Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Lecture at Parliaments of Arts December 13 2005
During Parliaments of Arts I witnessed a community struggling for its constitutional settings. Discussions and arguments on accountability, competences and membership as well as questioning the relations and/or dependency to the hegemony of the town’s public administration are significant for the ongoing debate. The mailing list of NetzNetz deals with these issues as well. Beside my interviews with several members of the community it was furthermore a main source of my analysis of this community. NetzNetz is about to receive the public funding for net-art and net-culture and will gain the responsibility to distribute this amount to artists.
It is too early to assess the outcome of the development and even too early to predict what NetzNetz will become, but it seems quite clear that NetzNetz is yet another grey zone between virtual community and real life citizenship, between the local space of the city of Vienna and the global space of the world wide infrastructure of the Internet. NetzNetz is also an example for the extended public sphere that is rather fragmented and diverse than a homogenous construct of mass media and concerned citizens as Habermas (Habermas, 1964) suggested.
In this lecture I'd like to discuss on a micro-level how discourse is organized in different communities. Moreover, I aim to suggest how NetzNetz could participate on a macro-level in the discourse on the political and social implications of technologies.
A discourse is more than just a debate on an issue, a discourse is a whole set of actors and networks. Being a young university teacher myself, I just started exploring the scientific discourse on media studies. There are several rules, do's and don'ts to keep in mind when participating in this discourse. The French anthropologist Bruno Latour analysed discourses in sciences in his famous book “Science in Action” (Latour, 1987). He recognised the strategies participants of these discourses are using to construct scientific facts.
The product of scientists is in general a paper for a journal or a conference, a book or a monography. Objectivity in science is gained by inter-subjectivity, by comprehending the participants’ input and by providing transparency in the research methods, the experiments and the construction of arguments. Publishing one paper does not make someone a scientist and does not construct a scientific fact. As Latour points out:
"A paper that does not have references is like a child without an escort walking at night in a big city it does not know: isolated, lost, anything may happen to it." (Latour, 1987, p. 33)
A paper always needs other papers to live on in the rapid developing output of scientific production. Scientific facts are constructed by comprehending the contribution of other participants and constructing validity by tight ties in argumentation, references, and the repeatability of experiments. Therefore, discourse in science could be described as an actor network, a set of alliances, actors, platforms and representation channels.
Size does matter in scientific discourse; a small scale community of a few participants won't establish a discourse, they will lack the workforce to build up the tight networks for production and representation as well as for questioning and verifying their output. They will lack the many eyes for a proper peer review and if they won't connect with other scientific communities and institutions to meet the established criteria, they will be nothing than acknowledged as being irrelevant.
Inside the networks of scientific discourse the production of scientists is valued by the participating community itself. For these assessments a set of criteria and values was shaped and modified in this community over a period of hundreds of years. These criteria can be summarized as:
The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us that the order of discourse is about power. The ruling participants in the discourse organise it by several principles and the power of different institutions. In his lecture “The order of discourse” Foucault (Foucault, 1982) recognises these principles as:
A lot of scientific work in humanities (e.g. gender studies, sociology and cultural studies) dealt with making these structures visible in order to question the construction of knowledge and how its entanglement with power. The unfolding of the relations of participants and objects provides a picture of the involvement and the complexity hidden in the social and political context of an object. Latour’s notion of a parliament of things (Latour, 1993 and Latour, 2005) is an attempt to present objects not as facts but as things. Presenting the thing means a representation of its heterogeneity, variety, dynamic, its ties and relations in their entire complexity and entanglement of human and non-human actors.
The issue of valuation is widely discussed on the NetzNetz mailing list and also an important debate on Parliaments of Arts. In order to emphasize my argument of building platforms for discourse and participation I want to discuss how valuation is handled on Slashdot.org and how this platform constructed a heterogeneous system of man-machine interaction to value postings. Slashdot is a website that displays and comments “News for nerds and stuff that matters”, as the self-description of the website states.The community of Slashdot is huge; several thousand participants comment articles and discuss with each other. A problem for this platform was the well known phenomenon of flaming and posting redundant messages. For a platform this issue is crucial, because if a forum is flooded, the users interested in serious debate and interaction will look for another platform fast. Slashdot developed a system that organises the debates and provides a system of grading the participant’s contributions.
The people behind Slashdot thought about a process of moderation and about how to rate a posting good or bad. They doubted that a small group of moderators would be able to handle the hundreds of postings added every day. Besides they wondered how to avoid moderators who would abuse their power in rating users up and down. The outcome was an amazing system of moderation and meta-moderation that differentiates Slashdot from being just another virtual community but becoming an example of an online public sphere (Poor, 2005).
By extending the amount of moderators, every user who is a regular visitor of Slashdot will be able to moderate. The only assumption is that the moderator is familiar with the issues of net-culture and the cultural codes established on Slashdot. The power of moderators is controlled by two aspects. Each moderator has only a limited influence on the postings because he can rate a posting up or down by only one of six points. In total every moderator may only rate five times before his turn of moderation will end. Every user can value the moderation by grading the moderators’ rating of a posting as underrated or overrated.
Next to the peer review other principles are adopted from the established organising principles of the scientific discourse such as taking the reputation of a user into account. If a user has built up a record of interesting, informative and inspiring postings the value of his postings will be per se higher than those of users whose record consists of flaming or redundant postings.
Of course there are several exclusion mechanisms on slashdot.org. One is definitely the language and the insider jokes that make it hard to interact in the communication on Slashdot, but that also contributes strongly to the identification process (see Poor, 2005 and O’Baoill, 2000).
Nevertheless Slashdot is famous for its agenda setting and its ability to bring up important issues to get represented in mainstream media and constituting a public debate or at least raising attention. When Sony decided to shut down the website Aibohack.com, because it was distributing modified software for the robot dog the attention raised by the community forced Sony to stop its legal action (Schaefer, 2004). In the same way Slashdot participated in the discussion on Sony's copy protection kit that harmed users' computers and their privacy.
To sum up, although Slashdot is a special interest platform with a tight community it is able to connect to other networks and platforms in the public sphere. This way Slashdot is participating in the discourse on technology and contributes with its collective intelligence in the debate on the political and social implications of technology and its regulation by authorities and companies.
Slashdot is one among countless examples for the dynamic culture unfolding on the internet. The established channels of cultural production are extended into the living rooms of users and are furthermore extended into a global multitude of participants who work successfully on building their own platforms, developing their own tools and shaping their own aesthetic codes and cultural values. Traditionally the Internet culture is acknowledged as anti-institutional, meritocratic, and critical against authorities and hierarchies. The famous sociologist Manuel Castells describes these aspects as inherent to the Internet culture that grew out of the discourse networks of computer sciences from the 1960s and 1970s (Castells, 2001). The meritocratic aspect of net-culture that was inherited by the universities where a great deal of the founding development work of the Internet culture took place and meritocracy is still a driving force of cultural production online, especially in software development. If you are good in what you do, the community values that with respect. Software design is another example how cultural production finds new spaces and new forms of collaboration. The labour of designing software often takes place in online communities whose members collaborate in flat hierarchies and use methods of production that are clearly different from established engineering methods (Rieder and Schaefer, 2006). In opposite to traditional software design the open source software design methods were described by Raymond as the Bazaar (Raymond, 1999). This Bazaar is not only a form of designing software it describes also a new space of collaboration, cultural production and therefore a space of creating meaning and values.
The communities that emerged on the Internet are not only innovative in technical aspects. Their innovation takes also place on a social level. Next to creating meaning, simply by interacting with each other and adding sense to their lives, enhancing their social network and learning from each other, they developed a new set of methods of how to produce cultural artefacts. In software production the methods of peer-review, of publishing early and inviting the community to help and to collaborate, to change and modify software led to the very successful work processes identified today as open source software. Besides these semi-professional work processes the online communities are able to help less skilled users in acquiring more skills. As the scholar Neil Selwyn points out, adopting the social and technical capital created within these communities will consequently lead to the claim for political and economical capital (Selwyn, 2002). For Selwyn the meaningful use of technology means to acquire social and technical skills that will in consequence lead to action, to the participation in the processes of public administration and the postulation to take part in the constitution of society. In the field of software development this postulation was best seen in the last year’s actions against the decision for software patents that avoided a restrictive patent law in Europe successfully.
In 1937 the German culture critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin asked in his famous lecture “Der Autor als Produzent” (The Author as Producer) artists to rethink their works under the aspect of their attitude (Benjamin, 2002). In the German text this attitude is called "die Tendenz”, and can be perceived as a mix out of political attitude and the reflection of technology used in the artist’s work. Benjamin postulates that the author has to reflect in his work the apparatus of production that is the entire network of the culture industry and the power. The author’s task is to use the technology in a way that will enable people to participate in the production process. He literally asks to turn consumers into producers and visitors into participants and to modify the apparatus of production for changing the status quo of the culture industry (Benjamin, 2002, p. 243).
In the field of software development that would mean to plead for open standards, to develop open source software and build up a common cultural resource that can be accessed and used by everyone. Benjamin’s political account is more than current in the situation today when corporate companies in alliance with public administrations and lobbies are defining the technology that will define tomorrow's culture. RFID chips, Trusted Computing, Digital Right Management (DRM) or the recent proposal of a law in France that will among other things prohibit the sending of unencrypted content online and that will prohibit software without DRM are challenging the global net-culture and its values. We, the entire society, are in desperate need of a society wide discourse on these issues.
A lot of these doubts concerning hierarchies and institutional structures were part of the discussions on NetzNetz during the workshops at Parliaments of Art.
But there is a lot more a loose network of actors, in our case the participants of NetzNetz, could be. Although a scientific community and Slashdot do not have much in common, there is one thing on which their discourses drive: the issue itself. In the case of Slashdot it is the discussion of contemporary development of technology in society and in the case of scientific communities it is the certain object of their discipline. Regarding NetzNetz this would be net-art and net-culture.
In my discussions with participants from NetzNetz I experienced a kind of exhaustion. They seemed tired of that work, tired of the discussions on how to dispose money to whom. But they did a great job actually. They established the starting point for a participatory culture. It is participatory in certain aspects. They will have the possibility
This will increase the visibility and the connections of NetzNetz. Participants from other disciplines can join the debate and engage in the discussion and the shaping of definitions, terminology, the creation of values etc.
The artists represented in NetzNetz can participate in the discourse on the political and social implications of technology and its construction simply by doing their job, producing art.
Similar to a paper without references, a community without connections and without interfaces is very poor, unstable, unproductive, and maybe even irrelevant. This event, the Parliaments of Art, is a starting point for building these necessary affiliations and connecting the artists in a real world space with participants from different fields of the discourse. And of course the Parliaments of Art are required to represent the thing, which is NetzNetz, its participants and their work, in its entire complexity and entanglement. The bureaucracy and the political pressure of the town of Vienna must be part of this cartography as well as the various critics of NetzNetz and those who are excluded from it.
But before this can happen, the artists need the possibility to do their work and start circulating it within their field of discourse. Consequently, the chance will open, to interact in discourse on technology and to participate in the shaping of this hybrid society that is as well located in cities like Vienna but participating in communities on the global connected networks, simultaneously.
Our society will need the reflection work of the artists for constituting the culture to come. We may not leave this up to the lobbies of corporate companies and the European Commission. In that aspect NetzNetz can also serve in establishing the civil society online. I can only wish the NetzNetz participants will have the courage to get over their constitutional struggles and arguments and will have the courage to go on in setting up a Viennese platform for net-art and net-culture. I ask you to have the courage and just take the money and work!
O’ Baoill, Andrew (2000), ‘Slashdot and the Public Sphere’, in: First Monday, 5(9). http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_9/baoill/
Benjamin, Walter (2002), 'Der Autor als Produzent’, in Benjamin, Walter: Medienästhetische Schriften, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002, S. 231-247.
Castells, Manuel (2001), ‘The Internet Galaxy’. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Foucault, Michel (1982), 'The discourse on language', in: Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, pp. 215-238.
Latour, Bruno (2005), ‘From Realpoltik to Dingpolitik. Or how to make things public’, in: Latour, Bruno; Weibel, Peter (eds.), Making Things Public, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno (1993). We have never been modern, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Poor, Nathaniel (2005), ‘Mechanisms of an online public sphere: The website Slashdot. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication’, 10(2), article 4. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/poor.html.
Raymond, Eric S. (1999), ‘The cathedral and the bazaar: Musings on Linux by an accidental
revolutionary’. Sebastopol: O'Reilly.
Schaefer, Mirko Tobias (2004), ‘How Users Improve Things, Provide Innovation and Change
Our Idea of Culture’, in Goriunova, Olga; Shulgin, Alexei (Eds.), Read_Me, Software Art and Cultures, Aarhus: Aarhus University, pp. 62-77. http://art.runme.org/1107805077-9249-0/schaefer.pdf
Rieder, Bernhard; Schaefer, Mirko Tobias (2006), ‚ Beyond Engineering. Software Design as
Bridge over the Culture / Technology Dichotomy’forthcoming, http://procspace.net/berno/files/design.pdf
Selwyn, Neil (2002), ‘Defining the ‘Digital Divide’: Developing a Theoretical Understanding of Inequalities in the Information Age’, Cardiff, http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/ict/definingdigitaldivide.pdf
Date December 2005 Category News
The city of Vienna is following a new approach in funding art. Artists in the field of netart will not apply for grants at a city’s department but dispose them among the community themselves. A software based voting system called Mana will be installed for delegating votes and credits within the netart community’s participants. NetzNetz, the platform of the Viennese netartists was founded in opposition to Public Netbase that was obtaining the majority of the city’s funding for new media art projects.
The start up of the new funding model is accompanied by the conference Parliaments of Art.
Read my contribution Making Sense of Discourse.