Into the Neverlands

It seems like I wasn't beating around the bush with the post on privacy settings on Facebook. danah boyd calls them 'the most flexible and the most confusing privacy settings in the industry' yet she maintains that many Facebookers don't realise their flexibility.

Howeer, she also points out that privacy settings should be about awareness and context besides the possibility of control. In other words, ideally each time we tag somebody in a photo it would be pleasant to know who can view it and customise that.

Another exceptionally good distinction regarding privacy is made by Clay Shirky - the fact that between private and public personal has disappeared. He gives an example of having a chat with a stranger in a park - it is not a private act, yet not a public one either. Shirky points out that nowadays we mostly tend to use the word personal when we refer to technology.

In this respect and with the growing popularity of SNS and the being online which in fact is increasingly becoming doing online as our presence on the Net is becoming increasingly participatory by chatting, linking, commenting, tagging, embedding, posting, twittering, it seems that our previous understanding of what is private is irreversibly changing. I can observe two camps emerging: those who try to keep at least a minuscule amount of privacy while participating in the creation of Semantic Web and those who seemingly are no longer concerned with privacy. Nowadays posting information online and hoping to keep it private is a bit like having an affair at work - mostly it gets exposed anyway.

My suggestion for those worried instead of evoking notions of Big Brother would be to think twice before posting anything. And read privacy settings beforehand. And enjoy this data whirlpool which lurkers will never understand.

On the other hand, the privacy issue that worries many is the fact that other Facebookers can upload pictures with you without prior notice. It is possible to detag oneself if others have tagged you and even report the photo for nudity or pornography/drug use/violence/attacks individual or group, yet Facebook warns that they 'will NOT remove photos just because they're unflattering'. I guess, it means say cheese?..

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This one is about inspiration. And patience.

Ted Nelson once said that 'schooling systematically ruins things for us, wiping out these interests; the last thing to be ruined determines your profession' ¹.

During one of the seminars in Utrecht University one girl (luckily, not from the Media studies) expressed her worries about online universities and online lectures. I'd like to know which corners of the Net she's treading and I could suggest a good few.

I adore sites like Ted.com or Fora TV and obviously the good old friend YouTube. Some of the talks on Ted are so remarkable (needless to say free) that I they should make any ambitious professor rethink the content of her lectures twice before even starting to prepare for them. One aspect that makes Ted particularly compelling is the passion that I savour in numerous talks available on the site.

During the past few weeks I realised I would like to learn to program - mainly after watching Jonathan Harris' projects. Which reminds me that in his 1995 interview Friedrich Kittler suggested that students researching cultural studies should know at least two software languages - only then 'they'll be able to say something about what 'culture' is at the moment, in contrast to 'society'² (although that's quite a challenge when media scholars mostly are being trained within the faculties of arts or humanities...).

After Johny Lee's presentation on Wii Remote hacks I thought I should at least get better acquainted with the hacker culture and the ways their practises become quintessential examples of what De Certeau calls 'tactics' (2002)³, such as New York hackers turning iPods into drum machines or devices on which they play Doom. Mirko Schäfer just defended his PhD "Bastard Culture! User participation and the extension of cultural industries" in Utrecht University where among other issues he covers Xbox hacks as examples of participation culture.

Another talk I came across today cost me 4 hours spent in front of a square sheet of paper. I wish I was taught mathematics, computer science and arts the way Robert Lang talks about merging mathematics and origami! Talks like these are like watching the Olympics on the telly or listening to exceptionally good musicians performing - whatever they engage in seems so flawless, yet at the same time so simple, that I instantly consider becoming a figure ice skater or a pianist. I guess my idea of origami was similarly naive... While at first I was intending to make a water bug, for the moment it is a bit of rocket science, so with a bit of visual help, I rather chose to make a more basic beetle.



It's a bit beetle-tired, but it's mine... I wander if I can crack origami, can I hack something?..

Hope everybody is having as much fun this season :)

1. Nelson, T. H. No more teachers' dirty looks. 1970. In N. Wardrip-Fruin and N. Montfort , eds. The new media reader. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

2. Technologies of Writing/Rewriting Technology. An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler about Cultural Studies in Germany, Literature in the Age of Technology and the Blind Spot in Media Theory by Matthew B. Griffin and S.M. Herrmann, available here. The interview originally appeared in Auseinander, Vol.1, No.3 (Berlin, 1995).

3. De Certeau, M. (2002) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: UC Press.

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Monkeys of Yamanouchi, Japan (photo EPA)

Wishing a happy holiday season to all! Off to get new ideas and insights.

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After finally managing to convince a friend of mine who lives in Dublin to get on Facebook (primarily in order to stay in touch), low and behold I discovered that she quietly vanished off the face of Facebook. I didn't get a notification about that...

Previously I was told that disappearing from this social network site is not as easy as joining it and I was presuming that deletion of one's account is not possible. Deletion for users indeed is not possible. But deactivation is.



And you must love Facebook for the possible options given:

I don't feel safe on the site.
I spend too much time using Facebook.
I have another Facebook account.
This is temporary. I'll be back.
I need to fix something in my account.
I don't understand how to use the site.
I receive too many emails from Facebook.
I don't find Facebook useful.
Facebook is resulting in social drama for me.
Other [please explain further].


Unlike Facebook, MySpace allows to cancel the account and in that case the cancellation is irreversible.

So I had two news for my friend: firstly, she indeed became invisible. Yet, secondly, the traces were still there...

However, complete deletion of one's profile is possible, although one has to contact Facebook on that. Before that (and before the deactivation) it is requested to remove any profile content distributed on Facebook: sent and received messages, friends, comments/posts on all of your walls, comments/posts on other peoples walls, all your photos, you will have to leave all the networks and groups, transfer the admin rights to someone else, clear every last bit of information from your profile. Then contacting Facebook and if no traces are left - voila, you will be deleted. At least that is what it sounds, I wonder if anybody has experiences with this.

One of the reasons I came across deactivation/deletion matters was because I was looking whether it was possible to restrict one's profile to being visible only to friends as my newbie Facebook friend was getting worried about privacy. I told her that the Internet is the wrong place to be if one is after privacy, yet it seems that Facebook is flexible enough - it is possible to make one's profile/basic info/personal info/status updates/friends less accessible to the general lurker audience - even though one needs to research a bit on that as an average Joe 6 pack might not find it that easy.

On the other hand, I was wondering about the photos with me on other people's albums - these are out of my control. Vanishing nowadays has become quite complicated...

My conclusion so far is that there is plenty of gossip around about SNS, which is oftentimes based on customised settings, and the only way to come up with answers is to look for them.

I'm thinking whether I can convince my friend to come back... Not that Facebook is the love of my life, but I'd like to see my friend more often. At least on Facebook.

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"Networked culture has yet to ar ticulate itself clearly in spatial terms. The real change happens when networked communities and data manifest in spatial terms." (Headmap Manifesto, p. 50)

I must say that in terms of these processes in Utrecht, I haven't seen much of this happening lately. The manifesto being 10 years old... Please point me into the right direction.

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It is unimaginable to study the new media without creating something within them. So I embarked on a new project today creating a network on Ning for Lithuanians studying and academics working abroad (it's in Lithuanian, so you don't necessarily have to head there).

The main reason for a social network of this kind was the fact that since we are a relatively small country and the numbers of students and academics heading abroad have been rapidly increasing, it has become hard to find them all in one place, get in touch and see what others have been working on. Moreover, there was a notion of patriotism tingling somewhere in the back of my head as academics previously have played a substantial role in establishing the country in the late 1910s and later on in restoring the independence and starting everything from the scratch again in 1990s. As a fellow student of mine told me a few months ago, when one comes from a minute and young country, one has a feasible chance to make some sort of a difference. Perhaps...

Anyhow, setting up a network on Ning allowed me to start getting some idea on how this budding social network(ing) site is working. While danah boyd and Nicole Ellison define
MySpace and FaceBook as social network sites that embed the social networks their users have developed prior to joining them, the developments I have noticed on Ning allow to erase the parentheses and consider the attempt to networking. The matter that interests me most is the nature of the networking and the threads that emerge within this practice.


The first look and in particular at the last results of the searches reveals that there is a lot of solitude on the networks launched on Ning yet - many of them, particularly the ones with the generic sky blue icon are networks of one person still. This poses two possible explanations - either that is because of Ning's relative novelty and the networks need some time develop or the fact that the people joining Ning consider the platform a possibility to establish a room of their own on the Web, which puts the practice of networking in a different and possibly questionable perspective.

Ning co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini says that 65 percent of Ning's 500 000 social networks are being actively used with a new one springing up every 30 seconds. Since I managed to erase my bookmarks where I believe I had world-wide figures, I am left with the ones from the States and according to Nielsen Online, Ning's year-over-year audience's growth for September was the third largest one after Twitter and Tagged among social network(ing) sites - 343%, 330% and 251% respectively. Ning had 2,955 mln users compared to Twitter's 2,36 mln and Tagged's 3,86 mln. On the average that leaves with 6 people per each Ning network, although, as I have said, many of the ones I found were still underdeveloped and included only one person (and since they were not updated regularly with posts, photographs or videos didn't function as blogs either). The cemetery of attempts... However, some of the more popular ones (a feature Ning offers by random order?), such as I see color have over 60 000 members.

Interestingly, during one of my first encounters with Ning, I randomly searched for networks revolving around the axis of adult-content trying to see whether sex indeed is the forbidden fruit we are all after in the virtual (the first question my avatar was asked on Second Life was 'So, do you wanna have sex?').

While the official Ning blog claims that adult-oriented networks must have a warning page and that they don’t show up in the search results on Ning.com, a quick search by entering various words for male/female genitalia results in dozens of raunchy networks and one doesn't have to look far to find those that are public, appear on the search results and have no warning pages about adult-oriented content.

Since Ning's main money making machine is GoogleAds, such networks have become a cause of serious headache and as of the 1st of January, as Ning blog states, they will no longer support adult social networks on the Ning platform.

From what I have observed so far, it seems that Ning is first of all becoming an ethnographic case study of what Hugo Liu calls taste performance. Unlike FaceBook where the textual plays a major role in displaying one's profile and the bonds with the other users, Ning like MySpace offers the possibility to manipulate the template visually - a feature that in MySpace serves a major tool in constructing one's space. However, while MySpace and FaceBook firstly serve as quintessential platforms for 'friending' rather than making connections with strangers (I find FaceBook more like a pin-up board), the networking priority on Ning is questionable, as solitary notworking is still very evident. It will be interesting to observe whether Ning will evolve into a networking platform and how it will continue to develop. And I will let you know whether my network will develop into a networking practise or I will be doomed for solitude.

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krazydad/jbum photo

Stumbled across this one while fishing in Visual Complexity.

Julian Stallabrass includes an insightful essay on the digitalisation of visual culture 'Sixty Billion Sunsets' in his book Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, published more than a decade ago, yet still making a lot of sense.

Sunsets are some of the most popular subjects in photo banks. I just found 4 556 234 of them on Flickr and 3 117 531 on Picasa. They're mostly highly saturated, with the colours so sticky sweet you want to dip the fingers in them is if they were jars with marmalade.

The photo-graph consists of 150 00 pictures with a tag 'sunset' and demonstrates the manufacturing of the sunset. Krazydad provides a more thorough explanation of his graph.

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Currently I am researching how
linguistically the words representing
the virtual space are being mapped in various languages and I would
appreciate if you took a minute to leave a comment about the words mentioned
below in your native languages. I think this could potentially reveal
a fascinating kaleidoscope of how we define the virtual in various
cultures. While I understand that English lexicon is quite popular,
perhaps some new words are being invented to replace the English ones?
A few words I am interested in are:

***********
'web site'
'blog'
'internet'
'internaut' (or other words defining the users of the internet)
************

I can give you examples in Lithuanian language which in a way explain
the beginnings of this modest attempt:

'web site' is 'interneto svetainė' which in fact means a
living/sitting/common room in the internet.

'blog' is 'tinklaraštis' which means a script on the net or a net that
is weaving a pattern/script. Funny enough, the word 'blogas' (we add
the ending -as to male nouns/adjectives) in Lithuanian means 'bad'.

If you could take a minute to reply with as precise
definitions of the above words with as correct transcription of them
(with dots, umlauts and other diacritics), I would be forever
grateful. If you come up with some other interesting words circulating
within that context or would like to forward the link to other people
from across the globe, you are more than welcome.

Please leave a comment or reply to lina[dot]zigelyte[at]gmail[dot]com . The overview and
an essay will be posted on the blog.

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Preparing for the seminar on performatvity and locatedness of media and performance. This time the subject is Performative Subjects with Foucault's Panopticism and De Certeau's Spatial Practices as the main texts.

While we were discussing the texts prior to seminar, as a possible example worth mentioning within the framework of panopticism and performativity I remembered London cyclorama.



BBC report gives quite a clear explanation of how the cyclorama functions if you haven't heard about it before. Foucauldian paranoia of surveillance remains, yet the fact that the observers can render the flow of time by moving within it leaves room for practising spaces. Consider if somebody went for a walk within the scope of the cameras and then entered the cyclorama to play with time and their traces in/on it.

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For the past few weeks along with other few students I was brainstorming about the term ‘mapping’. After looking at Deleuze’s ideas on maps and mapping as a continuous practice I came to realise that in fact our quotidian practises are all about mapping and embedding ourselves within various maps.

I weave my thoughts within this blog (as of the last weeks of November) in a certain manner, which is different from the practice employed in my previous non-academic blogs. I’ve been treading certain virtual spaces for the past couple of months augmenting my folksonomies, compiling the blogroll and developing new networks. When I talk with my professors I maintain a slightly different lexicon than the one I use with other students of Utrecht University and they do not hear the vocabulary I use with my best friends after a couple of glasses of wine or a few biertjes. Deleuze and Guattari argue¹ that ‘we are composed of lines.<...> They compose us, as they compose our map' (Deleuze&Guattari, 2004: 224). We blend and intersect with new ones on a daily basis. And we emerge out of this matrix.

Consequently I was explaining to a friend of mine the idea of our participation in network culture as a practise of mapping ourselves within them. danah boyd calls it defining ourselves and our context in which we are operating ². The matter is as vast as the virtual web within which we are entangled together. But the more research I did on it, the more discoveries I encountered. In a week or two I'll know if I have to remap my thoughts...

In the meantime - contemplating on Gambling, Gods and LSD - a visual meditation on being I thoroughly enjoyed in IDFA in Amsterdam yesterday.

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1. Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. & Massumi, B. 2004. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum International Publishing Group.

2. boyd, d. 2006. Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites. First Monday 11(12), December, p. 7

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