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.

Yes, the costs are higher this year, but, frankly, this conference is more expensive to run than IR.10 was in Milwaukee last year.

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. Details below:

Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR)
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
AoIR 11 Grant

The CIPR will sponsor one student (undergraduate, graduate or post-doc) for the Gothenburg AoIR 11conference in the amount of $800 (US). The student’s research must focus on some aspect of information ethics or information policy, and internet studies, broadly conceived. The recipient must submit a proposal for a paper according to AoIR procedures. Once accepted, the following should be submitted to Elizabeth Buchanan at elizabeth at internetresearchethics.org:

• Paper Abstract
• CV
• Brief statement describing how the paper will make an impact on the fields of information ethics, policy, and internet studies.

Submissions should be received by 1 August 2010. Recipient will be notified by 30 August 2010.

The recipient should acknowledge the CIPR grant at AoIR and in any subsequent presentations or publications.

I hope to see many of you in Gothenburg this fall!

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Internet Research 11.0 – Sustainability, Participation, Action
October 21-23, 2010
University of Gothenburg/Chalmers University of Technology
Gothenburg, Sweden

The full call for papers is here.

I am proposing a panel for IR.11 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.

Ideal papers will provide philosophical, conceptual, and/or critical insights into Facebook and social networking generally.

If interested in joining this panel, please email me a 250-500 word abstract, and a brief biography, by February 13.

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4. IR.10 Internet: Critical (or, why the blog has been slow lately)
5. Bill McGeveran on Facebook, Context, and Privacy

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 the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook, based on my critique of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release.

I’ll also be participating in a pre-conference workshop on Critical Issues and Perspectives in Internet Research Methods and Ethics, where the focus will be on raising awareness of and sensitivity by researchers around critical methodological and ethical issues working particularly in online or Internet-mediated realms.

There already is a great tweet stream at #ir10, so please follow us if you can’t make it.

UPDATE: By most measures, the conference was a great success. As an organizer, I was only able to sit in on a handful of sessions (including my own), but others have blogged about here and here.

There are quite a few images up on Flickr, and I’ve created a Wordle from all the individual paper titles. Matt Allen blogged the AoIR general meeting, where the locations of the next two conferences were announced: Gothenburg, Sweden (2010) & Seattle, Washington (2011). See you there!

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5. Critical Perspectives on Social Software and Web 2.0

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 laws regulate – through constitutions, statues, and other legal codes. In cyberspace we must understand how code regulates – how the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is regulate cyberspace as it is. (1999, p. 6)

For Lessig, “how a system is designed will affect the freedoms and control the system enables” (Lessig, 2001, p. 35); the very architecture of the Internet dictates its politics and ideology. He argues that it is the architecture of cyberspace that constitutes its culture, its community, and its freedom; and as the architecture is threatened or changed, so is the culture, community, and freedom it enables.

To see this in action, consider two recent examples: a change to the default reply settings on the Association of Internet Researchers discussion list, and a similar change implemented by the microblogging service Twitter.

:: Air-L ::

The Association of Internet Researchers hosts a quite active discussion list (air-l) on all things related to Internet studies. This past Sunday evening, the list manager sent out the following message:

Up until now on air-l, replies to messages posted to the list went, by default, to air-l. The default reply setting for air-l has been changed. As of now, replies to list posts will go privately to the message poster and not to air-l. If you would like people on the list to see your reply, you will need to manually insert the air-l address into the To: field of your reply.

Within minutes, this change was strongly criticized:

I think this is very detrimental to the community. This change fundamentally destroys the conversation construed as a group, and forces it to be between individuals, unless they consciously choose otherwise. …Air-l should be about collegiality and sharing, not about replying to individuals…. (source)

A lengthy discussion ensued, which included more detailed explanations of the motivation behind the change (centering on a concern over the inability to remove personal/confidential/harmful information that might be mistakenly sent to the entire list given the original default reply setting — a motivation that has been questioned by myself and others). Some also found the nature of the change quite surprising considering we’re an organization who studies Internet-based communication and culture; while others criticized the lack of community feedback, participation, or notice about the change.

The debate continues, but what it reveals is how the architecture of a system can impacts not only the mode of communication, but also the members’ sense of community, dialogue and sociability. As one commenter put it: “Even small technological changes can have immense social and political repercussions.”

As Lessig states, code is law, and as the reaction to the change in settings on the Air-L list reveals, many fear that this new code will regulate their experience in new — and detrimental — ways.

:: Twitter @Replies ::

At just about the same time as the Air-L debate, Twitter announced a similar change to how it would treat replies on its microblogging platform:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

Translation: If I follow certain people, I can see their tweets, including those they send in reply to people I don’t follow. Twitter states their data shows this is “undesirable,” so, with this global change in place, I no longer see replies from friends to people I myself don’t follow.

Again, the reaction was swift, with the hash tag #fixreplies quickly emerging as a means of following the chatter.

And again, we are reminded of Lessig’s warning that the way a system is designed regulates our experiences within it. Consider this commenter’s reaction:

The new policy isn’t something you have to opt-in to. It’s not something you can opt-out of. It’s true for people who use 3rd party Twitter clients to read their Tweets. It’s more fundamentally closed than Facebook is; on that site I may not be able to view the profiles of strangers talking to my friends, but I can see that the conversations are happening and I can read the comments. This new Twitter policy breaks one of the fundamental rules of social activity streams: that I can discover new people by seeing who is conversing with the people I already know.

As with the Air-L issue, this is an ongoing debate with arguments from both sides (and Twitter appears to be making changes their original tweaks).

The point of both these cases is that architecture matters; especially architecture that is hidden, controlled by others, and set globally. The way a system is designed is constitutive of its culture, its community, and its freedoms; and as Lessig argues, when the architecture of a system is threatened or changed, so is the culture, community, and freedom it enables.

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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, economies, politics, locations, agencies, and ethics, Internet: Critical invites scholars to consider material frameworks, infrastructures, and exchanges as enabling constraints in terms of online phenomena.

Furthermore, the conference invites considerations of Internet research as a critical practice and theory, its intellectual histories, investments, and social reverberations. How do we, as Internet researchers, connect our work to social concerns or cultural developments both local and global, and what kinds of agency may we exercise in the process? What kinds of redefinitions of the political (in terms of networks, micropolitics, participation, lifestyles, resistant or critical practices) are necessary when conceptualizing Internet cultures within the current geopolitical and geotechnological climate?

To this end, we call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and academic communities that address the conference themes, including papers that intersect and/or interconnect the following:

• critical moments, elements, practices
• critical theories, methods, constructs
• critical voices, histories, texts
• critical networks, junctures, spaces
• critical technologies, artifacts, failures
• critical ethics, interventions, alternatives.

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, legal, aesthetic, economic, and/or philosophical aspects of the Internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

SUBMISSIONS
We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference PAPERS and we also welcome proposals for ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, as well as organized PANEL PROPOSALS that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme.

DEADLINES
Call for Papers Released: 17 November 2008
Submissions Due: 1 February 2009
Notification: 15 March 2009

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
All papers and presentations in this session will be evaluated in a standard blind peer review.
Format

• PAPERS (individual or multi-author) – submit abstract of 600-800 words
• FULL PAPERS (OPTIONAL): For submitters requiring peer review of full papers, manuscripts of up to 8,000 words will be accepted for review. These will be reviewed and judged separately from abstract submissions
• PANEL PROPOSALS – submit a 600-800 word description of the panel theme, plus 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation
• ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS – submit a statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting. An individual may also submit a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers as long as you are not presenting them.

PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the journal Information, Communication & Society, edited by Caroline Haythornwaite and Lori Kendall. Authors selected for submission for this issue will be contacted prior to the conference.

All papers submitted to the conference system will be available to AoIR members after the conference.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
On October 7, 2009, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquiries regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to both the Conference Chair and Program Chair and no later than March 31, 2009.

CONTACT INFORMATION

• Program Chair: Susanna Paasonen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
• Conference Co-Chairs and Coordinators: Elizabeth Buchanan, Michael Zimmer, UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies and Center for Information Policy Research; Steve Jones, University of Illinois-Chicago

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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, and Steve Jones, UI-Chicago.

The hosting institutions include the School of Information Studies (UW-Milwaukee), the Center for Information Policy Research (UW-Milwaukee), and the Department of Communication Studies at UI-Chicago).

More details to come…we hope to see you next year in Milwaukee!

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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 paper “Designing Privacy Into Online Communities” by Drs. Cathy Dwyer and Starr Roxanne Hiltz. Dwyer and Hiltz criticize the poor design of privacy management on social networking sites, such as Facebook, and suggest three important ways to design privacy into these services:

• Evaluate the privacy level of each component: Just as each component of a system can be evaluated as to its usability and security, so should each component be evaluated as to its privacy.
• Provide privacy feedback: We need a privacy WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”), showing users exactly what is visible to friends versus strangers as they tweak their privacy settings.
• Publish privacy norms: Social networking sites should publish aggregated metrics that reveal norms with respect to privacy settings, such as “70% of users make their e-mail address visible to friends; 10% make it visible to strangers.” Knowing this information can help inform users and perhaps influence their behavior.

I also suggest adding a fourth design suggestion:

• Provide privacy reminders: Periodically prompt users to revisit their privacy settings.

Currently, social networking sites seem to assume that one’s privacy preferences when the account was first opened remain static. However, users should be reminded to tweak their privacy settings over time, due to a variety of reasons: you might want to change who can see what based on life changes (perhaps you are now on the job market and want to restrict access to some of those compromising photos), based on new information being shared on the network (as a newbie, you might have only included basic data, but after time, you might start sharing more personal information), or in reaction to changes in the service itself (once Facebook opened itself up to non-college students, the number and type of people able to see your content change dramatically).

It was great hearing about other resesarch addressing the complexities social networking privacy functionality (for those who are overwhelmed by Facebook’s complex privacy options, see my “How to Change your Facebook Privacy Settings” guide). And I was especially excited when Dwyer noted the importance of placing privacy on the same level of other “non-functional” design variables such as security, usability, and reliability. That is “values in design” in a nutshell.

Another highlight of the conference was Saturday’s keynote by Stephen Graham, Professor of Human Geography (a wonderful term) at the University of Durham, who spoke about the links between mobility, urbanism, ubiquitous computing, and surveillance. It was a probing and insightful talk, providing much fodder for future research projects. A great summary of the talk is here.

Finally, we announced that next year’s conference will be in Milwaukee, co-organized by the School of Information Studies at UW-Milwaukee and the Deptartment of Communication at UI-Chicago. More details on this exciting announcement here.

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My paper was titled “Search 2.0: Web 2.0, Personal Information Flows, and the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine.” My submitted text is here, but the presentation focused a bit more on Web 2.0 platforms than the paper itself (paper revisions to come). My slides (a 6.7MB PDF) are here.

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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 how Google’s particular information interface implicates three interrelated values of moral and ethical import: freedom from bias, privacy, and trust. The paper will close with a call to action for Google – and the search engine industry at large – to engage in value-sensitive design to ensure a place for these values as criteria by which we judge the quality and acceptability of web search engines

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Received this CFP today from Eszter Hargittai:

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Special Issue on

The Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Dimensions
of Search Engines

Guest Editor:
Eszter Hargittai
Northwestern 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 ever before. Despite the crucial role that search engines play in how people access information, little attention has been paid to the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of large-scale search engines.

This special issue will explore the social implications of large-scale search engines on the Web. It will bring together experts from the fields of communication, sociology, political science, economics, business, law, and computer and information sciences to consider what we know about people’s search engine uses and what recent trends suggest for the types of content that will be most accessible to users in the future.

The following are some questions papers might address: Who uses search engines and for what purposes? What are the effects of search engine use on mass- and interpersonal communication? How do users’ communication practices influence search engine functionality? How skilled are various population groups at the use of search engines? How do search engines shape identity management and representation online? Are all search engines created equal? Is all content created equal in the eyes of search engines? Is there a viable public alternative to the search engine market dominated by private actors? These are just some of the possible questions papers in this special issue may address.

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