Debrief: Social Software and Web 2.0 seminar

I presented at the Social Software and Web 2.0: Critical Perspectives and Challenges for Research and Business seminar and workshop a few days ago at Aalborg University in Denmark. My talk, “The Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0: How Web 2.0 Platforms Act as Infrastructures of Dataveillance” can be downloaded here (PDF), and the slides from my presentation are here (large 7.1MB PDF). Two other excellent presentations were made:

Søren Mørk Petersen, a PhD student at IT University of Copenhagen, presented his research on moblogging and challenged us to break out of the typical Web 2.0 discourse that modulates between two poles: the alpha geek (where Web 2.0 prepresents democracy, liberation, freedom) vs. the alpha geist (where Web 2.0 brings narcissism, aflattening of culture & knowledge, a public-private breakdown).

And Mikkel Holm Sørensen (a recent PhD from IT University of Copenhagen) discussed the innovative work he’s doing at Actics Ltd, where the are trying to bring “action ethics” into the realm of “corporate social responsibility” by building online tools for companies to measure, manage and act on their corporate values. An example is [link removed], where a profile can be created for a company to list their purported values and then let employees and customers rate how they are performing – kinda like MySpace for corporate values. Cool stuff.

It was a great seminar, and I enjoyed learning about the kind of work being done in Denmark surrounding Web 2.0 specifically, and the ethical implications of technology generally. Congrats to Anders Albrechtslund & Thomas Ryberg for an excellent event.