity of identities (in the rhizomatic sense). It’s an interesting departure from the “second self” sort of digital dualism that the augmented reality folks seem to detest (I really have to catch up on the arguments surrounding this).

Tom Slee also presented an interesting paper on “From Facebook to Banquets: Identity, Institutions, and Uprisings,” and although he insisited that he came in piece with his micro theory, not all were impressed:

My identity can be a math problem! Thanks 4 taking me seriously with ur micro framework!! Smh! #nodads #a1 #TtW13 http://t.co/TU6s5q2LVO—
Will Canine (@willcanine) March 02, 2013

But I did like some of the work he was drawing from, particularly Pol­letta & Jasper’s Collective Identity and Social Movements – they ask a lot of important questions here:

I think Earl & Kimport also hint at these, when they called for more work on the subject in Digitally Enabled Social Change:

If your sense of others’ participation changes, especially when you don’t have a representation of that participation, we might expect that processes driving collective identity would change too. Or collective identity itself might change, emerging from places other than face-to-face interactions, and encouraging different kinds or levels of mobilization than previously studied. (185)

Anyway, there’s a lot of meat from OccupyData and TTW13 that I can now work into my thesis project – grist to the mill, as they say. Of course, if your eyes are open and your brain is on, you can find stuff worth exploring almost anywhere, and a conference is chock full of it – just check out this slide from one of the other panelists.

He left this slide up for what felt like forever.

Yesterday and today I spent my time at OccupyData’s hackathon at the CUNY graduate center, where Theorizing the Web 2013 just so happened to be taking place. Each deserves their own blog post, and I’ll get to it tomorrow I suppose. I just realized that I hadn’t really put much on the research I’ve been doing up on the blog – I’ve included the preliminary paper I did along in a new page under the Papers & Projects tab.

Also, since I haven’t really been updating the blog with my notes on the work (I have over 60 separate notes with thousands of words and lots of clippings in each), I thought I’d provide a taste of some of the things worth checking out that I’ve come across researching hackathons so far.

• #OccupyDataNYC & Wiki
• CodeForAmerica
• OpenNYForum
• National Day of Civic Hacking (White House release)
• HackerSpacesWiki
• Netizen Report: Occupy the Net Edition
• Hacker School
• Content Hackathons?
• Maxigas – Hacklabs and Hackerspaces 
• Solutionism: David Sasaki - Evgeny Morozov
• Corporate Hackathons: The Fine Line Between Engaging and Exploiting
• Big Data or Pig Data?

More tomorrow!

Unlike some of the other events I’ve been to, there were no prizes, and organizers were very clear that you get out what you put into this event. There weren’t any really evidently corporate sponsors - Joel Natividad of Ontonida was there (we had a really good conversation in the breakout group) and talked about OpediaCities as a ”Smarter City” platform, for the sort of data-wrangling and resource management that others could build off of. There was also a presentation about Socrata, some talk about NYC Department of Education’s interest in this work, and Big Apps.

Our breakout sessions were really neat – there was a large crowd of beginners, about 17 people, a smaller group of people who knew what they were doing and were there to get something done, and a non-technical group I joined for a policy discussion. Noel Hidalgo (who led the intro and our policy group) explained how OpenNYForum is writing a white paper that will go to good government transparency advocates, and then be fleshed out to a broader paper on open open government and open data advocacy.

Here’s the back of my head in the policy group – I’m taking notes.

I thought it was a pretty cool day – I had a few good conversations and was glad to be able to participate on a non-technical task in the hackathon. It also continued to drive a rift into my work that I hadn’t really thought about before – civic hacking versus hacktivism. Aaron Schwartz has highlighted the problems with the negative public perception of each of these, as evidenced by this recent NYTimes piece. There are some strong opinions on the difference between hacktivism and civic hacking, and this was evidenced by the tenor and goals of the event. People at this hackathon weren’t interested in transgressive acts of civic disobedience or antagonism towards government. The view was very much that “we ARE government,” and there was a matter-of-fact belief that citizens should be involved and that data was an objective answer. Involving people outside of government in the analysis and use of data would help achieve communal goals and social progress. When I asked someone about the clashing of interests, they admitted that sometimes, citizen interests will clash with civic government’s interest. But the goal was to get them into giving ordinary people that access in the first place, through cooperation and mutual goals. It was very much an adovcacy-vs-activism strategy, and the tone was much different than what I’ve been used to.

I couldn’t help but feel it was a little too optimistic. There was no conception of the government as an institution or an establishment. They were very precise in policy goals and lobbying specific individuals in specific offices to evangelize for open government issues. In a way, it was almost like seeing technocrats plan how to assume their rightful place among the traditional rulers. Civic hackers are well organized, motivated and educated, but I wonder how welcome they really are in the halls of power. The recent news of Chinese hackers attacking American networks has led President Obama to sign an executive order on the issue, but I haven’t heard much on how this affects civic hackers and hacktivists – I assume it won’t bode well. NYC has a lot of great legal and political precedent for civic hacking and open data, but this city is just one place and one government. Realistically we’re only talking about one administration.

On another note, I had the preliminary work I did with my research partner from last semester accepted to Critical Themes In Media Studies –  I’m super excited about presenting the work so far. I also submitted some of my other work on the politics of digital identity to MiT8 and I’m hoping they like it. Although I didn’t get in to Theorizing the Web with this hackathon stuff, I looked at some of the work that was accepted and I’m looking forward to attending this weekend. There is a strong backlash against the concept of digital dualism, and that really plays into the online/offline collective identity issues that I was working on at the core of theory concepts my thesis is organized around. OccupyData is holding its hackathon in the same building (at the CUNY Graduate Center) and I imagine I’ll be popping in and out on Saturday… good thing the hackathon runs earlier on Friday as well.

I’m really happy that I recently accepted an offer from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven to do videography work for them on Reintegrate: Enhancing Collaborations in the Arts & Sciences. Reintegrate is a pretty neat project, about not only looking at the arts community in New Haven, but seeing how the scientific and academic community can work with them on projects and share the strengths of two different styles of thinking. In its own words, the project

celebrates and showcases the region’s creativity in both the arts and sciences by facilitating collaboration between artists and scientists, showcasing innovative arts and science projects, and inviting the public to share the arts/science connection through events and resources.

Essentially, there are several teams of artists and scientists working together on projects related to geography and literature, stem-cell research and dance, citizen science and sculpture, and so on. This is really exciting to me because of my experience working with civic and tactical media through the Remember Me project. Coincidentally, I’m TAing a course in Interventionist Aesthetics this semester, in which we

examine the ways in which art, design, and technology can be leveraged to develop creative and tactical responses to critical political issues in the public sphere. We study the role of artistic interventions, social media, and tactical tools to support civic agency and participatory action, as well as transform changing political conditions in critical ways. We will investigate how aesthetic principles such as the gaze, spectacle and détournement help to contextualize interventionist practices and inform the creation of new work.

To me, videography is a process of documentation, presented through stylistic choices and a structure that mimics a popular visual aesthetic. People typically understand the language of interview, editing, and video sequences as a compact mode of storytelling. But the subject of Reintegrate is interesting because it deals with collaboration in a way very similar to my thesis work on hackathons. People are coming together from disparate backgrounds sharing similar goals, exercising their skills in a temporary collective effort to make something for others.

I’m also excited because it finally justified me getting a proper camera and gear to do the shoot right. Those tools will definitely come in handy if I decide to incorporate multimedia elements into my thesis work, or on some other project.

a sketch of one of the hackathons where we did participant observation

Well, this past semester was incredibly busy. Although I haven’t been working as much with Youth Rights Media, I did start a research project that I will be pursuing as a master’s thesis this coming year. For awhile now, I’ve been interested in the idea of digital activism and “hacktivism” as it’s been termed. There’s a lot of confused discussion over the use of the term “hack” and how it applies to hackers, hacktivism, and hackathons. Public perceptions and use of the term hacking and hackers leads to some very odd policy decisions, as Molly Sauter points out in this MIT CMS lecture. But digital activism/hacktivism is a much larger barrel of monkeys. When I started working on this subject, I was highly influenced by Joss Hands book, @ is for Activism. I also have been following the discussions and trends around slacktivism/”clicktivism” as Earl and Kimport describe in “Digitally Enabled Social Change” and their “theory 2.0″ ideas about how we conceptualize collective identity when dealing with disparate political actors in a digital environment.

These inspirations combined with the last year’s worth of news and events from Occupy and Anonymous and other forms of digital activism, led me to some new questions and ideas. First, is digital activism/hacktivism a collectivizing endeavor? Or is it purely an individualist activity where people wind up working together? As many know, there are difficulties of researching actions and subjects in digital localities. For the past twenty years people have been developing a methodology of netnography, and now we have a trend of combining quantitative analysis with a previously anthropological approach through the use of data mining and fancy coding tools. I wasn’t sure if this was what I wanted to do though.

At the New School, there was no shortage of talk about Occupy – there were even hackathons organized for projects geared towards Occupy-related issues. At the urging of my advisor, I started looking at hackathons as field sites where this sort of digital activism happened in a physical space as well, as a sort of hybrid environment where we could do more traditional participant observation into not just the physical space, but also the “information space” – all the cloud and internet based environments where data was being shared, stored, and drawn from to make these projects happen.

I’m really happy to say it was a great experience. I worked with a fellow grad student (Danny Kim) as a research partner and together we did participant observation at three hackathons  - OccupyResearch at CUNY, EcoHack, and Hack N’Jill, all of which had some sort of identifiable pro-social or political agenda or theme. It was great as a pilot study, and I’m eager to get more into the work this spring. Some of the things we discovered felt like new ideas – unless we’re reinventing the wheel, our findings so far helpful to understanding hackathons and their potential for social or political activism.

Participants working at one of the hackathons

The best TL;DR summary I can give is probably this: it seemed as though hackathons are about solving technology problems, rather than social problems. The time/skill-driven agenda really creates a disconnect between any policy issues that the projects are meant to address and focuses participants on rolling them out in a working and deployable format without a lot of concern towards longevity or application. This isn’t always the case, but what we really saw was an environment where people came to casually demonstrate and practice skills with others, to collaborate and learn, and generally have fun doing something they loved doing. I think this is all very different from the action-driven agenda of activism, although the two are not incompatible.

This sort of work will hopefully lead to our bigger questions, about how individual identity informs a group and helps to create a collective identity, and how a collective identity helps to inform the individual on their role within the group, particularly when dealing with horizontal networks of politically motivated individuals facilitated by technology. I believe this is a recursive sort of relationship, and I’d use the drosde effect as an illustration.

I’ve also submitted our abstract for Critical Themes In Media Studies and Theorizing The Web 2013. I’d love to present on this work or find some new opportunities for study. This semester I’ll be making a stronger effort to blog more frequently about updates to this project.