La séance du 15 février 2012 de mon séminaire EHESS Étudier les cultures du numérique : approches théoriques et empiriques (initialement consacrée à l’ouvrage Pour un humanisme numérique de Milad Doueihi qui hélas a eu un empêchement de dernière minute), sera assurée par moi-même (cliquer ici pour s’inscrire). J’aurai donc le plaisir de vous proposer quelques éléments de réflexion sur:

Small data vs. Big data : comment mener des expériences dans les médias sociaux

L’explosion récente des « Big data » (traitement automatique d’énormes bases de données natives du Web) a été saluée par les chercheurs en sciences humaines et sociales comme une véritable révolution. Néanmoins, certaines voix se lèvent pour dénoncer les limites épistémologiques, méthodologiques, et éthiques de cette approche. La méthode ethno-computationnelle développée par Tubaro & Casilli (2010) permet de dépasser ces limites en ayant recours à des petits jeux de données qualitatives (small data) utilisés pour calibrer des simulations multi-agents. Loin de produire des « prophéties », cette approches permet de mener des expériences in silico dans des situations d’information imparfaite et asymétrique. Deux études récentes (l’une relative aux effets de la censure des médias sociaux géolocalisés dans des situations de violence civile, l’autre sur la diversité culturelle sur Facebook) illustreront cette démarche.

Date : mercredi 15 février 2012
Horaire : 17h à 19h
Lieu : salle 587, EHESS, bât. Le France, 190-198 av de France 75013 Paris.

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Les textes autour desquels le séminaire s’articulera (téléchargeables en version .pdf) sont :

- danah boyd & Kate Crawford, (2011). Six Provocations for Big Data. SSRN eLibrary.

- Paola Tubaro & Antonio A. Casilli (2010). “An ethnographic seduction” : how qualitative research and agent-based models can benefit each other. Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, n. 106, pp. 59-74.

- Antonio A. Casilli & P. Tubaro (2011). Why Net Censorship in Times of Political Unrest Results in More Violent Uprisings : A Social Simulation Experiment on the UK Riots. SSRN eLibrary.

- Antonio A. Casilli & Paola Tubaro (2010). Légitimation intersubjective de la présence en ligne et formation de réseaux sociaux : Une approche ethno-computationnelle. II Journées d’études du RT 26 (Réseaux sociaux) de l’Association Française de Sociologie Les réseaux sociaux: quoi de neuf ?, 16-17 mars, Université de Toulouse II – Le Mirail.

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Prochaines dates :
- 21 mars 2012 – « Quels enjeux pour les Digital Humanities? » (Pierre Mounier, EHESS)
- 18 avril 2012 – « Etudier l’anorexie en réseau », Paola Tubaro (University of Greenwich, UK)
- 16 mai 2012 – « Politique des algorithmes », (Dominique Cardon, Orange Labs)

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« Le jour où l’écrivain découvre que son livre a été piraté et est désormais disponible en téléchargement illégal sur Mediafire, il est fier comme un écolier qui vient de gagner sa première vérole ».

Bon, je sais… ce n’est pas la phrase *exacte* que Charles Baudelaire avait consignée dans les pages de Mon coeur mis à nu (1887), mais elle décrit assez bien le mélange de sentiments qui m’anime en retrouvant la version piratée de mon ouvrage Les liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociablité ? tantôt sur un blog de critique littéraire (« je l’ai lu pour vous, retrouvez-le par ici »), tantôt sur un forum de gamers (« version pdf : achievement unlocked! ») tantôt sur le site même de l’Hadopi (on me l’avait signalé mais depuis la page a été supprimée…).

Mauvaise nouvelle pour mon éditeur. Mais sans aucun doute bonne nouvelle pour moi. En tant qu’auteur, je ne peux qu’être flatté par le fait que quelqu’un ait pris le temps de craquer les DRM de la version ebook ou de scanner (comme dans un cas remarquable, vu en ligne il y a quelques mois) les 336 pages de la version papier ! C’est du boulot, ça. Tout comme c’est du boulot le fait de le mettre en ligne, de l’héberger, de le partager avec d’autres lecteurs, d’écrire des billets ou des messages dans des listes de diffusion pour le faire savoir aux autres.

J’ai donc tendance à interpréter ces activités comme autant de signes d’appréciation. Quelqu’un a considéré les thèses présentées dans mon ouvrage assez méritoires pour prendre la peine de faire tout cela – et pour prendre aussi le risque que l’ayant droit porte plainte contre lui.

Rassurez-vous. L’ayant droit, ce n’est pas moi. Moi, je suis celui qui est intéressé à voir ses idées circuler. Et qui pour cela est content de se voir piraté tout comme il a été – je crois à juste titre – content de voir que son livre a été bien vendu, bien lu, bien présent dans les classements des meilleures ventes, et tout le baratin. En tant que défenseur d’un modèle d’industrie culturelle qui s’efforce de co-produire de la connaissance avec les lecteurs plutôt que de les poursuivre en justice, je considère le partage non-commercial de mon livre non pas comme un accident de parcours, mais comme une attestation de la pénétration culturelle de mes idées.

De la même manière que les recensions dans les revues savantes, les citations dans les colloques scientifiques, les papiers dans la presse ou les interviews dans les médias… Si aujourd’hui on m’encourage à inscrire tous ces résultats dans mon curriculum d’universitaire, pourquoi ne pourrais-je ajouter aussi « Livre piraté sur… » dans la rubrique valorisation de la recherche et rayonnement de l’activité scientifique ?

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I just bumped into the first known infographic about “computer user types” and wanted to share it with you. That, my friends, is one of the joys of studying computer culture from an archeological point of view.

Click to enlarge

The infographic is featured in Ted Nelson’s 1974 cult classic Computer Lib (South Bend, IN: published by the author). The book was actually a double feature, and it read both forwards (and in this case the title was Computer Lib: You can and must understand computers now) and backwards (as Dream Machines: New freedoms through computer screens—a minority report).

As a foretaste, what about a joke about AI? This one’s taken from page 12.

“ONE OF THE FEW GOOD LAYMEN’S COMPUTER JOKES
A very large artificial intelligence system has been built for the military to help in long range policy planning, financed by ARPA, with people from MIT, Stanford and so on. ‘The system is now ready to answer questions’, says the spokesman for the project.
A four-star general bit off the end of a cigar, looked whimsically at his comrades and said: ‘Ask the machine this: Will it be Peace or War?’
The clerk-typist translated this into the query language and typed it in. The machine replied: ‘Yes’.
“Yes _what_?”, bellowed the general.
The operator typed in the other query. Came the answer: ‘Yes SIR!’.”

Nerdy, right? But, like for other mimeographed publications from the 1970 computer underground, this book has everything, from cellular automata to cartoons, from practical jokes to ASCII erotica…

..from political activism to “computer dating”, from the very first “file Web” to cognitive and bodily augmentation. I told you: everything. Enjoy folks!

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Au hasard de mes explorations en ligne, je découvre Snob.ru, service de réseautage pour « l’élite de la société russe ». Tout comme son homologue international asmallworld.net, ce site créé en 2008 permet à des personnes aisées d’afficher leurs goûts et leurs styles de vie distinctifs dans un cadre valorisant. Sponsorisé par le milliardaire Mikhaïl Prokhorov, le réseau a été souvent présenté dans la presse internationale comme un repaire de nouveaux beaufs, symptôme de la décadence anthropologique de la Russie de Putin.

Mais il est surtout une mine d’or pour tout chercheur travaillant sur les pratiques de consommation actuelles, et surtout une occasion unique pour mettre à jour certaines notions sociologiques, de la consommation ostentatoire de Veblen à la distinction de Bourdieu, de l‘élite du pouvoir de C. Wright-Mills au rôle de la violence symbolique chez Michel Pinçon et Monique Pinçon-Charlot.

Ceci dit, l’existence même d’un réseau de ce type et de la culture spécifique qu’il contribue à développer, nous met face à la question de savoir quel est l’impact des médias sociaux d’Internet dans la perpétuation des inégalités sociales. Sont-ils bien des laboratoires d’intégration ou bien des déclencheurs de formes de ségrégation et de fractures sociales de plus en plus aiguës ?

Souvent, d’une manière certes expéditive, certains commentateurs ont résumés mes positions à ce propos en  affirmant que la pratiques des médias sociaux « augmente » le capital social des usagers. En fait, comme je l’expose dans Les liaisons numériques et dans d’autres textes, je suis d’un avis fort différent : les médias sociaux sont utilisés pour « optimiser » (au sens de maximiser sous contrainte) ledit capital social (au sens de l’ensemble des ressources relationnelles qu’un individu a à sa disposition pour atteindre ses but personnels, politiques ou professionnels). Ceci évidemment permet d’activer « la force des liens faibles » si chère à Marc Granovetter ou de faire valoir – selon les exigences du moment – des logiques de cohésion (bonding) ou de connectivité (bridging), mais sans gommer les effets de la stratification sociale qui opèrent à un niveau beaucoup plus foncier – du moment où on fait le choix d’adhérer à un service de networking orienté à une certaine catégorie d’usagers jusqu’au moment où on arrive à développer et à entretenir les compétences et les attitudes nécessaires pour évoluer dans ledit service.

La question reste de savoir si ces réseaux permettent une transmission de pratiques culturelles et de modes de consommations d’un milieu à l’autre. Est-ce que les nouveaux riches russes sont en train de jeter des passerelles vers d’autres milieux pour leur permettre une quelque forme d’ascension sociale ou symbolique ? Un texte de Tine Roesen paru dans la dernière livraison de Digital Icons nous aide à trouver quelques éléments de réponse.

Tout en affichant ses fonctionnalités de média social, Snob.ru n’a pas fait de la sociabilité en ligne (ici restituée par le terme общение, qui désigne plutôt la communication) sa caractéristique principale. Bâtie autour d’une « infrastructure  humaine unique » (уникальный круг собеседников, un noyau de membres influents activement sélectionnés), la communauté Snobshchestvo ne s’ouvre pas à la diversité. Tout au plus elle l’instrumentalise en permettant un accès libre (mais payant) au service et en segmentant ses utilisateurs entre « aisés », « bien éduqués », « fortunés » etc.

Tout en devenant de plus en plus ouvert au fil des années, Snob.ru demeure « une aire protégée de l’Internet » (охраняемая территория в Интернете), une sorte d’îlot résidentiel voué à une logique “non-massmédiatique” (средство немассовой информации). Le tout finit par ressembler à un de ces ghettos du Gotha dont parlent Pinçon et  Pinçon Charlot : des enclaves où l’entre-soi est cultivé à l’extrême en se positionnant de manière ambiguë par rapport à un extérieur tantôt éloigné tantôt exploité par les nouveaux riches.

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All throughout the month of February 2012 the Net artist collective RYBN is in residence at the Gaîté Lyrique, one of the hotbeds of the emerging art & technology scene in Paris. If you are in the French capital, I highly recommend paying them a visit.

I became acquainted with RYBN last year, when I met some of its members at a conference at the French National Library where I was delivering the closing speech, while they had presented their most recent project, Antidatamining VIII. ADMVIII (for short) is a trading bot, i.e. an artificial intelligence making real investments on real stock exchanges, collecting data and impacting financial markets worldwide. The bot monitors and maps data flows to create real-time digital visualizations such as charts, soundscapes, and timelines. It has an online page (where you can see how well it is doing, its net liquidity, the value of its shares, etc.) and a Twitter account providing details about ongoing orders.

Source: Antidataminig – Offshoring map visualization

ADMVIII is not your run-of-the-mill social commentary about market greed and pervasive financial panic in modern life. The goal of the project is to detect economic imbalances and discrepancies introduced by robot trading. As the bot actually executes buy and sell orders online, it represents a détournement of automatic trading technologies. As such it is intended to highlight their social consequences – and their potential disasters.

One of the most interesting features of ADMVIII is that it forces us to take into account the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary stock markets. Trading automats (automatic programs, or algorithms) are used to ease the financial transactions and allegedly reduce market risk. One third of the UK trading is now run by bots and three-quarters of trading in the US is now computer-generated. Trading automats have triggered what some believe to be an ‘algorithmic revolution’.

One of their main effects, is the creation of “flash crashes”. As high-frequency trading enabled by the new generation of algorithms allows to make trades in less a millisecond, markets undergo infinitesimal crises every once in a while. In an incident occurred in 2007 at the New York Stock Exchange, a small anomaly resulting by software engineers having used a placeholder value of one penny (one small, tiny penny…) started a chain reaction, triggering thousands of sell orders and, as traders adjusted to what was believed to be an upcoming trend, stock values of some companies dropped of 500% in under one minute and in a few minutes some companies’ stocks values plummeted from forty dollars to a few cents. In another such incident, occurred in May 2010, high frequency trading robots caused a 20 minute crash. The estimated loss totalled up to $1000.000.000.000. (Here is the Antidatamining applet which transforms into sound the raw data of the day, recorded from the 9 stock exchanges routed on the NYSE.)

Source: Antidataminig – Flashcrash Sonification

Think of these flash crashes as micro-strokes in the body of an elite athlete: he might keep running, but he’s dying inside a little at the time… Algorithmic trading increases market volatility. That goes against the economic common sense of the 20th century that quicker transactions, by allowing a higher circulation of currency and wealth, result in more liquidity and increased stability. On the other side, that corroborates some of the contemporary social theories surrounding the relationship between code and financial crisis. In a recent issue of the journal Theory Culture & Society focussing on this topic, Marc Lenglet makes the point that algorithmic trading is in itself a crisis-prone activity as far as it affects the temporalities of decision, and crises urgently demand decision.

Source: Antidataminig – Flashcrash event ‘astrology’ chart

Another problem with algorithmic trading is that it is designed to replicate trading patterns that were initially centered around human traders, but that by now are increasingly performed by bots. For obvious reasons (algorithms are not patentable so they are to be kept as trade secrets) those bots are black boxes, progressively more difficult to replicate. So an algorithm simulating another algorithm creates some sort of infinite regression. In this financial mise en abyme, misalignments and discrepancies between algorithms are always possible. Reliable measurments of the systemic risk represented by several trading algorithms operating at the same time, on the contrary, become unattainable.

Algorithmic trading marks the departure from the efficient-market hypothesis that had ruled over financial economics in the past decades, according to which prices reflect information on stock market fundamentals. Enter the trading automats, and markets become nothing but Bruegel-esque landscapes of bots imitating each other. Several commentators have voiced their concern and called for regulation, spanning from the introduction of the Tobin Tax to the restriction of automatic trading pace (by posting trades for at least more than a second). Some others have tried to tone down what they perceive as alarmist rhetoric surrounding the progressive replacement of human by artificial traders. See for instance this reassuring British government report stating that there is “no direct evidence that high frequency computer based trading has increased volatility” and that instability is social, meaning that it comes from markets settling in with flash crashes by turning them into “normal” events to which they do not adjust to, until it is too late. One way or the other, projects like ADMVIII might be important as pedagogic devices designed to raise awareness about the growing risk of total economic collapse in a markets where unregulated bots.

Source: Antidataminig – World Wide Stock Exchange map

More importantly, ADMVIII is useful to help contemporary publics and regulators to confront their own impossibility to envision market fallibility. Even critics of disorganized capitalism (as Lash and Urry would have it) unknowingly trust market resilience and overall reliability. As a society, we are more willing to admit that one day (maybe soon) the earth itself might succumb to an environmental catastrophe, than to acknowledge the actual possibility that our dear old market economy might fall apart and drag us all down screaming with it. There is no need to adopt an apocalyptic stance here, as in fact we are utterly incapable to imagine the apocalypse of our financial system. And yet its fate is sealed, a little everyday. This is a form of false consciousness that art – especially when it’s of the true political kind – might help denounce.

ADMVIII will be displayed at the Gaîté Lyrique from Jan 31 to March 25, 2012 as part of the exhibition « 2062″. The bot will be transferred on the Gaîté Lyrique’s server for six months, starting Feb 5, 2012. During this period, the members of RYBN will be working on an open source distribution of the algorithm (tentatively named Antidatamining 9). On Feb 9, you might also want to check this conference at the CNAM (Paris), where the bot will be discussed with economists and mathematicians.

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So apparently SOPA is dead, for now. If you’ve been following the recent events surrounding this infamous anti-piracy (and anti-free speech) law, you know that’s good news for a lot of people – me included. The way this thing will go down in history is pretty much that “an iniquitous piece of legislation was to be voted, but a 7 million-strong Google petition, a rally in San Francisco and a massive online campaign (including a spectacular 24-hour blackout) defeated it”. Unfortunately, this means downplaying the role of another important element of this story: lobbying.

If you are not aware of how US lobbying works (or, worse, if you are European), let me break it down for you. Lobbying basically means talking to the right persons and influence them in following a certain political line. Sometimes this line is instantiated by a clear gain in terms of funding for politicians – to be used to be re-elected, to promote new policies, public works programmes, or political activity in general. Government resources are scarse, so this keeps the machine running, although in some cases it borders on buying votes. Telecommunication and electronics companies are among the biggest “buyers”.

Communication and electronics sector displays one of the highest and fastest increasing lobbying spending. Source: Sunlight Foundation

Whether you like it or not (I’m more on the “not” side, but then again I’m European…), this is the way it works. And lobbying might not always be a bad thing. For politicians, this means growing independent from their voters base (and from the State-based corporation and tycoons financing their election campaign) and serve national interests, not only local/industry ones. Some lobbyists are not-for profit organizations working pro bono publico. And some decent folks (citizen groups, grassroots associations, social activists of every sort) lobby to convince legislators to take specific actions in favour/against specific legislations. Yet, lobbying implies spending a lot of money, and having a lot of high-placed friends. Which is why big-ass corporations are good at it, and small citizen groups have a hard time staying afloat.

Not only business. Labour unions and nonprofits account for 24% of the lobbyist expenditures. Source: US Office of Government Ethics.

Since the advent of the Web, new tools to overcome access barriers to lobbying are in place. For instance crowdfunding. Kickstart or ActBlue are popular platforms where Average Joes can create causes and invite people to micro-finance them. In some cases things can get really interesting, really quick. (I remember in the heydays of the Obama administration, having witnessed the feat of half a million dollars raised in 24 hours to lobby members of US Congress to pledge in favor of Medicare. To say nothing about the role of online fundraising and small donors in the 2008 US presidential elections. For more on this, see my book Les liaisons numériques, pp. 76-99).

So what happened with SOPA? Well we don’t know actually. There is an incredibly sparse media coverage about the role of lobbying in determining the dramatic turning of coats in the wake of the Jan. 18, 2012 Internet blackout, exemplified by this image.

Number of SOPA/PIPA opponents before and after the Internet blackout. Source: Propublica.org.

On the ProPublica.org website you can read the single anti-SOPA statements of all the US members of Congress. We can assume some of them changed/made up their minds after pondering at the meaning of this law, and its nefarious consequences for free speech. But we also must assume that some of them were effectively targeted by interest and pressure groups, as explained in this pre-blackout Venture Beat piece.

20% of lobbying expenditure was funded by computer software and online services indutries to oppose SOPA. Source: Venture Beat.

Who am I talking about? For sure, not the grassroot crowdfunding initiatives like We The Lobby who raised a modest 8033 $ to this day. And not the colourful League for Gamers… We must assume an important part of this lobbying was done by computer software, electronics and Internet behemoths who after all have their men on Capitol Hill since the late 1990s.

We The Lobby citizen crowdfunding fell short of expectations. Source: We The Lobby. 

As in this story there are more things we don’t know than things we know, I would like to conclude these modest remarks by a few questions:

- How much did consumer electronics industry (Apple, Nintendo and the likes) put into anti-SOPA lobbying?

- What has been the role of big investment groups and private equity firms such as TCV or KKR in the anti-SOPA campaing?

- Did the balance between anti-trust investigations-related lobbying and anti-censorship lobbying shift for Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft?

- Can we map the Washington lobbying industry? Who are the key players today? Do they count anti-SOPA groups or corporations among their clients?

- Are any of those lobbying and industry groups connected with online free speech advocacy groups and citizen initiatives?

I hope that the journalists, activists, and researchers among you can help provide answers…

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[Update] A loyal reader going by the Twitter name of @gag0s thought this post lacked infographics ;) and pointed us to this imposing (also pre-Jan 18) display of the gap between Entertainment and Tech companies lobbying in 2010/2011. This raises the question whether IT companies are actually using lobbying or PACs to put pressure on politicians (until 2009 it was a mere 10% of the lobbying budget).

Tech companies anti-copyright lobbying remained steady over 12 months. Entertainement lobbying dropped by almost 50%. Where did they invest the bulk of their lobbying money? Source: Politico.

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Dans le cadre de mon séminaire EHESS Étudier les cultures du numérique : approches théoriques et empiriques, j’ai eu le plaisir d’accueillir pour une séance sur ville, infrastructure et données Jérôme Denis, sociologue, enseignant-chercheur à Télécom ParisTech, auteur (avec David Pontille) de l’excellent Petite sociologie de la signalétique (Presses de l’Ecole des mines, 2010) et co-animateur du blog Scriptopolis. Voici les slides de son intervention.

La ville et ses données : quelques pistes d’analyse.

En quelques années, la rencontre entre la ville et les nouvelles technologies est devenue une question centrale dans de très nombreux domaines (géographie, informatique, sciences de la communication, sociologie, gestion). Elle a notamment donné lieu à certains discours qui présentent une “révolution” qui aurait peu à peu “doublé” la ville d’une nouvelle couche informationnelle. Dans ce mouvement, on assisterait à l’explosion du nombre de données disponibles qui permettraient de faciliter la saisie de la ville, qu’il s’agisse de la gérer, de la fluidifier, de la sécuriser, de la démocratiser ou encore de l’habiter. C’est dans ce cadre par exemple que le mouvement Open Data, qui défend la libération des données publiques a pris forme.

Si ce discours ne repose pas sur du vide, il mérite toutefois d’être largement remis en perspective. C’est ce que je propose de faire dans cette séance en montrant d’abord l’intérêt qu’il y a à saisir les continuités qui se dessinent dans l’émergence d’une ville numérique, et en ouvrant ensuite une piste de recherche inspirée des infrastructure studies qui vise à documenter finement les conditions de production et les formes d’instanciation des données de la ville.

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I’m serious: the marxiste célèbre and #Occupy Wall Street avuncular philosopher Slavoj Žižek is really a funny man. Case in point, this excellent coffee table book containing a collection of the jokes he spices up his impenetrable prose with (complete with references to the original texts).

Žižek employs jokes like Plato resorted to myths as heuristic devices designed to convey a logical meaning. Thus, they are used iteratively — the Marx Brother one-liners about self-identity or refusal of choice, the Rabinovitch anecdote about realism, the skeptical paradox about the fiancée who’s late for a rendez-vous…

Find a selection of the best scanned pages on the publisher’s website, and discover the maieutic value of laughter. (Also discover that this is a project of the Mickey Mouse Club ft. the norwegian artist Audun Mortensen, and that the book is actually printed in a very limited edition of 1…)

« There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole of human history to date: from the prehisotric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name… »
[Slavoj Žižek (2011) The Collected Jokes, Mickey Mouse Club, p. 73]

« This situation is not unlike the joke about the conscript who tries to evade military service by pretending to be mad: he compulsively checks all the pieces of paper he can lay hands on, constantly repeating: ‘That’s not it!’ The psychiatrist, finally convinced of his insanity, gives him a written certificate releasing him from military service: the conscripts casts a look at it and says cheerfully: ‘That is it!’ »
[ibid., p. 106]

« It is not that his call for more passion in politics is in itself meaningless (of course, the contemporary Left needs more passion); the problem is rather that it resembles all too much a joke quoted by Lacan about a doctor asked by a friend for medical advice — unwilling to give his services without payment the doctor examines the friend and then calmly states: ‘You need medical advice!’ »
[ibid., p. 32]

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New year, new issue of the online journal Fast Capitalism. This is a special one, with a special section on Academia in the Internet age (one of my topics of choice – as you can see from this recent communication of mine at the Sciences Sociales 2.0 symposium at the ENS Lyon).

The plat de resistance here is the article written by Jessie Daniels and Joe R. Feagin “The (Coming) Social Media Revolution in the Academy”. The authors start by addressing the (increasingly) common opinion according to which digital academia is characterized by a decline in elitism and in expert knowledge. Does democratization of knowledge mean the Gramscian “organic intellectual” will be replaced by a new brand of open-source academic? Sure this is not a linear process. The authors turn to analyze the material conditions of contemporary academic labour. This implies an adjustment in the use of some pre-existing scholarly facilities – such as libraries. This also means the introduction of new tools. Blogging and micro-blogging can be efficiently used to expand intellectual impact and to bridge different departments and research fields. But these participatory Web devices can also meet mixed reactions in the academic community, where they might still be perceived as “distractions” taking away from career pursuits.

« Christine Hurt and Tung Yin refer to blogging without tenure as “an extreme sport” because of the risks involved (2006, p. 1235). They enumerate these risks of blogging for untenured faculty as including: the amount of time involved, being controversial, being wrong, and sharing too much personal information. These are all legitimate concerns that any blogger (not just an academic) should weigh in the balance before engaging with social media. »

[Daniels and Joe R. Feagin (2012) The (Coming) Social Media Revolution]

Academic blogging must not be understood as the end of peer-reviewed publications either. On the contrary, the complex interplay between the business of academic publishing and crowdsourced/open publishing makes things all the more complicated for today’s academic labourers.

The proliferation of online tools represents a methodological and epistemological shift as well, although not all disciplines are concerned in the same way – or adapt at the same pace. One important issue raised by Daniels and Feagin is why there is no such thing as Digital Sociology (while, on the contrary there is Digital Humanities).

« Sociology lags far behind in the adoption of digital tools for scholarly work.  As Paul DiMaggio and colleagues noted in 2001, “sociologists have been slow to take up the study of the Internet” (“The Social Implications of the Internet,” Annual Review of Sociology, 2001, p.1). While there are notable exceptions, such as Andrew Beveridge’s digitizing of Census maps (www.socialexplorer.com), when looking at the field as a whole these sorts of innovations are rare in sociology. In contrast to the decade-long conference in the digital humanities, there is no annual conference on “digital sociology.”  Sociology graduate students Nathan Jurgensen and PJ Rey recently organized a conference on “Theorizing the Web,” that drew luminaries in sociology Saskia Sassen and George Ritzer, but this is the first sociology conference (that we are aware of) to focus exclusively on understanding the digital era from a sociological perspective.  Analogously, there is no large institution, like the NEH seeking to fund digitally informed sociological research. The reasons for this sociological lag when it comes to the Internet are still not clear, but some point to the problems of getting digital publication projects recognized by tenure and promotion review committees. »

[Daniels and Joe R. Feagin (2012) The (Coming) Social Media Revolution]

Broadly speaking, authors insist, hiring and promotion committees in sociology are less sympathetic than in other disciplines to recognizing digital production of knowledge as a legitimate, CV-leverageable activity. On the contrary, many institutions in the field of Digital humanities take into account creative works (works in fine or performing arts, including digital works) and others value dissemination of research (public speaking, media features, op-eds online or offline).

How much of this is an effect of the pressure of the eponymous « fast capitalism »? The effort to maintain an increasingly high « scientific production standard », measurable via a difficult access to high impact factor journals, can lead to overlook actual social and cultural penetration of academic sociology research – which can assessed by online participation. As this matter remains to be addressed, the other articles published in this issue might be of some help.

I especially would like to mention Patricia Mooney Nickel’s biting essay “The Man from Somewhere: Author, Affiliation, and Letterhead”. It is about how social networking sites for scholars, such as Academia.edu, can end up replicating status display involving affiliation, rank, and institutional prestige. And it is also about the difficult balance of full professors affiliation and lecturers/adjuncts affiliation in grant-driven research institutions.

« As they participate in this circuitry of value, academics pursuing the normal path of the academic career become complicit in the casualization of the university. Faculty members, encouraged by the university to accumulate prestigious grants, earn teaching “buy out.” The grant-maker, who typically funds only affiliated individuals who posses prestigious letterhead (Caesar 1992), pays for someone else to teach in the vacated classrooms while the grant recipient pursues — and contributes affiliation value to — the grant-maker’s objectives. This exchange allows faculty members to collect affiliation with prestigious foundations without abandoning their affiliation with the university, while the university capitalizes on the sign value that they extract when their faculty members achieve more value. »

[Patricia Mooney Nickel (2012) “The Man from Somewhere”]

Also have a look at Venessa Paech “Publish or perish: digital presence and mobility as worth” (about how mobile technology and scholar connectedness echoes the dominant ideology of Publish or Perish) and at Henry A. Giroux “Rejecting Academic Labor as a Subaltern Class” (about the heritage of Brazilian pedagogist Paulo Freire in the Occupy movement)

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The Occupy movement has been in the front of the scene all throughout 2011, winning media attention, taking over where the Arab Spring and the Indignados left off and ideally avenging the Tea Party instrumental use of all the self-organization/non-hierarchical discourse. So, at the end of the year, it’s time for a little review.

Global #Occupy Map

Members of an Occupy-affiliated group, We All Occupy, have been collecting resources from activists from all over the world. The result: a listing of over 1300 geocoded Occupy locations, with websites, Facebook, and Twitter URLs where possible. A (still to be completed) database for all of you activists, data/citizen journalists. And of course, a global interactive map available on Mapbox for your viewing pleasure!

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