IR9.0 - dichotomies, the politics of tagging and the subconscious - thoughts on the keynote lectures

This year's AoIR conference, the IR9.0 in Copenhagen is still inspiring me - it's been a great event with numerous encounters, plenty of food for thought thanks to the fantastic conference chair Lis Klastrup and the programme chair Brian Loader with the organising team and 430 international delegates. Here is a nice visual overview flickr

The keynote lecture presented by Mimi Ito focused on a large-scale project which had made use of a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods applied by 29 researchers. The descriptions of these aspects alone were fascinating and highlighted that managerial and soft skills may have played a quite significant role in the success of the venture. Mimi had resorted to currently dominant discourses around dichotomies such as the connoisseur/amateur, producer/consumer, autonomy/peer pressure in order to frame the findings of research undertaken in the area of anime/fansubbing where reciprocity of peer review is embedded in friendship-driven participation and closely intertwined with practices of status. Exploring this specific area must have been fascinating , some of her results suggest that the genres of participation - covering ID, culture, practice etc acc to her definition - might be rooted too much in traditional sociological terms, though. I thought that these categories did not seem to enable us to truly capture the complex phenomenon of capacity-building activities including the flows of social and transferrable skills which -presumably - start off in the online sphere and gain momentum and their own dynamics in the offline sphere. Mimi ‘s notions on moral panics and the scepticism as to the contrary celebrations of the no-barriers sphere remained marginal in this rather optimistic interpretation within her lecture.

The pessimistic comments were much more at the core of Stephen Graham’s keynote lecture which critically evaluated the tagging practices in the contemporary hype of securing, excluding and trajectory-tracking of mobile bodies, goods and ideas which all aim at listing of profilings including discourses of status, power, control and policing in order to make spaces governable which are perceived as prone to threats. Stephen presented a picture in stark contrast to Mimi’s: the dream of transparency in an ever more complex world chiselled into the gloomy rhetoric and practices of biometrics, militarisation and the fixing of ‘authentic’ IDs into static subjects. He raised the question how much time societies may have left at their hand before their citizens become all too accustomed to the notion of being the sum of tags. Tags defined and attached by others - also here an underlying polarity. Re-animating and re-mediating urban spaces in an attempt to un-blackbox these technocrat politics by moving away from interiorised gaming were among the ideas Stephen presented as to how to resist and appropriate at grass-root level. I felt, though that questioning the lack of questioning in these days might be the underlying issue at stake in a hybrid on/offline world where anxiety has gained true celebrity status as it actually dictates the culture of tagging in a very subtle manner - and in this sense is an even more powerful agent in a nation's subconscious.

ethics and research in the virtual world

In July I attended the Internet Studies Festival at John Moores University in Liverpool which was a rather small but very valuable event. One issue though seemed to remain in the dark and it is still not as widely debated as it should be: ethics.

A post-grad social researcher argued that 'one would need to find a way to work around' - she left us in the dark about the details of her own research, i.e. how exactly she had ensured privacy and data protection in her fieldwork centred around 'understanding student's use of Facebook' were secured at all times. Rather she had perceived the semi-public sphere of facebook with her friends' contact details a rich source of data - and subsequently presented poorly disguised images and personal details of her participants as part of her findings to the delegates - assuming this would be another semi-private/exclusive space. Hence, a safe arena.

This may come across as a specifically sad case but looking at the currently available formal framework of guidelines as provided by the AoiR [Association of Internet Researchers] AoIR Research Ethics and the BSA Research Ethics
the guidelines are perhaps not explicit enough and might remain vague to those students who learned to expect a larger extent or more explicit guidance. Also, the applications online available, the range of settings and practices within and around the online social networks, the micro-/blogosphere etc may change faster than academic institutions/committees are usually able to respond and amend their guidelines. Dynamic and flexibility would need to increase - or students might need to get equipped with the skills and attitude to adopt/develop guidelines themselves according to the demands of the specific environment under investigation.

Another issue in this context might be the persistence of a rather unhelpful debate: the public/private dichotomy. Certainly, the online sphere deserves just as much careful consideration of ethical issues as the offline spheres - otherwise we, i.e. the community of researchers [at all stages], may risk to loose reputation, credibility - and most importantly: the degree of influence we actually seek when we embark upon the research journey.

lurkers, surfers and the politics of blogging

Apart from posting links I haven't managed to write anything over the past few weeks since I set up this blog, my 3rd one. Partly due to lack of time and problems with reliable networks/access but mainly driven by the desire to post a bit of quality [the dichotomy of random thought vs cohesive conceptual structure?] and take the time to think first about content, then about structure and style - and finally the oh so powerful but mainly silent, passive and invisible audience. Who are you guys? Lurkers, ignorant surfers, bored office workers...? Politics of idenity and politics of representation are at stake.

As research student in the social sciences with focus on online social networks (OSNs such as facebook) blogging is not really easy, it seemed... why I am writing myself into being [echoing danah boyd's claim] or is 'cogito, ergo sum' still valid - I think, therefore I am?