Michael Zimmer.org

Registration is now open for Internet Research 11.0: Sustainability, Participation, Action, the 2010 conference for the Association of Internet Researchers, taking place October 21-23 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

And, if you’re a student looking for ways to defray some of the costs, the UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR) will again sponsor a student (undergraduate, graduate or post-doc) for the conference in the amount of US$800.

I am proposing a panel for Internet Research 11.0 titled “On the Philosophy of Facebook”. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has built his social networking empire on the belief that “information wants to be shared”, a particular philosophy of information that directly impacts the values built into the design of Facebook, ranging from its user interface, privacy policies, terms of service, and method of governance. This panel will explore the philosophy of Facebook and its broader implications for norms of privacy, identity, governance, sociability, and online life generally.

For the last 353 days, I’ve been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an interdisciplinary collection of nearly 400 scholars, researchers and graduate students interested in Internet and new media studies are descending on Milwaukee this week.
The conference program is fantastic, featuring keynote addresses by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Megan Boler. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my paper, “But …

Speaking of Lessig, two interesting cases emerged this week that help illustrate Lessig’s position that, when thinking about the architecture of cyberspace,  “code is law.”
In Code, Lessig argues that all of the rules, tendencies, affordances, and constraints of/in cyberspace are the result of human decisions, actions, and, ultimately, code. What we can and cannot do there is governed by the underlying code of all of the programs and protocols that make up the Internet, which can, alternatively or simultaneously, permit and restrict certain human actions:
In real space recognize how …

The Call for Papers for Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), has been released:
Call for Papers
Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical
The 10th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)
October 7-11, 2009
Hilton Milwaukee City Center
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
http://ir10.aoir.org
As the Internet has become an increasingly ubiquitous and mundane medium, the analytical shortcomings of the division between the online and the offline have become evident. Shifting the focus to the fundamental intermeshing of online and offline spaces, networks, …

The 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) will take place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from October 7-11, 2009. The conference theme will be “Internet:Critical“, providing a space for interdisciplinary researchers to reflect on, describe, interrogate, challenge, and stake new claims to various critical Internet issues, including:
critical moments, elements, practices
critical theories, methods, constructs
critical voices, histories, texts
critical networks, junctures, spaces
critical technologies, artifacts, failures
critical ethics, interventions, alternatives
The program chair is Susanna Paasonen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. The local organizing committee is comprised of Elizabeth Buchanan, UW-Milwaukee, Michael Zimmer, UW-Milwaukee, …

Over the past few days I have been attending the 9th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in Copenhagen. This year’s conference is “Internet Research 9.0 – Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place“, and it has been expertly organized by The IT University of Copenhagen.
While I missed the first day, I was able to attend excellent panels on “Coding Places”, “Privacy Disclosure Identity”, “Beyond Offline vs Online: Effects of Technology”, “e-Health”, and “Gaming”.
One particular highlight was the …

Following up on my Web 2.0 panel at 4S, I just returned from another quick trip to Canada — this time Vancouver — for the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, where I organized a similar panel titled “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0: Surveillance, Discipline, Labor.” I again had the pleasure of presenting alongside Anders Albrechtslund, Søren Mørk Petersen, along with Kylie Jarrett, and my former NYU collegaue, Bilge Yesil. We were lucky to have David Silver perform the duties of respondent, and he posted his valuable insights …

I am presenting this paper today at the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR). The panel is titled “Search Engines – Their Politics; Their Logics”:
The Value Implications of the “Google Paradigm” for Organizing, Distributing and Accessing Information
Given the status search engines have gained as the dominant knowledge tool for accessing the wealth of information available on the Internet, it is vital to consider the value and ethical consequences of our reliance on these tools for organizing, distributing and accessing information. This paper will explore …

Received this CFP today from Eszter Hargittai:

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Special Issue on
The Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Dimensionsof Search Engines
Guest Editor:Eszter HargittaiNorthwestern University
Search engines are some of the most commonly accessed Web sites online. Millions of people turn to search engines daily to find information about news, health concerns, products, government services, their new neighbors, natural disasters and a myriad of other topics. At the same time, recent trends suggest that the search engine market is shrinking, with fewer large players guiding users’ online behavior than …

I’m part of a panel submission to the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR). The panel is titled “Search Engines – Their Politics; Their Logics”:
Search engines today seem to afford the only access point to the webspace that continually increases in both size and complexity. This panel undertakes a conceptual and technical investigation of search engines, tracing them from early days to their increasing political, financial and social significance in global life. We challenge notions of centrality and neutrality of search engines by examining …