98 research outputs found
High technology and low-income communities: Prospects for the positive use of advanced information technology, Donald Schön, Bish Sanyal, and William Mitchell, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press, (1999). Reviewed By David Hakken
Get PDFEthnography, Documents, and Big Data: Reflections on Teaching with David Hakken
Get PDFIn the summer of 2011, I joined University College Dublin, Ireland, as a permanent faculty member in the then‐named School of Information and Library Studies (now the School of Information and Communication Studies). As an academic working in a European university, I could avail myself of opportunities for European faculty and staff, including the Erasmus mobility program. The Erasmus program has provided teaching and training exchange opportunities for students, faculty, and staff between universities in Europe for over 30 years. David Hakken and Professor Vincenzo D'Andrea of the Department of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento in northern Italy invited me to Trento to do an Erasmus exchange and co‐teach with David, who was a former colleague of mine from Indiana University‐Bloomington. David held a regular visiting fellowship with the University of Trento and spent several summers teaching and doing research there. During the summers of 2013 and 2014, I visited the University of Trento with funding from the Erasmus program to design and co‐teach several workshops with David
Proposal for a participatory performance : a long table on design at the margins
No full textContemporary performance techniques have developed new forms that aim to promote social and political engagement. The Long Table is one example of this approach that uses a combination of metaphor, stylized physical environment and an etiquette that encourages open dialogue on a topic. The PDC2008 Long Table will engage participants in a discussion 'on the margins of technology'. Building on an earlier performance as part of the Democratising Technology project this Long Table will explore the problem of widening the franchise of design to people who are often neither consulted nor considered in the design process
WEB 2.0: THE INDUSTRY OF PARTICIPATION: An Actor-Network Theory Account of Myspace in the Case of Underground Music
No full textSince the contested label of “Web 2.0” was put forward in 2004, the hype and buzz around it spread enormously both on a media and academic level.
In particular, literature on Web 2.0 and its tools is often either driven by deterministic assumptions, or presents partial accounts of the issue. Indeed, many discourses surrounding Web 2.0 embed “narratives of inevitability and technological determinism” (Bigge, 2006: 1) and belong to a long history of studies on the web and networked communication technologies that often have claimed a “revolutionary” role of the next new medium, a history that usually saw the failure of those claims, which should be challenged once and for all. However, many critical studies that would be expected to debunk the “dominant rhetorics” of Web 2.0 in fact partially accomplish the mission, since they often fail to properly account for all the aspects of Web 2.0. I will propose a "theoretical remediation" (Beer, 2008) by adopting the theoretical framework of Science and Technology Studies, and in particular, the perspective of Actor-Network Theory (ANT).
Within this framework and perspective, I will investigate in my study of the Social Networking Site Myspace and some of its underground music-related users whether and how the alleged processes of democratization, user empowerment and active participation can be retrieved.
I carried out my study with the methodology of cyberethnography, and, more specifically with participant observation and in-depth interviews.
I conclude by highlighting how, in light of my work, Web 2.0 could be properly called "the industry of participation", for highlighting how user participation is not completely voluntary and aware, but instead, embedded into business processes. Also, a “missing democratization” emerged from my research
Participatory prototyping proposal : performance methods for engaging in design
No full textThis prototyping workshop will use methods adapted from contemporary performance to engage people in designing 'networks of things'. These methods have been designed to widen participation in the design process and to help people envision and articulate the alternative social and political worlds that technology engenders
Computing and the Crisis: The Significant Role of New Information Technologies in the Current Socio-economic Meltdown
No full text There is good reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of the current crisis for the reproduction of contemporary social formations. Thus there is an urgent need to understand it character, especially its distinctive features. This article identifies profound ambiguities in valuing assets as new and key economic features of this crisis, ambiguities traceable to the dominant, “computationalist” computing used to develop new financial instruments. After some preliminaries, the article identifies four specific ways in which computerization of finance is generative of crisis. It then demonstrates how computationalist computing is linked to other efforts to extend commodification based on the ideology of so-called “intellectual property” (IP). Several other accounts for the crisis are considered and then demonstrated to have less explanatory value. After considering how some commons-oriented (e.g., Free/Libre and/or Opening Source Software development projects) forms of computing also undermine the IP project, the article concludes with a brief discussion of what research on Socially Robust and Enduring Computing might contribute to fostering alternative, non-crisis generative ways to compute. </jats:p
Participation and Representation:a Discussion Based upon a Case Study in the Danish Healthcare Sector
Get PDFMaking Sense of Users Participation in Open Source Projects: The case of a Mature Video Game
No full textThrough a cyberethnographic informed approach applied to a mature Free and Open Source Software video game collective this research addressed a central issue in contemporary information age: the increasing place taken by users in creating and maintaining innovative public goods thanks to the distributed carrying capacity of the Internet.
The empirical work is based on an ethnographic immersion in the field and on interviews and it is theoretically informed by Actor-Network Theory and integrated with insights coming from Action Nets
Computing and the Crisis: The Significant Role of New Information Technologies in the Current Socio-economic Meltdown
No full textThere is good reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of the current crisis for the reproduction of contemporary social formations. Thus there is an urgent need to understand it character, especially its distinctive features. This article identifies profound ambiguities in valuing assets as new and key economic features of this crisis, ambiguities traceable to the dominant, “computationalist” computing used to develop new financial instruments. After some preliminaries, the article identifies four specific ways in which computerization of finance is generative of crisis. It then demonstrates how computationalist computing is linked to other efforts to extend commodification based on the ideology of so-called “intellectual property” (IP). Several other accounts for the crisis are considered and then demonstrated to have less explanatory value. After considering how some commons-oriented (e.g., Free/Libre and/or Opening Source Software development projects) forms of computing also undermine the IP project, the article concludes with a brief discussion of what research on Socially Robust and Enduring Computing might contribute to fostering alternative, non-crisis generative ways to compute.
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