Pablo Abend- (Geo-)Tagging : The utopian hopes and harsh realities of a ubiquitous media practice
The meaning of the English noun “Tagging” goes back to the name for a loose piece of cloth or scrap of fabric (“tagrag”), a derivative of the Scandinavian “tagg” which refers to prong, point, spike or thorn. The meaning as a label – a signifier – attached to something dates back only to the 1830s. When we speak of tagging today, we usually refer to the practice of attaching additional information (also: meta-information) to something (a place, a person, an animal, a dataset). In logistics, objects are tagged with barcodes and RFID chips to track their position in the supply chain, wildlife biologists tag animals in order to gain insights into behavioral patterns and habits, and museum visitors routinely scan QR codes to retrieve additional digital information about exhibits. As a media practice, tagging has been associated with utopian ideas of alternative productions of space and place, meaning and order. For example, early Location-based art projects used tagging to render individual spatial knowledge visible. Shortly after, tagging became the dominant media practice of the Web 2.0 promising “People-Powered Metadata” – collaborative, bottom-up knowledge systems as alternative to top-down classifications. On the other hand, tagging has also always been an integral part of surveillance architectures working in the background of systems, collecting data for the purpose of classification, identification and localization.
The talk does not attempt to give a comprehensive account of all the contexts the practice of tagging can be found today. Instead, it theorizes tagging as a hybrid practice that undermines distinctions between analog/digital and physical/virtual by mediating in-between – a characteristic that allows the practice of tagging to oscillate between empowerment and suppression, between utopian hopes and harsh realities.
Renée Ridgeway- 1n(tr0)verted Data: how geofence warrants engender Sensorvault subjects
In the 21st century user data has become the world’s most valuable resource, as raw material exploited for ‘data colonialism’––the appropriation of human life for profit (Couldry and Mejias 2019)––and as a currency sine qua non facilitating the redistribution of power on the internet. In exchange for access and convenience, users’ locative data is collated, stored and analysed (Lyon 2018) in Sensorvault, a massive proprietary database. Part of the Google server complex, Sensorvault ‘maps’ users’ habits and actions for private use, though relying on public infrastructures such as cell towers and GPS satellites. Increasingly, ‘reverse search warrants’ for criminal investigations worldwide by law enforcement are compelling Google to release Sensorvault data. 1n(tr0)verted Data sheds light on these ‘geofence warrants’ by reversing the data-gathering process––collecting data on those collecting data on (us)ers through investigative journalism reports in the media, legal documents (court orders, subpoenas, affidavits) and US governmental committee letters to Google. Predicated on a confluence of methods between law enforcement’s dragnet policing practice and corporations’ surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015, 2019), locative data from mobile phones facilitates the profiling of (innocent) bystanders, who, by their proximity to crimes, become ‘surveilled and surveilling subjects’ (Lyon 2018, 6). ‘Parallel and recursive’ (Coté 2016), this contributes to surveillance studies and STS literature along with some consequences of geofence warrants: massive influx of public protests, mission creeping of user data and the resulting ‘chilling effects’ (Büchli et al 2020, Fussell 2021).
Yi-Fan Chen- Mapping my family story: Designing user-generated Geomedia for family
With 5G mobile technology on the rise, Geomedia fulfills users’ information and communication needs at the locations. Mobile Geomedia provides new opportunities for users to create, store, share, and retrieve information at different scales of time and place. Some of its applications include disaster management and mitigation (e.g., Google Crisis Response), tourism (e.g., Streetmuseum), and transportation (e.g., Google Maps). Mobile augmented reality system (MARS), one of the Geomedia (Fast, Jansson, Lindell, Bengtsson & Tesfahuney, 2017), allows all users to document and retrieve multimedia information at the location. Pavlik and colleagues (1999) argue that MARS adds a layer of information for user experience at the location.
The current study aims to design a user-generated MARS for users. Geomedia raises geoprivacy concerns and corporate surveillance (Atteneder & Collini-Nocker, 2018). The concept for this MARS design is content design by people for users within networks instead of technology-generated content for users. Research on mobile media shows that people love to share and retrieve their stories within networks but not strangers (Ling, 2004, 2002). This MARS for Family Story has a family tree diagram on the user’s profile. Users can see his/her family members with individual information (e.g., birth, marriage, and death dates). When family members are at the location where events are happening, they can use their MARS for Family Story to document the events. Image, text, audio, and video formats are all available to be used. Location and weather information is documented by the MARS for Family Story. The family members are encouraged to tag people, add emojis, and annotate special notes for the event. A wireframe prototype was built and use testing shows users see the design is useful and valuable to document family moments. They have fewer concerns about geoprivacy and corporate surveillance for the current MARS design.
Craig Ryder – Digitalising Bourdieu: digital capital as resistance in post-pandemic Sri Lanka
Thanks to the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1986) the social world is broadly understood to be organised by the accumulation and exchange of various types of capital: economic, cultural, and social. However, capital has been largely omitted from the interdisciplinary study of social media. When researching the most important developments across the social media-mix, including digital activism, the rise of influencers, and the platformisation of information, scholars have overlooked the implicit exchange of capital through digital technologies. Via a mixed-method case study of the 2022 anti-government protests in Sri Lanka, I advance Bourdieu’s notion of capital and rewire it for the digital era, arguing there is a new form of capital—digital capital—that is growing in salience as the digital becomes an increasingly ubiquitous meditator of social relations.
Digital capital is “the accumulation of digital competencies (information, communication, safety, content-creation and problem-solving)” (Ragnedda, 2018, 2367), and I contend that this capacity is articulated through the metrication of social media (Christin, 2020). By means of Visual Network Analysis (Venturini, 2019) of twitter data on the Sri Lankan protests, I identity what I term, “information influencers”; that is, citizens who amass a massive amount of digital capital on social media and explicitly use their platform for political participation. Like traditional social media influencers, information influencers engage in “visibility labour” and build digital capital through textual and visual narration of their experience (Abidin, 2016), but they refuse monetisation, opting for political advocacy over brand-alignment. The ethnographic investigation follows the “transmission of capital” (Bourdieu, 1986, 19), intersecting digital activism and physical spaces of resistance with surveillance and spatial control. The paper concludes that digital capital has such transformative potential that nefarious agents and government-bots mobilise to discredit influencers’ capital and reproduce the status quo.