Draft Abstracts for the Online Community Book Development Workshop
August 9-10, 2011 in Boulder, Colorado
The abstracts presented below are drafts, but should give you a good idea of what to expect to hear about at the workshop. Jocelyn made an attempt at separating the chapters into book parts, but whether these parts are appropriate will be a topic of discussion at the workshop.
Part I. Changing definitions of community and identity
1. Introduction: Community, Online
Lecia Barker and Jocelyn Petyak, University of Texas at Austin
Getting immediately past the question of whether online community can exist; a lit review that leads to the framework, the framework.
2. Do We Need People? An Adaptive Agent as Community Member on LambdaMOO[1]
Charles Isbell, Georgia Institute of Technology
LambdaMOO, a multi-user dungeon (MUD), is one of the first virtual worlds that provided a place for online community growth. Used more for recreational socializing than as a game, LambdaMOO still maintains thousands of active members. Because community members can interact solely through text, communication in LambdaMOO is very different from other, more complex virtual worlds that appeared after its release. This chapter describes the development of Cobot, a software agent whose goal was to become an actual part of that community. The chapter will present a detailed discussion of the functionality that made him one of the objects most frequently interacted with in LambdaMOO, human or artificial. Cobot’s was able to collect social statistics summarizing the quantity and quality of interpersonal interactions. Initially, Cobot acted as little more than a reporter of this information; however, as he collected more and more data, he was able to use these statistics as models that allowed him to modify his own behavior. In particular, to the actions of individual users, by observing how others interact with one another. Further, Cobot uses reinforcement learning to proactively take action in this complex social environment and adapts his behavior based on multiple sources of human reward. Cobot represents a unique experiment in building adaptive agents who must live in and navigate social spaces.
3. Conceptualizing Self-As-Community
Jaime Banks, Colorado State University
Traditional notions of the Self – as based in the physical body, as singular, as essential – are increasingly being critiqued and considered outmoded by the rise of a new Social. People live not only in physical space but also in virtual space; they live not only in one unified virtual space but through and across multiple online spheres that constitute a range of performative moments and contexts. This distributed Self – what Kenneth Gergen would characterize as the crisis-plagued multiphrenic self – must be examined with an evolved lens, one that accounts for multiplicity and multiplexity emerging from this cross-platform state. I propose that the Self can be viewed not as an ego-centered node, but as a community of networked selves. This approach requires a shift toward negotiating social system and intrapersonal theories to consider the Self (in terms of Rheingold’s classic definition of online community) as an emergent aggregate of personae, coordinating with respect to common interests and engaged in a web of sentiment and discourse, but each with its own governing system, unique goals, and situated subjectivities. I examine a case study of a social media user’s narratives about one dimension of online representation – screen names – to glean the user’s lived perspective of 1) experience within and among platforms 2) the very different selves she projects in each of those spaces, and 3) how those selves are coordinated in relation to one another. Further, I argue that Actor-Network Theory and its associated material-semiotic ontology is an appropriate frame for such inquiries, and suggest that this distributed Self is not, as Gergen contends, a catastrophic phenomenon, but instead the optimal state for realizing intersectionality.
4. Managing Real Tension in Virtual Reality
Lecia Barker, University of Texas at Austin
People create community when they orient to similar values or interests, display a sense of similarity with one another and their community, and show support for each other’s efforts in achieving goals. In reality, the ideal community of mutually supportive members does not exist. All members of a community are unlikely to orient to the same values, know how to show support for others, or even care to support others. Additionally, some community values may be inherently contradictory. Differences in concern and values may or may not cause serious problems, depending on how deftly members manage the tensions. In LambdaMOO, a text-only community, some of the apparent values and beliefs can create tension if LambdaMOO members (MOOers) orient to both at the same time. These include emphatic defense of free expression and the prevalence of irony and fantasy in everyday interaction. Free expression is deeply valued, but just as in real life, free expression can be injurious to others or violate community beliefs or norms. MOOers believe they can escape unpleasant aspects of their real lives online, but interacting online can mean being exposed to others’ opinions that may go against one’s real-life beliefs.
Complicating conflicting values, engagement in online community is inherently ambiguous. The more the built infrastructure is meant to simulate some version of physical reality, the more blurred the boundaries between real life and online life. Members are physically present somewhere, but only socially present online. Instead of despairing the lack of physical reality, however, MOOers celebrate and ritualize the inherent paradox of the non-real nature of their community through frequent use of irony and fantasy. The value of ironic discourse and engagement in fantasy implicates a norm: interaction with others should be based in what is real, but not too real. Although the irony and fantasy can be humorous, celebration of the non-real serves also as a constant reminder that the community isn’t real, yet one would like to believe that relationships and activities with others are real. As a result, tension develops as members negotiate meaning and manage tensions in ways that support community values. This chapter describes mechanisms by which MOOers successfully and unsuccessfully manage inconsistent values when attempting to maintain real community in a non-real place. I present two dilemmatic conversations, “Where’s MOOsmoke …” and “There’s a New Sheriff in Town,” and discuss how MOOers use electronic and communicative strategies in an attempt to restore harmony. The tensions in the first situation are easily resolved, with MOOers reminding each other that what they are doing together is not real. In the second situation, however, because the member’s expressed values are so unpleasant – “The beer‑drinkinest, red‑neckinest, nigger lynchinest good ol’ boy to ever set foot on the MOO” – and because he refuses to come out of the fantasy character he is enacting the dilemma is not managed at all.
II. Online and offline connections
5. Leadership and Bonding in Two Online Communities of Rock Fans
Andrea Baker, Ohio University
From the literature on offline and online communities, this chapter draws upon four major components of community: bonding, goals, traditions, and norms of interaction. Focusing on these dimensions allows comparison of two communities online. Both are composed of fans of the rock group The Rolling Stones. Each has different leaders who embody the ideals and norms of the groups they founded online a decade ago. Data for this chapter comes from a larger qualitative research project of 101 interviews, an exploratory questionnaire in one fan group, and observation of online fan boards and offline gatherings over four years.
The objective of the article is to identify features of online communities that can lead to more or less bonding or stronger or weaker emotional ties. The affect expressed among members is related to goals stated by the leaders. Hosting styles of the leaders and the technical features of their boards affect the emotional bonding among members. The number and type of offline gatherings and material objects associated with community membership have an impact on the relational ties within communities. Future researchers can extend the findings on leadership and bonding to better compare online communities and contrast these with online social networks.
6. ‘The Social Network’ and the Eritrean Diaspora: African Experience and the Internet
Victoria Bernal, University of California-Irvine
The recent film about the founding of Facebook is a reminder of how so many of our ideas, myths, fears, and debates about the virtues and dangers of the internet, indeed about the very nature of cyberspace are based in Western experience, Western constructions of individuality, and particularly in Western middle-class consumer culture. Yet millions of people in or from the global south are engaged in online activities. Here I explore the Eritrean diaspora’s development of a vibrant online public sphere devoted to Eritrean national politics to shed light on the relationship of the internet to postcolonial experience. The great significance of new media for Africans may lie in the context of struggles for democracy, free press, and civil society. In contrast to North America and Europe where issues of personal privacy versus publicity (e.g. the recent anti-Asian youtube rant gone viral) and personal privacy versus corporate snooping (e.g. the controversy over Facebook’s privacy setting) are the tension lines in digital media, in African contexts it is the tension between public—as in state-run, state-authorized media and information, and state-organized activities and institutions–, and the wider public of society where people are seeking a means of expression and seeking alternative channels for political analysis, reporting, and social action. The websites of the Eritrean diaspora are an example of using the internet to create a public sphere that has no offline counterpart and one that connects Eritreans in diaspora in numerous countries to each other and communicates their views to the government of Eritrea in the context of on-going struggles.
7. Connected Migrants: Orkut and the Making of an Online Brazilian Scape
Mieke Schrooten, Katholiek Universiteit Leuven
In the contemporary context of globalization, the classic migratory picture of the migrant that is either a temporary sojourner or completely assimilated to the receiving country’s culture is no longer tenable. Rapid technological development and a revolution in communication are interconnecting individuals and groups, making it increasingly easy for migrants to sustain dispersed forms of community and identity. This paper attempts to provide some insights into the use of the Internet by migrants by exploring the example of the online Social Network Site (SNS) ‘Orkut’. Although the website traces its roots to the United States, originally having an English-only interface, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians quickly ‘invaded’ the SNS and became the dominant user group. Within the variety of Brazilian websites, magazines and satellite channels, Orkut is often mentioned as the most important application to keep in touch with other Brazilians inside and outside Brazil. The paper demonstrates how Orkut has profoundly changed the world of many Brazilian migrants, opening up new pathways for community formation.
III. Collaboration and Communities of Practice
8. I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes: The Problem of ‘The Creator’ in New Media Endeavors
Megan Winget, University of Texas at Austin
In this presentation, I will explore the changing notions of authorship, particularly as related to authority, genre conventions, and creativity. Instead of an expectation of individuality in the creative endeavor, new media is allowing groups of people to create “truly aggregate” artistic projects that absorb the contributions of individuals and efface their distinctions by processing their input into a single data stream, or by turning their unique elements into a piece among so many that the identity of any one creator is completely overwhelmed. This presentation will focus on artistic production, but will also address changes in scientific practice (citizen scientist projects) and open-source software production. This change not only affects production, but has wide-ranging effects on the nature of the work itself.
9. Becoming Participatory in Cultural Studies: the ‘Becoming Methods’ Experiment
Jamie “Skye” Bianco, University of Pittsburgh
On June 15, 2011, thirteen academics (including graduate students) from five institutions in the US and UK and seven disciplines across the humanities and social sciences will begin to practice “Becoming Methods” (BM).[2] BM is an open process project, “explor[ing] the problem of method in relationship to aesthetics, politics, and value,” presented on the Cultural Studies Association’s new experimental multimedia publishing platform, LateralLab. Working in three time-constrained rounds and composing from a single avatar in multimodal genres, the group will theorize, practice and produce experiments in methods of inquiry. The goal of the project is to leave practice open, collaborative, and inventive. The past year was spent building the interface (by my team at Pitt[3]) and in discussion and the composition of the functionality of our “canvas” attempting to bring non-media producers into a rich collaboration with the now-completed dynamic and participatory web-based visualization.
For my contribution to this collection, I propose to document the developmental stage and to track the upcoming engagement stage of “Becoming Methods” in this self-conscious academic attempt at participatory online collaboration by folk attempting to question and invent modes of academic labor “in relationship to aesthetics, politics, and value” wherein few to no structures of institutional legitimation value this sort of experimentation as knowledge work.
10. The Serendipitous Collaboration: Emergent Social Norms and Creative Processes in an Online Remixing Community
Jude Yew, University of Michigan
Remixing, or the act of appropriating content from others to create new derivative works, is an increasingly popular activity on the Internet. The emerging cultural form of the remix is largely generated by amateurs and hobbyists whose creations rival those produced by professionals who do it for far greater financial gain. That remixing is a thriving online activity can be attributed in no small part to the support extended to these amateur creators by online communities. In this paper, I present a study of one such community, ccMixter – an online community of serious hobbyists engaged in the creation of music through remixing. Central to the creative process and membership in ccMixter is the need for individuals to prosocially share their creations for others to modify and reuse. But what compels ccMixter members to openly share their own creations for others to remix in the first place? I investigate the socio-technical factors that motivate this prosociality by employing a variety of methods, including Social Network Analysis and qualitative interviews. Based on the data generated from my study, I find that the prosociality required for remixing is shaped by both social as well as technical factors, and is reified in the social norms and creative processes embraced by the members of this community.
IV. New social movements
11. Piracy, Emulation, and the Rise of Homebrew: “Jailbreaking” the Social Movement
Casey O’Donnell, University of Georgia
This chapter examines the intertwined relationship that “MOD chips,” (modification chips), updatable firmware, and the “jailbreaking” of modern game consoles has with piracy, emulation, and homebrew software/game development. Drawing on participant observation amongst online Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Sony PSP, and Sony PS3 homebrew communities, the essay explores the complex, problematic, and contentious boundaries that participants maintain. Drawing on “technological and product-oriented movements” (TPMs) (Hess, 2005) this essay posits that “jailbreak” or “pirate” social movements, while similar to TPMs, present an important aspect of counter-hegemonic projects (Omi & Winant, 1994) that is nascent in other TPMs. The explicitly illegal character of the activities makes framing and frame management particularly important for these movements. The frame shift towards “jailbreaking,” after the introduction of the iPhone has proven extremely successful for these communities. Perhaps most importantly, recent exemptions to the DMCA (Billington, 2010) include the jailbreaking of cellular phones. However, a similar exemption was not made for console game systems maintaining the outlaw status of these communities.
Benford, R., and D. Snow. 2000. Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 26:611-39.
Billington, James H. 2010. Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works.
Hess, David J. 2005. “Technology- and Product-Oriented Movements: Approximating Social Movement Studies and Science and Technology Studies.” Science, Technology & Human Values 30.4:515-535.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.
12. Digilante Rhetoric: Analyzing the Intersection of Race, Crime, and Justice Online
Dara N. Byrne, City University of New York
The trophies above help to contextualize the rhetorical performance of justice and punishment in digilante culture. Digilantism is the term I use to refer to the growing practice amongst some netizens, mostly based in the United States and the United Kingdom, who mete out extrajudicial punishment to cyber-criminals such as scammers, hackers, and pedophiles. Unlike their vigilante counterparts whose notions of justice on the Wild Wild West required brute force to flog, tar and feather, or lynch their outlaws, for digilantes, punishing cyber-criminals rests entirely in the art of persuasion. Taken from the Trophy Room on 419eater.com[4], a scam-baiting website that seeks to educate potential victims about the proliferation of Nigerian 419 Advance Fee Fraud crimes[5], these photographs are depictions of what scam-baiters term “the new cyber-sport.” With well over 20,000 registered members, the 419eater community believes that its practices can put an end to cyber-scamming. Members pose as unwitting targets in an attempt to frustrate the scammers, waste their time, publish their addresses or emails, and, in a handful of cases, pass information on to law enforcement agencies. However, the real prize in scam-baiting is when the scammer fulfills the baiter’s request by sending “good faith gifts” such as African arts and crafts, a small money order, or, in the best case scenario, an image of the scammer or people in the scammer’s village engaged in humiliating activities. As the series of trophies above and in the attached appendix illustrate, in digilante culture the tortured naked body is the site of vindication. Victory and the associated bragging rights are usually derived from the scammer’s complicity in fulfilling the most degrading requests, particularly those where they are asked to pour or paint white liquid on their faces or bodies, tattoo the baiters’ nicknames or logos on their backs, or tie appendages to their genitalia.
Although ethical questions are clearly warranted, 419eater participants easily justify their actions by asserting that the Nigerians in these images are real criminals whose willingness to comply with these “humorous” requests is merely a reflection of their desperation to extort money from potential victims. But as much as the site’s administrators and participants would like to disavow any racist intent, the pervasiveness of the tortured black body fetish as evidenced by these trophies did not come about by way of simple whimsy. Fetishes such as these are reminiscent of the iconographic memorabilia produced at the height of vigilante hysteria about the perceived failure of the state to protect its citizens. In fact, digilantism is best understood when set against the backdrop of post-9/11 anti-terror measures, increased demands for border security, transnationally inflected rhetorics of immigration reform, the easy passage of “Stand Your Ground” self-defense bills, the ebb and flow of neo-Nazi and skinhead movements in the United Kingdom, and the spread of Minutemen-fashioned quasi-militia groups in the United States. Whether as responses to real crimes or to criminal suspicion, vigilante zeal is usually coterminous with the belief that there are scarcities and deficiencies in the state security system. The rhetoric surrounding the 2006 launch of the State of Texas’ video surveillance site texasborderwatch.com exemplifies this. Reasoning that the war in Iraq left the Mexico-Texas border defenseless, Governor Perry issued an official call for private citizens to help curtail crime by becoming volunteer surveyors in their Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program. Within the month that the test site was operational, it received more than 25 million hits, 200,000 registered subscribers, and 13,000 emails.
For the past few years I have been collecting and downloading artifacts published on over thirty digilante sites, ranging from one man operations like Alexander Kerensky’s Nigerian Bloodsport (geocities.com/a_kerenx/) to full fledged coalitions with recruitment and mentoring programs like that of 419eater.com. My archive currently includes thousands of photographs, chat room dialogues, email correspondences between digilantes and cyber-criminals, and most recently, two videos that were uploaded onto YouTube. When analyzed together, these disciplinary rhetorics are indicative of the strategic communicative behaviors of a discourse community whose rules and codes of conduct are as sanctioned online as they are offline. Because discursive interactions are inevitably sites of social interaction, they must be understood as reflections and reproductions of a “knowledge base” that invokes much larger social structures, situations, and norms. Functioning as social networking sites for netizens who wish to practice eye-for-an-eye justice online, the public aspect of the punishment is at the core of what it means to be a digilante. Whether termed a “sport” (scamorama.com), a “duty” (scamvictimsunited.com), a “hobby” (Canadian digilante known online as “Citizen Tipster”), or an “exhaustive volunteer practice” (quatloos.com), competing for increasingly degrading trophies (waronspam.com), infiltrating criminals’ systems by tracking their IP addresses (predatortracker.blogspot.com), patrolling cyber-crime hotspots (perverted-justice.com), and publishing home or work addresses (ebayersthatsuck.com) are all part of the widely accepted view that private policing, public humiliation, and stripping perpetrators of their fundamental liberties are powerful means of controlling or redressing internet criminality.
Although digilantism is a growing internet subculture, short of legal research on cyber-crime, little attention has been paid to the rhetorical, cultural, and socio-historical dimension of this widely practiced do-it-yourself form of justice. The paucity of humanistic research is particularly surprising given the explosion of popular and scholarly rhetoric on cyber-terrorism, digital surveillance, and internet security and safety. The purpose of my chapter then is to address this gap by providing a critical analysis of some forms of digilante rhetoric. I specifically use responses to Nigerian 419 scams because of the unique rhetoric digilantes use when interfacing with racialized groups. My objective is to set such rhetorics about justice in tension with traditional, modern, and contemporary vigilante activities. I will show how internet technologies are being used to promote variant above-the-law cultures unfolding across local, national and international lines and how real world forces such as the shift in racial tensions post-9/11 have contributed to renewed commitments to social control. My chapter is significant because it will help to address the rather vexed question as to why images and narratives that would otherwise be admonished in contemporary public discourse—the very norms that make us feel uneasy about the historical implications of 419eater’s trophies—are propagated as elemental in the regulation of cyber-crime.
[1] I created this title for Charles. He may not like it 🙂 I know he’ll let me know.
[2] See the abstract and project at http://laterallab.org/projects/the-problem-of-methods/.
[3] In full disclosure, as well as participant, I am the technical project lead of this project and the Managing Editor of LateralLab: a Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. This is the debut project for the venue.
[4] These pictures were posted by members operating under the monikers Shiver Metimbers, Trevor Andthat, and Captain Pugwash.
[5] The term 419 scam refers to the article in the Nigerian Criminal Code for confidence schemes. 419 scenarios typically involve asking potential victims to cover the fees of a large financial transaction in exchange for a percentage of the payout upon completion. Instead of receiving 40-70% of several million dollars, victims’ bank accounts are either drained of funds or they are asked to cover more and more fees until they are penniless. In 2006 The United States Department of Justice announced it had over 2.8 million open reports on 419 scams, accounting for about 1 billion dollars in losses.
Online Communities 