Socialising the machines

I’m saving these two CfPs for my own reference but I suspect others might find them interesting:

Call for Papers

Envisioning Social Robotics: Current Challenges and New Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Special issue of Interaction Studies
Guest Editors: Glenda Hannibal & Astrid Weiss

Submission Deadline: November 1st, 2018

We find in social robotics many so-called “wicked problems” – problems that are extremely complex and resist complete definition and resolution. To work out these problems, it is necessary to critically discuss the underpinning logic, or line of reasoning, that motivates social robotics and to develop new interdisciplinary methods to make social robots more “socially robust”. This special issue aims to address current challenges in social robotics by bringing methodological discussions to the foreground and therefore calls for submissions focusing on new methodologies in social robotics by reflecting on, developing, and demonstrating interdisciplinary research. Researchers with various disciplinary backgrounds and professions (e.g. engineering, physiotherapy, philosophy, law, biology, art, STS, psychology, medicine, HRI, sociology, computer science, nursing, industry, education, anthropology, HCI, management etc.) are strongly encouraged to contribute.

Successful submissions to the special issue should therefore focus on (a) defining current challenges from a methodological point of view and (b) presenting in response different models, approaches or methods for interdisciplinary social robotics. If possible, c) they should also provide illustrations of implementation of the suggested model, approach or method with a critical discussion thereof. All articles will be peer-reviewed.

Authors should consider the interdisciplinary readership of INTERACTION STUDIES and prepare their manuscripts accordingly. Authors may either submit full papers or short research reports. See the journal’s homepage for guidelines on the suggested length and formatting of the manuscripts: https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/is/guidelines

Please submit the journal manuscript(s) via the online submission platform provided by Interaction Studies: https://www.editorialmanager.com/is/default.aspx

Remember to select the name of the special issue when submitting the manuscript(s).

For more information please contact Glenda Hannibal at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) at glenda.hannibal@tuwien.ac.at.

And the other one:

The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies
Preconference Workshop, #AoIR2018 Montréal, Canada
Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre, INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique)
Wednesday October 10th 2018

Machine learning (ML), deep neural networks, differentiable programming and related contemporary novelties in artificial intelligence (AI) are all leading to the development of an ambiguous yet efficient narrative promoting the dominance of a scientific field—as well as a ubiquitous business model. Indeed, AI is very much in full hype mode. For its advocates, it represents a ‘tsunami’ (Manning, 2015) or ‘revolution’ (Sejnowski, 2018)—terms indicative of a very performative and promotional, if not self-fulfilling, discourse. The question, then, is: how are the social sciences and humanities to dissect such a discourse and make sense of all its practical implications? So far, the literature on algorithms and algorithmic cultures has been keen to explore both their broad socio-economic, political and cultural repercussions, and the ways they relate to different disciplines, from sociology to communication and Internet studies. The crucial task ahead is understanding the specific ways by which the new challenges raised by ML and AI technologies affect this wider framework. This would imply not only closer collaboration among disciplines—including those of STS for instance—but also the development of new critical insights and perspectives. Thus a helpful and precise pre-conference workshop question could be: what is the best way to develop a fine-grained yet encompassing field under the name of Critical AI Studies? We propose to explore three regimes in which ML and 21st-century AI crystallize and come to justify their existence: (1) epistemology, (2) agency, and (3) governmentality—each of which generates new challenges as well as new directions for inquiries.

In terms of epistemology, it is important to recognize that ML and AI are situated forms of knowledge production, and thus worthy of empirical examination (Pinch and Bijker, 1987). At present, we only have internal accounts of the historical development of the machine learningfield, which increasingly reproduce a teleological story of its rise (Rosenblatt, 1958) and fall (Minsky and Papert 1968; Vapnik 1998) and rise (Hinton 2006), concluding with the diverse if as-yet unproven applications of deep learning. Especially problematic in this regard is our understanding of how these techniques are increasingly hybridized with large-scale training datasets, specialized graphics-processing hardware, and algorithmic calculus. The rationale behind contemporary ML finds its expression in a very specific laboratory culture (Forsythe 1993), with a specific ethos or model of “open science”. Models trained on the largest datasets of private corporations are thus made freely available, and subsequently détourned for the new AI’s semiotic environs of image, speech, and text—promising to make the epistemically recalcitrant landscapes of unruly and ‘unstructured’ data newly “manageable”.

As the knowledge-production techniques of ML and AI move further into the fabric of everyday life, it creates a particularly new form of agency. Unlike the static, rule-based systems critiqued in a previous generation by Dreyfus (1972), modern AI models pragmatically unfold as a temporal flow of decontextualized classifications. What then does agency mean for machine learners (Mackenzie, 2017)? Performance in this particular case relates to the power of inferring and predicting outcomes (Burell, 2016); new kinds of algorithmic control thus emerge at the junction of meaning-making and decision-making. The implications of this question are tangible, particularly as ML becomes more unsupervised and begins to impact on numerous aspects of daily life. Social media, for instance, are undergoing radical change, as insightful new actants come to populate the world: Echo translates your desires into Amazon purchases, and Facebook is now able to detect suicidal behaviours. In the general domain of work, too, these actants leave permanent traces—not only on repetitive tasks, but on the broader intellectual responsibility.

Last but not least, the final regime to explore in this preconference workshop is governmentality. The politics of ML and AI are still largely to be outlined, and the question of power for these techniques remains largely unexplored. Governmentality refers specifically to how a field is organised—by whom, for what purposes, and through which means and discourses (Foucault, 1991). As stated above, ML and AI are based on a model of open science and innovation, in which public actors—such as governments and universities—are deeply implicated (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000). One problem, however, is that while the algorithms themselves may be openly available, the datasets on which they rely for implementation are not—hence the massive advantages for private actors such as Google or Facebook who control the data, as well as the economic resources to attract the brightest students in the field. But there is more: this same open innovation model makes possible the manufacture of military AI with little regulatory oversight, as is the case for China, whose government is currently helping to fuel an AI arms race (Simonite 2017). What alternatives or counter-powers could be imagined in these circumstances? Could ethical considerations stand alone without a proper and fully developed critical approach to ML and AI? This workshop will try to address these pressing and interconnected issues.

We welcome all submissions which might profitably connect with one or more of these three categories of epistemology, agency, and governmentality; but we welcome other theoretically and/or empirically rich contributions.

Interested scholars should submit proposal abstracts, of approximately 250 words, by 11:59pm EDT on June 30th, 2018 to CriticalAI2018 [at] gmail [dot] com. Proposals may represent works in progress, short position papers, or more developed research. The format of the workshop will focus on paper presentations and keynotes, with additional opportunities for group discussion and reflection.

This preconference workshop will be held at the Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre of INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique). The Centre is located at 385 Sherbrooke St E, Montreal, QC, and is about a 20-minute train ride from the Centre Sheraton on the STM Orange Line (enter at the Bonaventure stop, exit at Sherbrooke), or about a 30-minute walk along Rue Sherbrooke.

For information on the AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers) conference, see https://aoir.org/aoir2018/ ; for other preconference workshops at AoIR 2018, see https://aoir.org/aoir2018/preconfwrkshop/.

Organizers: Jonathan Roberge (INRS), Michael Castelle (University of Warwick), and Thomas Crosbie (Royal Danish Defence College).

Defending the social at #undisciplining

Notes for the closing panel at Undisciplining

Today’s session has a twofold purpose. It’s intended as a celebration of the paper which was awarded The Sociological Review’s prize for outstanding scholarship last year. But it’s also a continuation of the opening session, extending the discussion while introducing some new elements. It can perform both these roles because this incisive and powerful paper, authored by Val Gillies, Ros Edwards and Nicola Horsley speaks with such force and insight to the themes animating this conference.

Unfortunately Ros can’t join us today due to illness but we’re pleased to welcome Val and Nicola for a discussion about this work. The format for today is a fireside chat, a structure common in technology conferences which may or not may not work in an academic setting – like everything else here it’s an experiment. I’ll have a conversation with Val and Nicola about this work, as well as the larger project of which it is part. Then our editor Marie-Andrée Jacob and trustee Roger Burrows offer some reflections before we open out the discussion to include the audience, in as natural a way as is possible within such a large and imposing room.

The prize winning paper is Brave new brains: sociology, family and the politics of knowledge. It explores how the impulse towards dialogue and collaboration with the life sciences might inadvertently buttress a contraction of social horizons, as theoretical and methodological trends flows downstream through the mediation of social policy and social intervention. I was an immediate enthusiast for this paper in spite of the relative unfamiliarity of the subject matter to me. I was interested in the question of the biological as a recurrent issue within sociological thought, but had only encountered this at a certain level of historical detail or philosophical abstraction.

What I found so gripping about this elegantly written and argued paper was its capacity to retain these levels in the same frame of reference while expanding beyond them. It looks at how the cultural influence of popular biology can converge with the intellectual prestige of the life sciences to support a politics many in this room would object to. One which remains opaque if we reduce the issue of the biosocial to methodological or theoretical considerations. The conception of the social we intellectually endorse might nonetheless get chipped away at through the accumulating consequences of our practical decisions. What happens to the social when sociologists work across these frontiers? How do intellectual changes contribute to the reconfiguration of social realities?

Though their concern is with the biological as a frontier of sociological inquiry, I felt it nonetheless shed light on what we can also see with the digital. Here the challenge of transactional data invites and incites projects of disciplinary transformation. One which might also have social and political ramifications downstream, susceptible to sociological analysis yet too rarely subject to it. Much as the embrace of the biosocial risks leaving us with an eviscerated conception of social life, in a world of ‘big data’ people begin to be reduced to the behavioural traces which register through digital platforms.

Their might be other frontiers as well and this is why I felt the paper spoke so powerfully to the themes of the conference. What are the risks of undisciplining? How might pragmatic adaptations to the realities of work across boundaries leave us underselling ourselves or failing to value our own intellectual contribution? Can we retain an honesty about the political economy we work within, recognising how the incentives we confront and the values we embrace both shape our intellectual trajectories? How do we remain aware of the downstream consequences of our work? How do we remain clear about the character of the social and the consequences of conflicting conceptions of it to be found at these frontiers? Do we need to defend the social?

Sociology as a discipline doesn’t have a monopoly on the sociological. But what happens when the disciplinary interests of sociology lead sociologists to take action which is detrimental to the sociological? What’s good for the discipline, in terms of funding and prestige, might not be good for the project of understanding social life. What does this mean for undisciplining and what resources can we find in sociological thought to negotiate these challenges?

These are just some of the issue I hope we’ll touch on in today’s fireside chat. But the place to begin is to talk to the authors about how this superb paper came about and to find out more about the broader project of which it is only one part.

These are the questions I’m planning to ask:

To begin with, could you tell us how this paper came about? How does it fit into the larger research project you’ve worked on?
How is the social now invoked within the life sciences? Is this an adequate conception of social life when considered from the perspective of sociology or anthropology?
You use the notion of ‘early years intervention’ to establish why we should be cautious about this embrace of the biosocial. What is this and what does it tell us?
The family has become a key site in which the biosocial and the political meet. How has this come about? What can we learn from it for understanding how the life sciences and sociology can interact?
You talk of the life sciences as being funnelled through a neoliberal politics of the social. Is there why is still such widespread sociological suspicion of the life sciences?

CfP Symposium Dis/Connection: Conflicts, Activism and Reciprocity Online and Beyond, Sept 27-28, Uppsala University, Sweden

This looks really interesting

Here comes the final reminder about the symposium organized by The Cultural Matters Group at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University on Sept. 27-28 this year.

The symposium is called Dis / Connection: Conflicts, Activism and Reciprocity Online and Beyond and we look forward to receiving your papers!

Deadline for submissions is next week- June 18, 2018.

The symposium focuses on a fundamental aspect of social relationships, namely the idea of connection. We invite abstract submissions on the possibilities of connectivity, but also the problems and promises of the act of disconnection. Digital networks embedded in everyday lives have transformed virtually every aspect of social life – from intimate relations with family and friends to the collective acts of digital activism. Digital relations and connections are our starting point for a broader discussion of notions of connectivity and how they are developing, failing, or simply being reproduced. Therefore, we also focus on the idea of disconnection as a voluntary act to take control over one’s use of digital technologies, as an act of resistance and of saying no to the opaque structures of power and control in the networked society. The goal is to further the discussion on the gains, costs and possibilities of ethical life in the culture of hyperconnectivity. The symposium also aims to address destructive functions of connected living, such as surveillance, trolls, selfies, fake news, fake news accusations, sexual harassment, click baiting, commercialism, terrorism, viruses, spam, and the colonization of private life. In other words, we are interested in how connectivity and disconnectivity can give rise to and facilitate social inclusion and democratic processes, as well as exclusion, isolation and conflict.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Annette Markham (Aarhus University and Loyola University)

Adam Fish (Lancaster University).

Artist Mako Ishizuka will put her thoughts on the themes of the symposium into a mind-map on site, in dialogue with the symposium participants.

For more information please see:

http://soc.uu.se/forskning/forskargrupper/cultural-matters-group/dis-connection-symposium-/

Papers could address but are not limited to the following themes:

* What is ‘connectivity’ and how can we analyze it?
* Sexism, peer pressure and online harassment
* Digital activism / hacktivism
* Bad connection – communication networks gone awry
* The digital underclass – outsourced journalists, click farm and troll factory workers, and networking refugees
* “Someone is very wrong on the internet” – risk, edgework, and the rise of the internet as a polarized political space
* Digital afterlives and post-humanism
* Digital intimacies
* Online radicalization and extremism
* Epistemic enclosures (so called “Google Bubbles”) and the future of representative democracy
* The colonization of attention and attention economy
* The self promotion video as a technique of the self
* 1337 h4x0rz
* Politicians’ tweets, dick picks, inappropriate tagging and other downsides of being connected
* Analog relationships offline – embodied relationships between humans (and other animals) as a way to opt out of the digital
* Voluntary disconnection

Abstract submission and fees: The symposium will be free of charge, including coffee and a dinner in the evening of the 27thSeptember. The number of participants is limited.

Please submit your abstract to disconnection@soc.uu.se<mailto:disconnection@soc.uu.se> together with your name, affiliation and contact details. Use the same address for queries, and if you want to attend the conference without presenting a paper. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words. You will be notified concerning your participation in the beginning of July.

Deadline for submissions is June 18, 2018.

We’ re looking forward to receiving your papers!

On behalf of the Cultural Matters Group,

/Magdalena

Digital social science as a meta-field

For the last few years, I’ve taken to talking about digital social science. I mean this partly as a short-hand to refer to a whole range of (sub)disciplines and (sub)fields which have emerged in response to the challenge of ‘the digital’: data science, computational social science, web science, internet studies, digital sociology, digital anthropology, digital geography, data studies, software studies, platform studies, algorithm studies. But I also mean it as an umbrella term to refer to where this field formation could lead. I’ve found this a difficult topic to explore and the most developed statement I’ve managed is this short talk at an event last year:

I was immensely excited to read this post by Jeff Pooley, as it pursues an overlapping line of thought and does so with a great deal more clarity than I’ve thus far managed:

There’s a new academic meta-field, centered on digital life, that doesn’t look anything like a traditional discipline. The field is more like an estuary, fed by a number of existing disciplines—library and information science, law, sociology, science and technology studies, and communication. It’s an interdisciplinary mashup of fields whose domains (“media”, “information,” “technology”) have merged.

There’s nothing surprising about the intellectual momentum: rapid social change always calls attention to itself. Ambitious scholars mix with curious benefactors, writers trade alarmist and upbeat takes, and initiatives get launched. The modern social sciences, in the U.S. at least, emerged as a sense-making response to late 19th-century social churn. A society on the move is always throwing its novelty into relief; yesterday’s order makes today feel weird. So we would expect the last two decades of unending digital upheavel to generate an academic echo.

What makes the new, nameless formation interesting is its place in the university: the new field is seeded by institutes that—crucially—exist outside the established department system. It is a resolutely cross-disciplinary field, whose brick-and-mortar centers, like Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, are designed for idea exchange. The academics who populate the field, they reside in established departments and schools; it’s when they have thinking to share that they travel to Cambridge or to one of the other institutes.

So what’s formed over the last two decades is an extra-departmental crossroads. Lightly staffed centers, with few standing faculty, welcome a rotating cast of visiting speakers and affiliated fellows. Sharply designed, public-facing reports, perhaps open source tools and a podcast series—these are the centers’ main outputs.

The new digital-studies institutes have flourished at elite universities—like Harvard and Oxford—that could never really stomach the idea of training journalists or librarians. Communication research and library science were sneered at for their vocational grubbiness. Berkman and the Oxford Internet Institute are, in that sense, an institutional end-run around the student-supported disciplines that employ the bulk of their visitors and fellows.

http://culturedigitally.org/2018/03/the-post-program-era-the-rise-of-internet-society-centers-and-a-new-interdiscipline/

He offers a careful account of how this meta-field has emerged, as well as the challenges it faces as the conditions which gave rise to it themselves undergo change. There’s more to the digital social sciences than the institutional spaces he describes but this thoughtful and insightful post has helped bring clarity to issues that were still frustratingly unclear in my mind despite having thoughts about them for so long.

Xerox PARC and the challenge of building a community of inquiry

In TroubleMakers, Leslie Berlin offers a gripping account of the formation of Xerox PARC. This famous lab was responsible for a dizzying array of innovations, listed on Wikipedia as including “laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI) and desktop paradigm, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, electronic paper, amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications, and advancing very-large-scale integration (VLSI) for semiconductors.” It raises the obvious question of how the features of the organisation facilitated innovation which such regularity and it seems there was much in its planning from which contemporary universities could learn a lot. From pg 92:

Goldman proposed that Xerox locate the research center in a university town with an “intellectual night life” that would attract and benefit researchers. Within the center, he envisioned three laboratories to target basic sciences, systems science, and computer science. He also had a few specific ideas for future products that might emerge from the labs—“ a machine which is half xerographic printer and half computing machine,” for example. But the essence of his plan could be distilled to seven words: hire great researchers and leave them alone. He told Xerox’s top management to expect nothing useful from PARC for at least five years.

PARC relied on its relationship to the university, offering the virtues of an academic life without the vices traditionally associated with it. As she goes on to write on pg 97,

PARC also offered high salaries and excellent resources. PARC researchers could easily interact with others at SRI and Stanford, particularly the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). They could attend or give talks on campus, or meet with people visiting one of the other institutions. Several of the researchers from Taylor’s lab taught classes at Stanford. A job at PARC offered the intellectual stimulation of an academic career without teaching or publication demands.

Berlin paints a rich picture of a profoundly collegial environment, orientated towards enabling the creativity of the researchers and removing barriers upon its exercise through a process of community-building amongst people who nonetheless tended to be ardent individualists. From pg 97:

There was only one inviolable administrative requirement in Taylor’s lab. Once each week, everyone had to be in the beanbag room for a meeting. Taylor did not care when his researchers got to work or what they wore while there. It did not matter when they went to lunch or whether they shaved. But he wanted them in the beanbag room every Tuesday—and he expected them to stay for hours. The meetings served as the intellectual pulse of the lab and a way for him to keep the team moving in the same direction. The gatherings also reveal the inner workings of what both Thacker and Lampson have described as Taylor’s “magical” leadership. Taylor opened the sessions with administrative issues such as available billets and announcements of upcoming visitors. He then moved on to solicit project reports and ask for social announcements. Many members of the group, young and single, biked together in the hills or grabbed lunch at the Alpine Inn (fondly called “Zotts”) in the rural town of Portola Valley, a few miles from PARC. Researchers shared long weekend hikes among the coastal trees in the misty coolness above the valley. They barbecued at one another’s houses and worked on one another’s basement workshop projects. Taylor, a competitive tennis player, enjoyed challenging the best players at PARC to hard-core, sweat-streaming matches on the court behind his neighbor’s home. Afterward, the players would adjourn to Taylor’s house. “The Dr Pepper was cold, the doors were open, a breeze was blowing through, and everyone was always welcome to come in,” recalls Bob Metcalfe. 27

This required a great deal of creative management, some of which could be more accurately described as indulgence. But it served a purpose and created an environment in which scientists experience themselves as working autonomously towards collectively-derived ends, freed from the institutional pressures they would otherwise subject to because of Taylor’s careful and forceful mediation of the wider corporate environment within which PARC was embedded. From pg 98:

Taylor listened and took careful notes. He knew that truly creative computer scientists tend to be opinionated individualists. He catered to that tendency. When the group was preparing to move to a new building, he polled every researcher to determine the ideal phone system. All twenty researchers wanted Touch-Tone phones rather than the old-fashioned rotary dial, but beyond that, there was little consistency. One did not want any secretarial backup, but nine wanted the so-called Alan Kay switch that transferred incoming calls immediately to an attendant without interrupting the intended recipient. Five shunned the message waiting light, while seven wanted an intercom line. 28 Customized phones may seem trivial, but they are an example of a feeling that Taylor created at PARC—the sense that he was working for the researchers, rather than the other way around. Every week, once the social and administrative housekeeping were out of the way, Taylor brought the group to the heart of the meeting. “A time for half-baked ideas,” he called the sessions. A researcher would present work in front of a blackboard and set all the rules of engagement. Could he be interrupted with questions? V Were people allowed to interject at all? Would he talk for an hour and invite discussion for two more? Or would he toss out only a few ideas before opening the floor? Taylor called the featured presenter the “dealer” because the speaker set the terms much as a dealer sets out the rules of a poker game. Soon enough, the meetings themselves came to be called Dealers.

CfP: Workshop “We are on a mission”. Exploring the role of future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology, Berlin, 27 April 2018

Call for Abstracts

Deadline: 02.03.2018

Workshop

Friday, 27 April 2018

Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society

Französische Straße 9,

10117 Berlin, Germany

Keynote: Sally Wyatt (Maastricht University)

“We are on a mission to build a more open, accessible, and fair financial future, one piece of software at a time” promises the software platform Blockchain. “Imagine if everyone could get around easily and safely, without tired, drunk or distracted driving” envisions the self-driving car company Waymo(a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.). “The Regulation is an essential step to strengthen citizens’ fundamental rights in the digital age and facilitate business by simplifying rules for companies in the Digital Single Market” claims the European Commissionwith regard to the General Data Protection Regulation.

These examples show how imaginaries of future societies are enacted to promote digital innovations or legitimate certain modes of internet governance. They illustrate how software providers, tech companies and legislators dig into the rich pool of cultural norms, visions and values to support (or question) digital tools, rules and regulations. Future prospects seem to be central for making decisions in the present.

What role do future imaginaries perform in the making and governing of present digital technology? How are they mobilised to push or oppose digital innovations such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, blockchain technology or open source/open data projects? How are prospective imaginaries shaped in policy discourses and governance practices regarding networked technology and global data flows? What significance do European specificities have in global technology imaginations? Can different mechanisms be identified in mainstream discourses and counter-narratives? What happens if future scenarios are contested and digital promises become contradictory?

Themes of the Workshop

These are central questions to be discussed in our workshop. We welcome theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions that help us understand how the future is mobilized to make and govern digital technology in the present.

The workshop is organized around three central themes:

Theories and concepts to analytically grasp future visions and their
roles in the making and governance of digital technology

Methods and tools to analyze the nexus between future imaginations
and their functions in and impact on policy-making and technology
development

Empirical research and case studies on future imaginaries and their
roles in the making and governing of present digital technology

Submission

We welcome theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions from various disciplines that speak to the themes of the workshop. Please send an english language 300–500 word abstract including titlethat describes your contribution to the workshop. We encourage you to submit work-in-progress.

Abstracts are submitted via e-mail to astrid.mager@oeaw.ac.at <mailto:astrid.mager@oeaw.ac.at>before 2 March 2018. We will send out notifications on 13 March 2018.

Organisers

Astrid Mager

Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA), Austrian Academy of Sciences

astrid.mager@oeaw.ac.at <mailto:astrid.mager@oeaw.ac.at>

Christian Katzenbach

Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society

katzenbach@hiig.de <mailto:katzenbach@hiig.de>

Social listening and reclaiming the future

Emerging technologies, academic celebrities and the social organisation of disciplines

In his contribution to the Centre for Social Ontology’s workshop on human enhancement, Doug Porpora presented his initial results from an analysis of the emerging literature on human enhancement. He observed that this literature is scattered throughout many journals across disciplines, rather than featuring in the central journals of any one discipline. This left me wondering whether this is uniformly true of emerging technologies, reflecting something important about this category and the difficulty which our our existing organisation of scholarly inquiry has in coping with it. If a new technology has significant emerging implications, it will often fit poorly within our existing structures of inquiry which in turn has conditions how it plays out in relation to (partial or absent) specialist knowledge

For any given emerging technology, it would be interesting to examine who is cited across this scattered literature. My hunch is we will see a number of academic celebrities (people such as Bruno Latour or Donna Haraway) whose work has been picked up at the peripheries of many different disciplines. This tendency further adds to their visibility, rendering it more likely they will be picked up by others working at emerging frontiers. Looking at this in a systematic would involve identifying and analysing the commonalities and differences in the way such thinkers are drawn upon. Their work plays a crucial role in how the gap between concerned disciplines develops, either facilitating mutual exchange or furthering the fragmentation. However my suspicion is that this represents another vector through which the (dis)organisation of the contemporary academy undermines our capacity to identify, understand and steer the social life of emerging technologies.

Towards a sociological curatorial journalism

In Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci discusses the emergence of curatorial journalism and contrasts its function with that of traditional journalism. From pg 41:

Traditional journalism tries to solve a problem of scarcity: lack of cameras at an event. Social media curatorial journalism tries to solve a problem of abundance: telling false or fake reports from real ones and composing a narrative from a seemingly chaotic splash-drip-splash supply of news.

This is something which has often been undertaken by citizens, rather than professional journalists, lacking a commitment to established ways of performing journalism which emerged within a different information environment. Could this also be a model for public engagement by sociologists? We can already see many sociologists performing this function, maintaining Twitter feeds and blogs which select from media sources and filter them through the prism of a research agenda and expertise which has been accumulated over many years.

It occurs to me that “composing a narrative” out of the informational disarray which predominates on social media is a task which sociologists could be well suited for, particularly in terms of complex and peripheral issues which are framed in isolation within the media. It would be interesting to know how sociologists who already perform this role online understand their own activity. Are there differences in how this is theorised by practioners? Does this have implications for practice? Is this a new frontier of public sociology or merely a digital reiteration of the older traditional public intellectual?

Agnotology, Science and Public Engagement

One of the clear themes which emerged for me when reading Merchants of Doubt, a detailed exploration of corporate propaganda by historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, concerns the politics of public engagement. What might in other circumstances seem like anodyne issues confined to the university, who talks about science in public and the status attached to this activity, become urgent questions of societal importance when seen in terms of the history of doubt merchandising. As they write on pg 263:

The scientific societies have tried to address this by developing formal statements on climate change that reflect the collective wisdom of their members, but these statements tend to be dry at best, and often nearly impossible for a normal person to decipher. Who among us has read the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, much less the thousands of pages of actual reports? Indeed, who on the planet has read all this stuff? What average citizen knows that the American Meteorological Society even exists, much less knows to visit its home page to look for its climate-change statement? 92 Clearly, it’s ridiculous to imagine that anyone would, so someone has to summarize and communicate it. Then another difficulty arises. Scientists are finely honed specialists trained to create new knowledge, but they have little training in how to communicate to broad audiences, even less in how to defend scientific work against determined and well-financed contrarians. They often have little talent or taste for it, either. Until recently, most scientists have not been particularly anxious to take the time to communicate broadly. They consider their “real” work to be the production of knowledge, not its dissemination, and they often view these two activities as mutually exclusive. Some even sneer at colleagues who communicate to broader audiences, dismissing them as “popularizers.”

If we talk of ’embedding a culture of public engagement’, it can easily feel like a trojan horse for the reconfiguration of academic labour: the centrality of scholarship giving way to viral self-marketing, as universities move ever further away from their traditional mission. I have a lot of time for this critique but I think it misses something important, mistaking contingent features of ‘public engagement’ as it has emerged within a particular context for intrinsic features of any call for more activity like this.

For many years, I’ve been driven by a sense of an explicitly political public engagement, though it’s hard to articulate this amidst the conceptual detritus of the impact agenda and the sterile conceptual frameworks of so much of the orthodox literature on public engagement. There is a transformation in academic labour underway which we need to resist but this shouldn’t preclude a turning outwards because the capacity of the natural and social sciences to influence post-democratic social life is declining by the day. To the extent we can recognise their current organisation as hindering our attempts to reverse this trend, we confront an exciting challenge to articulate a vision of a ‘culture of engagement’ which is driven by ‘bottom-up’ social concern rather than ‘top-down’ imperatives of university management.

How can the social sciences keep up with socio-technical change?

At a recent symposium I saw Ben Williamson give an excellent lecture about the rapidly developing field of educational data science and how it is reshaping educational practice. Some of the material is summarised here for those interested. It was a really broad overview of these developments and the theoretical challenges we face in trying to make sense of them. However what his lecture left me pondering most was the practical challenge of keeping track of these developments. There is so much happening, at such a rapid pace, it becomes hard to see how the critical social sciences can keep up with these developments.

Someone like Ben is doing it successfully within one field but this demands specialisation in a way that sits in tension with theorisation and contextualisation. To put it bluntly: how does collaboration happen when most of your colleagues know much less about these developments than you do? How do you engage with important philosophical, ethical and political questions posed by these developments when you have to spend at least half an hour describing to an audience what is actually happening? How do you have conversations with those working in comparable fields, drawing out connections and identifying similarities and differences between what you are studying?

My point is not that it is impossible. Far from it. Or even that it is new, as it’s clearly a particular manifestation of the broader epistemic challenge of specialisation. Only that it is hard. Furthermore, it is this difficulty which compounds the specialisation dynamic because the people you inevitably find yourself working with face the same practical challenge in relation to the broader disciplinary community, increasing your epistemic reliance upon one another to develop your research in a collaborative way.

One obvious impediment to addressing this problem is the journal system. If it takes six months to write a journal article, another year to get it published and another two years before responses to what you’re written begin to appear (if indeed they ever do) then subsequent developments might well have rendered what you’ve written partially redundant. Factor in the bias towards length within journals that publish critical social science, as well as the low status accorded to descriptive or review pieces, to discover a publication infrastructure that systematically undermines our capacity to cope with the pace of socio-technical change. The fact it’s one most, if not all, find themselves bound into through the logic of career development entrenches the problem only further.

It won’t surprise anyone that I think research blogging can be a partial solution to this problem. It can accelerate scholarly dialogue in a way that mitigates, without overcoming, the decelerative effects of the journal system. So too could more attention to information-searching and information-storage practices within the critical social sciences. But perhaps we need to think more broadly than this. My developing conviction is that we need to create systems for networked horizon scanning in a way that complement, rather than seek to replace, the existing journal system:

Horizon scanning is a technique for detecting early signs of potentially important developments through a systematic examination of potential threats and opportunities, with emphasis on new technology and its effects on the issue at hand. The method calls for determining what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes. It explores novel and unexpected issues as well as persistent problems and trends, including matters at the margins of current thinking that challenge past assumptions.

Horizon scanning is often based on desk research, helping to develop the big picture behind the issues to be examined. Desk research involves a wide variety of sources, such as the Internet, government ministries and agencies, non-governmental organisations, international organisations and companies, research communities, and on-line and off-line databases and journals. Horizon scanning can also be undertaken by small groups of experts who are at the forefront in the area of concern: They share their perspectives and knowledge with each other so as to ‘scan’ how new phenomena might influence the future.

A solid ‘scan of the horizon’ can provide the background to develop strategies for anticipating future developments and thereby gain lead time. It can also be a way to assess trends to feed into a scenario development process.

https://www.oecd.org/site/schoolingfortomorrowknowledgebase/futuresthinking/overviewofmethodologies.htm

It’s important to recognise that these changes aren’t simply a matter of technical developments. There are a vast array of actors with a vested interest in pursuing these developments, encompassing policy makers, think tanks, foundations, entrepreneurs, data scientists and corporations. They proceed through a dizzying array of projects, intervening in every facet of each sector of social life. Such actors enjoy an obvious epistemic priority over those who seek to (critically) study them, inhabiting a rich web of assumptions, meanings and relations which those from the outside must come to inhabit while retaining distance. They also enjoy a temporal privilege, working in collectives towards these ends, creating a challenge for those who seek to track and analyse their endeavors either individually or within small teams, often while juggling a whole array of other demands.

The challenges we face in researching such developments are continuing to grow while we remain locked into individualising and decelerative modes of working that are wholly inadequate to them.

Techno-Galactic Software Observatory

T H E T E C H N O – G A L A C T I C S O F T W A R E O B S E R V A T O R Y

Worksession @ WTC25, Brussels + NAM-IP, Namur
Call for Participation / Deadline: 23 April

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From 7 until 12 June, the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory will explore practices of proximate critique with and of software. This worksession has been called an ’Observatory’ because we are interested in different ways to look at software, and at the implications of how it is currently probed and scrutinized as part of its production. Techno-galactic because we want to extend the observation to include different scales of computation, of software communities and their political economies.

With the rise of online services, software use has been increasingly knitted into production, while suggesting that these roles constitute separate realms. This has an effect on the way software is used and produced, and radically alters its operative role in society. The shifts ripple across galaxies, through social structures, working conditions and personal relations, resulting in a profusion of seamless apparatuses that optimize and monetize individual and collective flows of information. The diffusion of software services affects the personal, in the form of intensified identity shaping and self-management. It also affects the public, as more and more libraries, universities and public infrastructures rely on “solutions” provided by private companies.

Given how fast these changes resonate and reproduce, there is a growing urgency to engage in a critique of software that goes beyond taking a distance, and that deals with the fact that we are inevitably already entangled. How can we interact, intervene, respond and think with software? What approaches can allow us to recognize the agency of different actors, their ways of functioning and their politics? What methods of observation enable critical inquiry and affirmative discord?

Working with theories of software and computation developed in academia and elsewhere, our priority is to ground the Observatory in hands-on exercises and experiments that might have an effect on how software is done. At the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory we will explore methods developed in the context of software production, hacker culture, software studies, computer science research, Free Software communities, privacy activism, and artistic practice to experiment with ways to stay with the trouble of software.

During three sessions of two days, we will be collectively inspecting the space-time of computation and probing the universe of hardware-software separations. We will try out various perspectives and methods to look at the larger picture of software as a concept, as a practice, and as a set of paradigms.

Worksessions are intensive transdisciplinary moments, organised twice a year by Constant. We aim to provide conditions for participants with different experiences and capabilities to temporarily link their practice and to develop ideas, prototypes and research projects together. We primarily use Free, Libre and Open Source software and material that is available under Open Licenses.

This worksession calls for software-curious people of all kinds. Constant has invited 9 participants from different disciplines and backgrounds to prepare the subject. To ask questions about software from different types of engagement will require a heterogeneous group of participants with different levels of expertise, skill and background so we are looking for an additional 16 participants to join. You can apply for one or more blocks of minimum two days [see programme below], depending on your interest and availability.

P R A C T I C A L I N F O

The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory takes place from Wednesday June 7 until Monday June 12 in Brussels and Namur.

Participation is free and Constant provides lunch and hosting for all participants. If you would like to participate (or have questions), please send an e-mail to Martino, Seda and Femke at observatory@constantvzw.org <mailto:observatory@constantvzw.org> motivating your interest before 23 April. We will answer by May 1 latest.

The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory continues a series of encounters, research and situations such as:

– Testing the testbed (2017) http://www.constantvzw.org/site/Testing-the-testbed,2739.html <http://www.constantvzw.org/site/Testing-the-testbed,2739.html>
– Clouds are not an option (2017) http://constantvzw.org/site/The-Clouds-are-Not-an-Option.html <http://constantvzw.org/site/The-Clouds-are-Not-an-Option.html>
– Machine Research (2016) https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/ <https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/>
– Software as a critique (2016) https://wiki.laglab.org/Software_as_a_Critique <https://wiki.laglab.org/Software_as_a_Critique>
– The Libre Graphics Research Unit (2011-2013) http://lgru.net/ <http://lgru.net/>

P R O G R A M M E

Wednesday 7 + Thursday 8 June

The first two days of The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory will be developed in collaboration with the NAM-IP in Namur and will take place in the surrounding of their collection of historical ’numerical artefacts’. Viewing software in this long-term context offers the occasion to reflect on the conditions of its appearance, and allows us to take on current-day questions from a genealogical perspective. What is software? How did it appear as a concept, in what industrial and governmental circumstances? What happens to the material conditions of its production (minerals, factory labor, hardware) when it evaporates into a cloud?

Friday 9 + Saturday 10 June

The second two days will focus on the space-time dimension of IT development. The way computer programs and operating systems are manufactured changed tremendously through time, so its production times and places changed too. From military labs via the mega-corporation cubicles to the open-space freelancer utopia, what ruptures and continuities can be traced? From time-sharing to user-space partitions and containerization, what separations were and are at work? Where and when is software made today?

Sunday 11 + Monday 12 June

The last two days at the Techno-galactic software observatory will be dedicated to observation and its consequences. The development of software encompasses a series of practices whose evocative names are increasingly familiar: feedback, report, probe, audit, inspect, scan, diagnose, explore … What are the systems of knowledge and power within which these activities take place, and what other types of observation are possible? As a practical environment for our investigations, we will together set up a walk-in clinic in the basement of the World Trade Center, where users and developers can arrive on Monday with software-questions of all kinds.

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Public engagement, social media and university boundaries

In her wonderful Lower Ed, Tressie Cottom describes how her public profile led to her being in contact with someone who was enormously relevant to her ongoing research. From pg 103:

Aaron found me through my public writing and blogging and social media and decided that speaking to me might be interesting. He emailed me and kept emailing me over the course of a year. Eventually, I was giving a lecture in the same state where he lived, and he invited me to have coffee.

One of the most fascinating conversations I ever had while doing asexuality research was with a woman in her 80s who found out about me through an interview in a newspaper. She was unwillingly to be formally interviewed but an extensive phone conversation was enormously useful to my attempts to understand the changing social conditions in which being asexual is rendered problematic or otherwise. In both cases, we can see visibility facilitating people coming to us, creating opportunities if we are open to them but also complicating habitual expectations about how we manage relationships with groups external to the academy.

I’d love to hear other people’s experiences of such encounters. It strikes me that this is an advantage to public engagement which is rarely recognised. I suspect it’s a relatively common experience amongst people who engage in a lot of this activity and it’s one we should recognise and explore in a systematic way. The focus of a lot of what I’m doing over the next few months will be university boundaries and how they’re being changed by new technology. The role of public engagement in narrowing the gap between researchers and the researched is an important aspect of this. But there’s a theoretical complexity to how we conceptualise these boundaries which engaging with the work of Jana Bacevic has left me newly aware of.

Recognising such a benefit is interesting if we frame public engagement in terms of academic labour. It’s often cast as another thing to do, adding additional items to already over long to do lists. This implicitly conceives of it as something extrinsic to the research process, as if everything else about the professional practice of those involved remains fixed, only to be supplemented by these additional activities. But in reality public engagement is something relational, both in terms of the working patterns of the engaged and their relationship to the wider community of their research and ‘wider society’. It changes both in a way which complicates the initial comparison one made in which a working life without public engagement is compared to one which includes such activity.

My discussion so far has been about public engagement in general rather than social media in particular. However the opportunities and problems of the former are increasingly being forced as an issue by the widespread adoption of the latter. The boundary between the researcher and wider society is being changed by the uptake of new communications technology, making it more likely that the people we research and write about will talk back to us about what we say. Embracing this relationality can bring great benefits to the research process, with the the potential for important new connections being just one example of this. But there are liable to problems created if we ignore it. My suggestion is that what at present seem like outliers (people who are extremely visible through public engagement activity) represent the future normal, one which researchers will urgently need to adapt themselves too.

The centralisation of the web and the constraints on academic speech

A great essay by Ethan Zuckerman, which raises the crucial question of infrastructural dependency within the digital university. We can overcome this partly through cultural change (e.g. the importance of a domain of one’s own and boycotting companies like academia.edu) but there are institutional factors limiting the potential reach of these strategies. To what extent is mandated engagement expected to proceed through these channels? How do procurement and provision decisions made at an institutional level lock scholars into these systems?

Early proponents of the power of digital publishing celebrated the ways in which the Internet, and in particular the world wide web, democratized both access to information and the ability to disseminate knowledge to wide audiences. News organizations might evade government controls of the press by publishing on servers outside their nations’ borders. Dissidents could organize in the digital public sphere, evading controls that prevented freedom of assembly in the physical world. Scholars could disseminate work in progress directly to the web either outside of the process of peer review or under the aegis of new types of online journals.

It’s possible this utopian vision reigned for at least the early years of the consumer web, when independent online publishing was common. It’s also arguable that this has always been a fantasy, and that chokepoints like the domain name system and large internet service providers have always had the power to control speech. But since 2010, publishing online has centralized on a few commercial platforms, notably Amazon Web Services (which provides hosting and backend for over a million different websites, including those for publishers like Netflix, Instagram, and GitHub ); Facebook, which hosts content produced by over 1.7 billion people; Google, whose YouTube service hosts a significant portion of the web’s video content; as well as smaller players like WordPress and Wikimedia.

These platforms have immense power over what speech is possible, and their decisions are opaque and not subject to external review. When Facebook decided to prohibit Nick Ut’s Pulitzer-winning photo of Kim Phúc running from a napalm attack, public shaming was the only option Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten found for appealing the decision. Publishing platforms face intense pressure from governments to block controversial content, from Israeli government pressure to remove critical content from Facebook to the “blockade” against Wikileaks that caused the leaks organization to lose web hosting, domain name services, and services to accept donations.¹Examples abound of Google’s power to discriminate through indexing of information, and the results merit close study.Far more subtle forms of content control happen every day, from organized campaigns to “flag” and demand removal of content a group of coordinated individuals find offensive,² from Buddhist Burmese flagging pro-Rohingya content to Palestinian and Israeli activists attempting to silence each other.

http://parameters.ssrc.org/2017/02/imagining-decentralized-publication-and-curation/

There are many ways to publish without these centralised systems but we remain dependent upon them for discovery. Unfortunately, as he puts it, “the ability to publish without the ability to be discovered is an empty promise” and “In a world of scarce attention, those who control curation and discovery systems control what we encounter and what we know.” This is bringing about a radical transformation of the knowledge system:

As we consider the transformations in the production, publication, and archiving of social research under digital conditions, it is essential that we understand that scholarly publishing and discovery, a space traditionally controlled by university presses and scholarly peers, is now centralizing around a small number of technically sophisticated commercial firms. The good news in this development is that we have the opportunity to make collective cause with those seeking to ensure online publishing and discovery systems are transparent, fair, auditable, and distributed. The bad news is that we find ourselves joining a profoundly uphill battle, where many of our goals are merely infeasible and others may be technically impossible.

http://parameters.ssrc.org/2017/02/imagining-decentralized-publication-and-curation/

The epistemic implications of platform proliferation and platform death

From The Curse of the Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 623:

The average lifespan of a website, according to the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle is 44 days—and again, much like the estimates about the amount of data we’re producing, there really aren’t any reliable measures here (it’s actually quite difficult to measure). That is, the average length of time from when a web page is created and when the URL is no longer accessible is about a month and a half. Research conducted by Google pegged the amount of time that certain malware-creating websites stay online is less than two hours, and certainly this short duration along with the vast number of sites spun up for these nefarious purposes skews any sort of “average.” Geocities lasted fifteen years; Myspace lasted about six before it was redesigned as an entertainment site; Posterous lasted five. But no matter the exact lifespan of a website, we know, in general, it’s pretty short. According to a 2013 study, half of the links cited in US Supreme Court decisions –and this is certainly the sort of thing we’d want to preserve and learn from for centuries to come –are already dead.

From loc 638:

With our move to digital information technologies, we are entrusting our knowledge and our memories—our data, our stories, our status updates, our photos, our history—to third-party platforms, to technologies companies that might not last until 2020 let alone preserve our data in perpetuity or ensure that it’s available and accessible to scholars of the future. We are depending—mostly unthinkingly, I fear—on these platforms to preserve and to not erase, but they are not obligated to do so. The Terms of Service decree that if your “memory” is found to be objectionable or salable, for example, they can deal with it as they deem fit.

From loc 608-623:

If you burn down a Library of Alexandria full of paper scrolls, you destroy knowledge. If you set fire to a bunch stone tablets, you further preserve the lettering. Archeologists have uncovered tablets that are thousands and thousands of years old. Meanwhile, I can no longer access the data I stored on floppy disks twenty years ago. My MacBook Air doesn’t read CD-ROMs, the media I used to store data less than a decade ago.

The meaning of scientific participation in an age of crowd work

I’m curious about whether those who would use Amazon Mechanical Turk as part of a research project are aware of this dynamic. From Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, loc 908:

One Turker, Rochelle LaPlante, also reports that some workers seek out academic surveys because they gain a sense of accomplishment from contributing to research. “There is both financial and emotional payment, and some workers seek out one type of payment over another. Some say: ‘It’s okay if this study only pays $ 1/ hour because I feel good about contributing to science,’” she notes.

CfPs: ‘Big Data from the South’/’Big Data desde el sur

Submit your abstract (English or Spanish) by March 1st.

[Español abajo]
Deadline for abstract: March 1st

Big Data from the South: From media to mediations, from datafication to data activism
Organizers: Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) & Emiliano Treré (Scuola Normale Superiore, Italia).

Critical scholarship has exposed how big data brings along new and opaque regimes of population management, control, and discrimination. Building on this scholarship, this pre-conference engages in a dialogue with traditions that critique the dominance of Western approaches to datafication that do not recognize the diversity of the Global South. Moving from datafication to data activism, this event will examine the diverse ways through which citizens and the organized civil society in the Global South engage in bottom-up data practices for social change as well as resistance to “dark” uses of big data that increase oppression and inequality.
Location: Cartagena, Colombia

Date and Time: July 15, 2017, 10am-6pm
http://cartagena2017.iamcr.org/big-data-from-the-south-from-media-to-mediations-from-datafication-to-data-activism/ <http://cartagena2017.iamcr.org/big-data-from-the-south-from-media-to-mediations-from-datafication-to-data-activism/>

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Big Data desde el sur: de los medios a las mediaciones, de la dataficación al activismo de datos
http://cartagena2017.iamcr.org/big-data-from-the-south-from-media-to-mediations-from-datafication-to-data-activism/?lang=es <http://cartagena2017.iamcr.org/big-data-from-the-south-from-media-to-mediations-from-datafication-to-data-activism/?lang=es>

Organizadores: Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Emiliano Treré (Scuola Normale Superiore, Italia).

Fecha y Hora: Julio 15, 2017 de 10am – 6pm

Descripción de la conferencia: La crítica académica ha hecho evidente cómo el big data implica nuevos y opacos regímenes de gestión demográfica, control y discriminación. Con base en estas elaboraciones, la pre-conferencia se involucra en un diálogo con las tradiciones críticas al dominio de las perspectivas occidentales sobre la dataficación, que no reconocen la diversidad del Sur Global. Trasladándose de la dataficación al activismo de datos, este evento examinará las maneras diversas en que los ciudadanos y la sociedad civil organizada en el Sur Global se involucran en prácticas de datos horizontales en pro del cambio social, así como en resistencias frente a usos “oscuros” de los big data que aumentan la opresión y la desigualdad.