#Instalife: How is Instagram altering our practices and understanding of photography?

Instagram is a social, mobile photography app. They have 100 million monthly active users, and 40 million Instagram photos are posted per day. Purchased by the leviathan of social media that is Facebook in 2012, Instagram seems to be some kind of “big deal”.

From a commercial perspective, Instagram is an immensely easy-t0-use and popular social platform, and its default setting of making all images open the public makes it eminently available for market research (for example: I can search the tag “#target” and tap into what people are thinking and reacting to about Target and their stores). Instagram is also an excellent medium for brands and celebrities to communicate directly and intimately with their fans. Images are in many ways the language of the commercial world, and Instagram is a platform catered directly to that language.

Above and beyond the “market value” of Instagram, it is also changing the meaning and practice of photography at every level, from high art to the “laymen’s” snapshots of the Eiffel Tower and cute toddlers.

“ART” http://instagram.com/p/XKbfCHQ5Hj/#

“Tourism” http://statigr.am/p/449948018852874362_193856905

In some ways, this change is simply an amplification of the changes already underway since the invention of cheap film, and then the invention of the digital photo, and then the invention of the Internet. This technological progression has created an increasingly universal and democratic practice of photography. Taking a photo is getting easier and cheaper- and furthermore sharing those photos is becoming easier and cheaper as well. With the invention of the mobile camera, if you are carrying around a phone you are also carrying around a camera. With the development of high-tech devices like the iPhone, if you are carrying around a cell phone you are carrying around an incredibly high-quality camera. And if you have Instagram, you have a way of instantly and easily editing that photo and sharing it with the world (or at least- the entire Internet world).

“Nostalgia” http://instagram.com/p/WVG4bNnxCu/

But these things are, in theory, true also of tools like Flickr or Tumblr or Facebook. What makes Instagram different? How does this specific tool influence our practices and understanding of photography?

Perhaps the most explicit difference between Instagram and other platforms is its unique time-frame. Instagram is not merely a photo-sharing app, but actually contains a camera within the app. The tool emphasizes instantaneity (obviously) and a mimimum amount of time between taking and sharing the photo.

In this  way, Instagram takes on a quality (similar to the practice of Tweeting) of inherent presentness. It is a token of the “this-now”,  a visual status-update of sorts. This quality is emphasized by the common picture tag “#latergram”, used to indicate photos taken sometime in the past (typically more than a day). As was insightfully pointed out on PBS’s Idea Channel, this hashtag is particularly odd if we consider that every photograph is in some sense a “latergram”, removed from the actual moment represented in the photo, and that for most of history the point of photography was to preserve a record or image for later consumption. Yet it is true that Instagramography  has a kind of flat temporality that previous forms of photography don’t. The photos tend to be taken and instantly shared, often times with the photograph being taken expressly for the purpose of Instagramming, without any period of latency or consideration of the photograph. After being shared, this photograph is consumed fairly quickly, disappearing in a flow of new images within a day.

Another example of the temporality of Instagram is the hashtag #tbt, or “Throw Back Thursday”, a day where many users post heavily nostalgic pictures from years past. In a very literal sense, Instagram has only really been popular for a few years, so Instagram does not typically allow for a kind of nostalgic reminiscing in the same way old photo albums- even ones on Facebook- do. #TBT is the exception that proves the rule in this case.

Apart from these exceptions, Instagram photos tend to occupy two temporalities: the Here and Now, and the Atemporal Abstraction. Interestingly, Instagram actually quite literally addresses the HERE in here and now; although timestamping of images is universal, Instagram photos all contain a location-stamp, which Instagram uses to create “Photo maps”, or maps showing SPECIFICALLY where a photo was posted. Additionally, users may add their own location tag (“MoMA”), specifying which restaurant or business they are at, or utilize a hashtag (#playoffs) to meta-label attendance at an event.

Here and Now at Yankee Stadium. http://instagram.com/_puellaludens/

An event like Hurricane Sandy is an excellent example of the unique practice and meaning of Instagramography. The storm was a huge event that nearly all residents of NYC and the East Coast in some sense “participated” in, and furthermore was the kind of thing your dad would have tried to get some Polaroids of back in 1975, as a kind of momento of the time a hurricane hit New York. In 2012, people turned to their iPhones to capture these bizarre momentos of the flooding of NYC streets and the loss of power in Times Square– and also to communally share and consume these images via social media platforms. Rather than about the preservation of an image, this practice was about the communal participation in and consumption of the Here and Now.

Apart from this kind of Instagram, there is also the Atemporal Abstraction- the photograph that does not really represent a specific time or place- although perhaps an experience, or an image. This images are more purely aesthetic, or “artistic” rather than documentary. The banal version of this might be the Manicure-photograph, or the funny picture of a cat- the more artistic version of this might be the close-up picture of beads of dew on grass, perhaps through one of Instagram’s artsy filters.

These images gain their social capital not by being linked to a time and place, but rather the opposite; they represent something more widely accessible, based purely on aesthetic choice. I would argue that this phenomenon in Instagramography represents a shift in laymen-photographic practice. This is again partially due to changes in the technology. Whereas in an earlier era it may have made sense to go to the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa, this no longer makes sense in a world where you can simply Google an image of the Mona Lisa, and access the same kind of “memory”, probably through a much higher-quality photograph. For myself personally, Instagram and iPhone-ography makes me feel this sense of photographic nihilism even in my everyday life. How banal is a photograph of a sunset, or the New York City skyline, even if it is incredibly beautiful to me here and now? Instead, I find myself (and I often see others as well) looking for beauty in more unsuspecting places, or appropriating and participating in the image to make it more aesthetically “valuable”.

“GPOY” http://statigr.am/p/450608774919126548_17178742

One genre of Instagramography that I think falls into this category is something I call the “microgram”, or “abstractagram”- close-up photos of the textures and details of everyday life. These images abstract and aestheticize the banal, making them potentially more interesting to a wide world who does not share any memory or experience with you. This kind of photograph I think also speaks to the power Instagram has the alter the way we see the world- to make us ask ourselves “Is this beautiful? Is this interesting?” far more often and perhaps more creatively than we otherwise would.

#Microgram

In a world where nearly everything is being documented by someone at any given time, it is easy to fall into a kind of photographic nihilism. I might suggest that actually part of the power of Instagram is that, unlike Facebook, it encourages a kind of scarcity of photography, a kind of more “curated” activity of sharing. Whereas Facebook allows me to upload my entire album of vacation photos all at once, Instagram only allows one upload at once- and as a mobile platform, it usually simply doesn’t make sense to sit there in the “real world” and upload image by image. Instagram values the singular, and this is something that is incredibly rare and difficult to attain in our world so very over-flooded by images of every kind. This is perhaps relatable to the popularity of the app “Snapchat”, which revolves entirely around an idea of scarcity: you cannot “upload” a photo, it must be taken NOW and sent NOW; the image or video clip only lasts for a maximum of 10 seconds and a minumum of 3; and it must be sent to separately selected individuals, rather than out to a mass, pre-existing network.

Instagram does not quite so heavily emphasize scarcity as Snapchat; it still in some ways endulges the idea of the photo “album”, in that individuals have “profiles” that collect individual posts and act as a kind of sleek visual journal. As Susan Sontag says, “Photographs are really experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” There is much to be said here about the relationship between a consumerist culture and photography; iPhoneography seems undeniably to fuel the hunger to consume and horde the world, to turn even experience into a commodity. But it seems that Instagram is a platform that alters and even in some ways disrupts this “acquisitive mood”. By enforcing a kind of “curation” of content, the consumer is forced to consider the aesthetics and perhaps hidden beauty of his experiences. Furthermore, the particular social sphere of Instagram means that users do not simple consume- but also produce, share, and participate intimately in an community of Instagrammers.

http://instagram.com/p/RXe1ZdPNEg/#

http://statigr.am/p/450727718030223024_369856864

Not to be overly sentimental; this curation of content and social sphere of Instagram encourages “selfies” of girls in bikinis at the beach just as much as it encourages photos of carefully considered shadows on a sidewalk or of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in a poor neighborhood. All things considered, it is impossible to say that there is any clear overall “effect” of this technology on the entire realm of photography or photographers. But Instagram does seem to offer some new alternatives and encourage new practices of photography, perhaps even slowly altering our understanding of the meaning of photography itself in 2013.

The Politics and Power of Internet Infrastructure, Pt. 3

Please see also Part 1 and Part 2.

PART 3: NGOs AND DIGITAL RIGHTS

In the last section I considered the roles of business and governments in protecting “net neutrality”, or the basic neutrality of Internet conduits. Net neutrality is a subtle concept, involving the protection of a particular idea about what Internet access is and should look like. But in a world where the Internet is so very new- and already so very ubiquitous- it is still a matter up for consideration what the fundamentals of digital rights are. The biggest of these questions might be whether Internet access- whether “neutral” or not- is fundamental human right? As a huge space of international dialogue, free information flows, and democratic action, access to the Internet seems to be a corollary to  rights to free speech or education.

Although most people probably wouldn’t say that humans have a fundamental right to Internet access the same way they have a fundamental right to food or water or happiness, I also think that many would see North Korea’s complete prohibition of Internet access to it’s citizens as deeply fascist and possibly even inhumane.

A poll conducted by the BBC World Service in 2010 suggests that four out of five people (adult Internet users and non-users in 26 countries) felt that Internet access is a fundamental right. This is a philosophical stance, but it leads us to the more concrete question of how this right is to be protected and supported against the powers that be. We understand that the advancement of human rights probably should not be left to the discretion of private businesses, and in cases like North Korea maybe not even to the discretion of individual states. Given this, who is the proper protector and regulator of Internet access?

Professor Susan Crawford, legal scholar and board member of ICANN, suggests that it ought to be treated as a utility, and that as such, the U.S. government is failing its citizens by not regulating the telecommunications companies in order to ensure universal access. She points out that as a nation, we are very good at rhetorically emphasizing the importance of Internet access, but in concrete terms we are very bad at implementing policy to ensure access to our own citizens. By allowing the non-competitive, almost monopolistic control of Internet infrastructure to exist unimpeded, the U.S. is deepening the “digital divide.” The digital divide describes the division between those who can afford Internet access and those who can’t- with huge consequences in our increasingly Internet-run world. Those who don’t have Internet access- or even have slow or unreliable Internet access- are less able to inform and educate themselves, less able to perform work or do homework, less able to find jobs and other critical resources like housing, etc etc etc. Crawford suggests that a truly “equal” society like ours would treat this essential informational tool as a utility, and regulate it to ensure that at least some form of reliable, inexpensive Internet is available to everyone in the country- in the same way that they ensure that some form of water or heat or electricity is available.

Susan Crawford is one of the many regulators overseeing U.S. policy to try to ensure the right to Internet access in this country. As with other forms of universal human rights, there also exist entire international institutions dedicated to protecting this right. The earliest of these institutions grew out of the need to establish international standards and protocols just to make sure that the international network could technically function.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, is an extremely loose organization that emerged in the early days of the Internet we now know, in order to develop rigorously standardized protocols for data flow that allows nodes of the Internet to connect to one another, regardless of variations in hardware and location etc. This organization is dedicated to the purely technical task of ensuring that the Internet continues to function as an international network, even as technology develops. The IETF is also interesting because it functions in a way that nearly mimics political ideals about the Internet itself. The business of the IETF is conducted entirely by volunteers, who join the open committee to answer “RFCs” or “requests for comments” on topics which need resolving. Decisions are made entirely through a process of rough consensus, and members act purely as individuals, even though they may be parts of government, private corporations, or non-profit institutions. Indeed, strictly speaking the IETF does not have official members- is it an organization as much as an activity. It does, however, have several more official organizations that help to oversee it and support it, including the Internet Society (ISOC), an international non-profit organization.

The IETF serves as one model of an international institution that protects the fundamental capability to access the Internet. Another institution, ICANN, presents a rather different model serving a similar function.

ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (discussed in the first part of this project), similarly arose in the early days of the Internet to take over tasks of technical oversight and regulation previously conducted by the U.S. government. However, ICANN has a few major differences from the IETF. First of all, the IETF is primarily concerned with creating protocols and public documents for other Internet organizations etc. to voluntarily follow. In contrast, ICANN has more direct control over the actual infrastructure of the Internet; in particular, ICANN holds control over the “root zone” of the Domain Name System; that is, it can directly change the mapping of IP addressed onto domains, and also directly modify the centralized public directory which makes these mappings public to all other Internet users. In this sense, ICANN has “teeth”, or actual technological power to alter Internet access that the IETF does not have. These “teeth” are of huge political significance as well. Parts of ICANN are still under control by the U.S. Department of Commerce. In 2006 ICANN signed a document with the D.O.C. clarifying that they still retained the ability of final, unilateral oversight of some of ICANN’s functions. In contrast to the IETF’s international, multi-stakeholder, distributed and agreement-based process and enforcement, ICANN is a non-profit organization that is still under partial control of the U.S. government, and works on a model more of technical regulation and political coercion that sheer agreement. In particular, this insistence of the U.S. government to retain some form of (currently purely symbolic) control over an organization with real technological control over an international utility some consider to be a human right is actively protested by many other state governments, who see this as an unjust balance of power.
Beyond these institutions of technical regulation, many other large-scale NGOs exist to help set international standards for Internet access and regulation. The U.N., as the most obvious forum for regulating an international system like the Internet, has been central in developing several organizations and meetings surrounding Internet governance. Perhaps most prominently, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a specialized agency within the U.N. Governments join the Union as “Member states”, although “private organizations” like telecommunications companies and research and development organizations may also join as non-voting members. The ITU was responsible for organizing the twin meetings of the World Summit on Information Society in 2003 and 2005, which in turn founded the “Internet Governance Forum” (IGF) at the 2003 WSIS in Geneva. The Internet Governance Forum, along with the WSIS’s, are different from the ITU in that they are centered around a “Multi-stakeholder” governance model. This model emphasizes participation by all individuals, groups, or organizations that have some kind of “stake” in the matter being discussed. As we have encountered before, the Internet is an institution of deep and personal concern to private businesses, state governments, as well as individual citizens. Given this, it seems that the Internet is the perfect issue around which to develop a strong international system of multi-stakeholder governance. The lack of such a system seemed so glaring, that it was suggested that an organization be formally convened in preparation for the first World Summit on the Information Society:
“(t)he WGIG identified a vacuum within the context of existing structures, since there is no global multi-stakeholder forum to address Internet-related public policy issues. It came to the conclusion that there would be merit in creating such a space for dialogue among all stakeholders. This space could address these issues, as well as emerging issues, that are cross-cutting and multidimensional and that either affect more than one institution, are not dealt with by any institution or are not addressed in a coordinated manner”.

In “Networks and States”, Milton Mueller argues that the first WSIS conference “became a mobilizing structure for transnational civil society groups focused on issues in communication and information policy”, and that the IGF “supplied an institutional venue with the potential to prolong and strengthen that network.” (Mueller, 83). In many ways, this organization introduces an entirely new form of governance- a network of networks, much like the Internet itself.  However, Mueller also notes that this highly democratic and emergent form of governance is still developing the formal mechanisms of representation and decision making needed to actually and effectively govern. This combines the age-old problems of how we create maximally democratic government institutions, and the problem of how we make and enforce law on an international scale. Although it seems that the Internet is helping us to make some headway in these areas, we also see older models of state-based hierarchical governance continuing to lead the realm of Internet governance.

As an example of this, in addition to the IGF and the World Summit on Information Society, the ITU also sponsored the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12). This meeting, dedicated to modifying the International Telecommunications Regulations (last updated in 1988), was restricted to the 193 member states of the ITU. Exemplifying the traditional model of state-based governance, and in this case inter-state-based governance, the conference is rumored to have proposed that the ITU take control of surveillance and filtering of Internet content, as well as the duties of ICANN and the IETF, and would furthermore potentially condone state governments to filter content, and even allow government shut-down of the Internet if deemed necessary. These are only rumors, however, because the conference- instead of being open to the public- occurred behind closed doors. The U.S. was one of many states that ultimately did not sign the treaty. Although there are likely many motivations for this (including a possible provision removing ICANN from U.S. control), the U.S. claimed that it could not support the treaty because it did not support a multi-stakeholder approach to regulation; indeed, it seems that (in keeping with our earlier description), the U.S. did not want to make provisions regulating the Internet at all.

If the IGF represents a model of governance fitted to the higher potential of the Internet to create a more democratic and open society, able to effectively advance human rights around the world- including the right to Internet access- then the WCIT treaty represents a model of governance fitted to the ultimate power of the Internet to create a more tightly controlled and hierarchical society. It is hard to say which of these models will win out, or how they may eventually come to combine and compromise.

What is clear is that the Internet is a technology that is radically redistributing power, and that big and small businesses, state governments and the U.N., NGO’s, individual citizens and loose organizations of concerned volunteers are all working to control how this power is organized and regulated. Basic Internet infrastructure- such as the Internet backbone, ISPs, IP addresses and domain names, and Internet protocols are all points of extreme power over the fundamental nature of the Internet. Naturally, these are also the hot-spots of political activity. These are the areas around which we, as an international civil society, must defend net neutrality and the human right to Internet access.

The Internet is an ever-changing, highly unstable force in our current world, but it is foolish to think that this means that it is invulnerable to exploitation and control by extremely powerful forces. The potentially revolutionary and powerfully humanistic nature of the Internet is not inherent, and in order to advance it, we must quickly develop new forms of revolutionary and humanistic governance and regulation- or let governments and private businesses determine the nature of our existence in this new world of communication and information.

REFERENCES:

Crawford, Susan P. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. New Haven [Conn.: Yale UP, 2013. Print.

DeNardis, Laura. “The Turn to Infrastructure for Internet Governance.” Web log post. Concurring Opinions. N.p., 26 Apr. 2012. Web. <http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2012/04/the-turn-to-infrastructure-for-internet-governance.html&gt;.

Goldsmith, Jack L., and Tim Wu. Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

MacKinnon, Rebecca. Consent of the Networked: The World-wide Struggle for Internet Freedom. New York: Basic, 2012. Print.

Mueller, Milton. Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010. Print.

“OpenNet Initiative: Global Internet Filtering App.” ONI Internet Filtering Map. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 May 2013. <http://map.opennet.net/&gt;.

The Politics and Power of Internet Infrastructure Pt. 2

Please see the first part of this project here.

PART 2: NETWORK NEUTRALITY

In my last post I described the centralized control by only 5 major companies around the world of the Internet’s backbone. I described this as horizontal integration, or the conglomeration of suppliers of Internet service. This horizontal integration thus far has posed few problems; rather, it is vertical integration, and in particular when combined with horizontal integration, that has been problematic in the world of Internet politics.

Vertical integration in Internet companies is seen as particularly dangerous because it threatens the basic “end to end architecture” I described earlier. As infrastructures that exist at the center of the network, rather than at the ends, ISPs must walk a fine line between simply creating and maintaining this infrastructure, and manipulating this infrastructure in ways that fundamentally change the nature of Internet access. Vertical integration of high-level ISPs is dangerous because it makes it very easy and very tempting for companies to modify the network in ways beneficial to them.

This issue of manipulating the conduits of the Internet in ways that change the nature of Internet access is at the heart of the idea of “net neutrality”. The phrase, introduced into Internet discourse by Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, generally refers to the idea that all data traveling on the Internet ought to be treated equally. The notion of net neutrality forms a kind of baseline for our understanding about the appropriate regulation of the Internet- it describes a kind of basic social contract about the Internet. Yet this term has many many possible practical manifestations and meanings. In it’s 2005 “Broadband Policy Statement”, the FCC stated that:

“To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to:

access the lawful Internet content of their choice…

run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement…

connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network…

competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.”

This broad statement about “net neutrality” and the rights of Internet users sets a kind of baseline expectation for Internet infrastructure and services within the United States. Yet not all countries share this basic understanding, and even in the U.S. the FCC is encountering trouble finding grounds to effectively enforce these measures. It is fairly well known that in countries like China, where there is a radically different understanding of permissible free speech and much tighter control of media outlets, the range of access to “lawful Internet content” of the consumer’s choice is much smaller. In order to maintain this control over the Net, the Chinese government does not simply create laws about content and hope that citizens follow them, but maintains a large complex of surveillance, monitoring, and censoring via technological means and via the control of private corporations (I will discuss the implications of this more in the 3rd section.)

This practice of regulating behavior through modifying the conduits of the Internet seems to violate the traditional definition of network neutrality, and likely even the FCC’s definition thereof. However, this is a fairly common model of intervention in many places around the world.

That said, many would also consider the United States to be in violation of “net neutrality”, even by its own definition set out by the FCC. The U.S. government is very weak in terms of its regulation of the Internet, and in particular the Telecommunications Act of 1996 made deregulation of media ownership the norm. This means that there is very little done in the way of ensuring the FCC’s fourth provision entitling consumers to “competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.”

In a recent case, the FCC determined that Comcast, a network provider that also provides video content, should not be allowed to slow down internet service or otherwise interfere with customers using peer-to-peer software (software often but not exclusively used for illegal file sharing.)  This seems to be a clear case of the owner of Internet conduits modifying those conduits out of self-interest- a violation of net neutrality. However, this decision was overturned by a Federal court which decided that the FCC did not have the jurisdiction to enforce this rule. In this case- in contrast to the example of China- we see that the work of “Internet governance”, or deciding the basic functionality of the Internet and the rights of Internet users, is being largely carried out by private businesses. We can see from these two examples that notions of “net neutrality” and the social contracts between citizens and their government about how media ought to be regulated or not vary widely from region to region, and even within individual states.

What is interesting is that, although there seems to be little widespread concern about these kinds of violations of net neutrality by private companies, citizens do seem to be against more traditional control over behavior via law enforcement. The widespread SOPA/PIPA protests in January 2012 might be read as evidence that citizens do not find it an acceptable action of the government to intervene in the functioning of the Internet. The bills ostensibly were meant as measures to protect intellectual property; interestingly, many ISPs have actively taken measures to regulate piracy by various intrusive measures including “throttling”, or slowing down data flows to recalcitrant downloaders. Yet this privately enacted regulation seems to receive very little criticism. There are many other possible variables to consider here, but it seems that in the world of Internet politics, private businesses may be seen as more appropriate regulators than the government. This is extremely important, because it represents a precedent of direct technological control and regulation, rather than behavior-based or legal regulation. I will consider the implications of this precedent more in a later section.

This above case suggests the question: how is ‘net neutrality’ brought about? Through government regulation, or through free markets? Do we need governments to prevent radical horizontal and vertical integration that allows companies to modify Internet access to suit their personal interests? Or do we need to prevent the government from surveying and filtering online content, potentially overstepping the bounds of mere law enforcement and becoming censors?

Purely based on the extremely limited evidence described above, it seems that U.S. citizens see free markets as the key to net neutrality, and government regulation as potentially destructive towards free, neutral access.

To consider this question further, lets examine a few cases of government regulation versus free market scenarios.

In the U.S., we largely have a “free market” scenario. As mentioned, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the market in the hopes of encouraging competition and lowering the barrier to entry for new businesses. We also have very few laws regulating content, and virtually none enforcing content regulation through technical means (ie, requiring private businesses to actively regulate this content in accordance with U.S. law). In fact, the U.S. has many laws which protect private businesses from being held liable for hosting illegal content posted by third parties.

In contrast, in much of the E.U. governments enforce or encourage competition between ISPs through a variety of legal measures. This means that in the E.U., prices for Internet service are much, much cheaper, and broadband is a lot faster than in the U.S. This competition eliminates the problem seen in the U.S. where private companies can slow down service to competing content providers, or throttle Internet speeds for peer-to-peer users. That said, in the E.U. it is also (slightly) more common to enforce technical filtering of Internet content. Many countries maintain blacklists of domain names that ISPs are required to block; typically these are exclusively directed at child pornography sites, but recently the U.K. ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, a site primarily used for illegal downloading. In “Beyond Denial”, authors Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski suggest that even this minimal (and highly supportable) government regulation on a technical level sets a dangerous precedent:

“The convenient rubric of terrorism, child pornography, and cyber security has contributed to a growing expectation that states should enforce order in cyberspace, including policing unwanted content. Paradoxically, advanced democratic states within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)—including members of the European Union (EU)—are (perhaps unintentionally) leading the way toward the establishment of a global norm around filtering of political content with the introduction of proposals to censor hate speech and militant Islamic content on the Internet. This follows already existing measures in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere aimed at eliminating access to child pornography.”

This kind of filtering at the level of ISPs can be seen potentially both as a violation of net neutrality, in that data being sent across the network is being searched and discriminately filtered based on content, and a violation of free speech. Although overall child pornography should not be protected by the ideals of net neutrality or free speech, simply utilizing this technology opens a door to more serious content filtering and violations of net neutrality.

In these two cases, we see two inverse sets of power relations in regards to Internet infrastructure, with different resulting conditions of “net neutrality”. In the U.S., the balance of power lies heavily with ISPs and telecommunications companies. This limits the risk of violations of net neutrality in terms of government enforced surveillance and content-filtering, but increases the risk of content throttling and the kind of monopolistic control that allows ISPs to modify the Internet conduits for personal gain, without allowing consumers a choice of alternative, unmodified Internet access.  In the U.K. and around the E.U., the balance of power lies more heavily with the government. This increases competition and makes the Internet access individuals receive less constrained by commercial interests (ie, imagine a world where one did not need to choose between Comcast’s pricey “triple play” bundling, or where having Verizon’s extremely fast FiOS connection didn’t mean exorbitant prices, loss of telephone service during power outages, and the inability to switch back to a copper-based service- as they remove the old lines to prevent this.), but also means that the government is more ready to enforce content filtering of a kind that potentially violates rights to net neutrality as well as freedom of speech.

This relative balance of power between state governments and private companies greatly influences (or possibly reflects?) local understandings and practices of “net neutrality”. As I will explore in the next section, deeper questions about “digital rights”- and in particular questions about whether Internet access is a basic right- are greatly influenced by the relative power of NGOs to both businesses which own Internet infrastructure and the governments which regulate them.

The Politics and Power of Internet Infrastructure

We traditionally understand the world to be controlled primarily by technologies of violence and destruction. Who controls these technologies and how they are regulated are arguably the most important factors determining the global political landscape. Nuclear proliferation almost entirely determined international relations during the Cold War era, and North Korea’s recent suggestion about possible nuclear power attest to the continued importance of these technologies. Within the U.S., questions of power through weapons still exerts a dominating force on the politics of the United States. While countries like China do not allow their citizens to own firearms, the U.S. constitution affirms the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. Yet the exact details of whom may keep and bear arms, under what conditions and with what stipulations, is a question being seriously considered in the United States today, and which raises fundamental questions about the power of the government versus the power of the people.

Yet we live in an age where politics and power are driven increasingly by technologies not of violence but of information. Although violent technologies will always remain important, what is becoming increasingly essential to international and national politics and structures of power is the regulation and control of information. In particular, the Internet, that behemoth of information and communication that is quickly gaining control over all previous forms of communication (television, radio, print, telephone, newspaper, mail), is already a technology with political power on the scale of weapons of mass destruction. The following is a consideration of how this new form of information technology is manifesting radically new forms of power, reconfiguring a landscape previously determined largely by technologies of violence.

The Internet is a globalized network composed of various levels of hardware and software, crossing lines of government jurisdiction, and rapidly evolving since it’s birth only a few decades ago. Because of its relative newness and its complex, international nature, the Internet is still a relatively unregulated place, a kind of global “wild west.” And yet- although regulation in the traditional legal sense still remains relatively weak- clear power structures are rapidly emerging and crystallizing around certain aspects of the Internet. In particular, basic Internet infrastructure and what are called “critical Internet resources” are the areas around which these new power structures are emergent and quickly sedimenting. It is at this infrastructural level that the basic nature of the Internet is determined, with huge political implications for state governments, private businesses, and the citizens of the world.

PART 1: INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE.

It is worth spending some time considering the basic infrastructure of the Internet in order to understand how certain power structures arise out of this technological base.

First of all, it is important to note that the Internet was built as a highly distributed network with a large degree of decentralization and flexibility. Yhe Internet was partially designed as a structure of communication meant to allow a maximum sharing of resources across a wide geographical region with the minimum amount of failure or error. With this in mind, “ARPANET”, a project funded by the U.S. defense department, was developed as the early predecessor of the modern Internet. The network utilized flexible information flows and redundancy measures to ensure that parts of the network could be cut out without drastically effecting the entire structure; thus creating a communication network able to potentially deal with a nuclear attack taking out centralized hubs of communication (an ironic example of how technologies of destruction determine even apparently mundane technologies of information).

Contributing to the flexibility of the Internet is that it was designed with what is called “end-to-end architecture”, meaning that the network itself is built with almost no regulation (ie, completely “neutral”) and with only as many protocols etc. as is necessary to make the different components of the Internet compatible. The idea behind this is that Internet users have such a wide variety of different uses and needs for the Internet, that rather than limit the network by building in more features- for example, an automatic encryption feature that might be useful for some users but would simply slow down the processing of users who do not need encryption- that the additional features could be added in at the end (encryption taking place locally on the computers of those who need it). Because the particularized regulation of the Internet is done at the “ends” of the Network, in an “ad hoc” fashion, it makes overall regulation much more difficult to implement. Imagine a toll road that, instead of building the roads such that highway users are more or less forced to pass through and pay the toll, tolls had to be collected by sending individual bills to the homes of each individual user. They system would be incredibly cumbersome, perhaps even to the point of making tolls more costly than profitable.

This basic state of deregulation and flexibility in the technological base of the Internet has led many people to suggest that the Internet is inherently “free” and “egalitarian” (related to the idea that the Internet is inherently revolutionary and democratic). However, this “free” and non-hierarchical Internet infrastructure is managed and regulated by very powerful intermediaries. On top of this infrastructure exist many layers of organization and software to make the Internet usable as we know it, and two of these layers involve highly centralized and powerful intermediaries.

The first if these layers is that of Domain name and numbering. Domain naming and numbering is the basic process which allows information to flow from one side of the world to the other and reach the correct destination. Each individual node in the network has an IP address which other nodes use to contact it. Furthermore, these IP addresses are typically mapped to Domain names, which are what end users use to identify and request contact with another node. This is fairly similar to the idea of a phonebook. The user knows the name of someone they want to contact, they look this name up, and are returned with the address they can use to find them. This is of course an over-simplification; on the Internet, in keeping with its typical structure of distributed and flexible networks, these IP addresses change fairly frequently, many domains (like Google, for example) have large numbers of different IP addresses, etc. (For more information: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/internet-infrastructure5.htm, http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/internet-infrastructure6.htm ).

This complex system of addresses and names, which allow for the organized flows of information across a highly complex international network, is managed almost entirely by a single organization: ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Although their role may seem largely bureaucratic and organizational, this organization is at heart immensely powerful, and holds huge political significance in the world of Internet regulation. To invoke another metaphor, ICANN’s role is sort of similar to the idea of an international map-maker/land-owner, who not only maps out what territory exists and whom it belongs to, but also has the ability to make some of these territories “invisible” or “inaccessible” to the rest of the world, or to take away territories when it believes that the owner does not have a right to them. Like in the real world, these “territories” or domain names are in fact incredibly valuable; consider the value of the domain name “Google.com”. Consider the value lost if ICANN decided to misdirect the paths to “Google.com” even for a few hours. Consider that ICANN can “divest” domain names and IP addresses for sites displaying copyright infringement, selling of illegal drug paraphernalia, and other offensive acts or crimes. In this way, ICANN is in fact a powerful political tool, with the ability to fundamentally shape the content of the Internet and regulate human behavior online. What makes this technical ability all the more politically important is the relationship that ICANN, as a private, non-profit corporation based in California has to the U.S. government. I will explore this particular power relationship in a later section.

The second layer of Internet infrastructure that involves a highly centralized and powerful intermediary is the at the level of the “Internet backbone”. The Internet is essentially composed of linkages between smaller clusters of networks, and these inter-network linkages are the Internet backbone. Originally built by the National Science Foundation, most of these huge fiber optic cables are now privately owned by a small number of Internet Service Providers or ISPs. Those ISPs owning portions of the Internet backbone are typically called “Tier 1” ISPs, and there are only about 5 of them around the entire world.

http://warrington.ufl.edu/centers/purc/purcdocs/papers/0208_Dogan_Vertical_Relations_and.pdf

These Tier 1 companies all agree to share the information flowing through their chunks of the Internet backbone through “peering agreements”. Because each of these Tier 1 ISPs are approximately similar in their size of the market share, and because their interconnection is essential for all parts of the Internet to be connected to all other parts (rather than having 5 fragmentary “internets”), they share this traffic flow with each other free of charge. However, smaller providers must pay a Tier 1 provider to have access to the Internet backbone.

Like ICANN, these Tier 1 providers act as a kind of centralized point of power over an otherwise largely flexible, dispersed, and difficult to control network. Also like ICANN, although these private companies control the basic functioning of the Internet, there seems to be little reason to believe that they will use these powers in any significantly damaging ways. Rather, the current significance of these providers is in a more subtle form of power. Whereas ICANN establishes a precedent for NGO-government interaction in the regulation of the Internet, Tier 1 arrangements are establishing a precedent for highly centralized control of both the backbone of networks, as well as control of the consumer market in terms of both structure and content (horizontal and vertical integration). While horizontal integration is the fundamental characteristic of the Internet (connecting nodes to each other), vertical integration greatly amplifies the power these already very-powerful private business have over consumer access to information and communication technologies. This vertical integration becomes particularly meaningful in its relationship to state governments, which not only allow radical vertical integration, but take advantage of these centralized points of control in order to control and regulate behavior on the Internet.

NEXT: Part 2: Network Neutrality

Walter Benjamin on the Allure of the Photobomb

Wait for it…

“No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistable urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently we, looking back, may rediscover it. ” -Walter Benjamin, “A Little History of Photography”

(Possibly, this may also explain the allure of the disposable camera in the era of Instagram.)

New Media Practices and the 2012 Presidential Elections

The past few posts I have written all belong to a collection of case studies about new media practices and the 2012 elections. I want to collect them all here, and briefly reflect on what these case studies might mean overall for democratic engagement and participation.

#MocktheVote

Practices of political news consumption and production on the Facebook news feed

Live-tweeting democracy

#Ivoted: Documenting the Vote

Reflections:

As was to be expected, these case studies do not provide us with any neat conclusions about the relationship between new media practices and democratic engagement and participation. Across different platforms, different communities, and surrounding different kinds of events, we see very different kinds of practices emerge. Beyond that, each specific practice can suggest multiple possible readings in terms of the implications for democratic practice. To know or measure the intention underlying a practice, or the effects of that practice on a culture, is particularly difficult in the disembodied and widely dispersed world of new media.

Yet there are a few trends that can be identified across these platforms. As I emphasize in the section on Facebook’s news feed, it seems that the realm of the “social” is increasingly becoming entwined with the realm of authoritative news media and politics. Although for many Facebook represents a realm of private life, of leisure, and thus politics is taboo here, the structure of the platform makes it easier than ever to share news and political content. This has the dual effect of giving the individual’s political opinion more authority, and of giving sources of authority more personal relevance by connecting them to the social realm.

Similarly, in the case of “document the vote” practices, we saw the way that “mass social media” can effect huge changes in political mobilization and democratic practice simply by making individual practices visible within a social network. In this way, the authority of strong social ties is more effectively mobilized by social media platforms, and political action takes on greater meaning socially.

Both of these effects mentioned have a clear relation to those kind of events which we hold up as evidence of the democratic power of new media. If we take as our model the revolution that took place in Tahrir Square in 2011, we see that this was partially fomented by the intertwining of the social, news media and politics. “We are all Khaled Said”, the notorious Facebook page created about an Egyptian who was killed by Egyptian politic officers, represented an intertwining of the social and the political, and later was used to spread information about the protests in Tahrir Square. Furthermore, Twitter was famously used by protestors to share information about events as they happened on the ground, and this social, political voice became itself a source of authority as news media organizations began to circulate the content posted here. Even as the repressive media in Egypt tried to undermine the event by false or dismissive reporting, social media platforms allowed individuals to continue to voice their political position, supported by the authority of “citizen journalism”.

Although the situation and the political culture overall is radically different in Egypt than it is here, in both countries the voice of the citizens is upheld as the proper authority to which the media and political authorities should answer. New and social media platforms seem to be scrambling the traditional relations between these three powers, and in particular allowing social networks to have some of the technical power of mass media

However, in many cases we also see that this new authority being granted to social networks is not necessarily used to enhance democratic engagement or political action. In the case of the “mock the vote” practices, we see the way that much of this individually produced and mass-circulated political content is little more than an empty referent, being combined with other empty referents of pop culture to get a cheap laugh. Similarly, the “live tweeting” of political events like the debates seems to actually detract from real political engagement or consideration, in favor of purely “communicative capitalism”, or the broadcasting of messages purely for their own sake.

It seems that many of the democratic and political new media practices being engaged in are still modeled on the traditional structures and practices of mass media; individuals are looking for the biggest audience, pandering for “likes”, trying to increase their “social capital” through a recirculation of powerful cultural symbols and images.  In particular, it seems that in the realm of U.S. government politics the possibility of original thought or language has been systematically snuffed out. “Entertainment media” seem to ironically offer greater room for dialogue and creative engagement than the media of U.S. politics, which permits only a single narrative storyline of us-versus-them. The new media practices of the 2012 elections revealed only two real choices: the utilization of this oppositional narrative to garner social capital, or a removal from all political engagement either via simple tactics of mockery or by blocking out the political noise altogether.

Although technological affordances has shifted the balance of communicative power, there has not yet been a corresponding cultural shift that allows individuals to think creatively about how to use this power outside of the traditional paradigms of mass media, and outside the current narratives of the political landscape. This requires a sort of radical reimagining, a rebuilding of politics and media from the ground up, literally. To escape the highly determined landscape of mass media politics, it may be necessary to actually begin the process offline, unplugged, outside of any kind of “media practice”. This seems to be the hope of movements like Occupy Wall Street, where citizens are encouraged to actually get out from behind a computer and come speak to fellow citizens, to experience an unmediated kind of sociality and political discussion. It seems that in the case of the protests in Tahrir Square, the ultimate full-scale revolution that resulted did not come from demands made on Facebook, plans made by protestors via Twitter, but from the momentum and inspiration of the physical protests themselves:

“Taken aback by their success, once in Tahrir the activists had to work out what to do next. The initial idea was to call for the arrest of the Interior Minister, but the people in the square, most of whom were not part of any political group, were chanting for the removal of the regime. The activists realized they could not call for less than the demonstrators wanted. So the demands of the Revolution were set by the spontaneous chants of the people.” (Idle, p.32)

This unmediated political voice might also be the key to reimagining what a real “rule of the people” would look like here in the U.S., and help us to imagine what kinds of new media practices would reflect and support this kind of democracy.

#Ivoted: Documenting the Vote in the 2012 Elections

In the lengthy and involved media spectacle surrounding the 2012 elections, the day of reckoning is of course voting day. Traditionally, media messaging switches from heated horse-race coverage to “neutral” coverage encouraging people to get out and vote, with live coverage of lines at polls and providing information on polling locations. This year witnessed an interesting new addition to the media’s “rock the vote” message, with individuals using social media to document themselves going through the voting process and encouraging others to do the same.

Youtube encouraged users to send in pictures and videos of them voting, Facebook placed a widget at the top of their page which allowed people to click an “I voted” button, and informed people in their news feed which of their friends had clicked the button. But the most noticeable practice this year was people taking pictures with their mobile phones either of their actual ballot displaying their vote, or proudly displaying “I voted” stickers, and uploading these pictures either to Facebook or the increasingly popular photo-sharing platform Instagram. This practice was so widespread that many traditional news outlets covered the phenomenon, in particular to emphasize the fact that in some states, it is actually illegal to photograph your ballot and it can possibly even be voided if if you do.

The Pew Research Center reported that 22% of registered voters announced their vote via social media (Rainie, 2012). Instagram reported that nearly 100,000 photos posted were tagged #ivoted (Election night on Instagram, 2012). This widespread phenomenon of voting documentation provides provides insight into the relation of new media practices and concrete political action.

This year’s “Document the vote” phenomenon seems to be a natural extension of the practice of handing out “I voted” stickers at polling places to display proof of pride in oneself/the democratic process/one’s candidate/America, and to encourage others to vote as well. Social media allows that “sticker effect” to be amplified around the virtual world.

Miley Cyrus and friend displaying “I voted” stickers on Instagram

Looking closely at the practices of documentation across these different platforms, we can see how some of the important differences already discussed manifest themselves. On Twitter organizations and politicians encouraged others to vote, celebrities publicly documented their vote, and all the “little people” of the internet world helped to create a trending hashtag, #Ivoted.

These displays of civic engagement were all completely public; even those without Twitter accounts could see pictures of Beyonce posing with her ballot, either on her Twitter page or on the multitude of gossip blogs that circulated the image. This means that an incredibly wide audience was encouraged to vote on Twitter via their favorite sources of authority, be it the New York Times, their cousin, Ron Paul, or Miley Cyrus.

Beyonce poses with her ballot

On Facebook, the platform itself was encouraging people to vote via a widget appearing on the top of the Facebook home page. This widget encouraged people to look up their polling place on an app Facebook had created, or to click an “I Voted” button which would not only notify your friends of such, but also used these clicks to create a real-time map of the U.S. showing “blips” of where people were voting.

Of course, Facebook’s large network of strong social ties still are likely to have the strongest effect on voter mobilization. A recent study actually tested the relative effect of this social network on voter mobilization by randomly selecting a small percentage of Facebook users to be exposed only to the “informational” content, providing polling location info and a counter of Facebook users who had voted, but not showing them whom of their friends had voted, and selecting another small percentage to receive neither the information nor the social messages from Facebook. The study found that the group exposed to the informational and social messages were .39% more likely to vote (confirmed by public voting records) than both the group that received the informational message and the control group, suggesting that the real motivator was the social message. They also measured the “social contagion” effect on voting, with results suggesting that reports of voting by strong ties in the network generated an additional 282,000 validated votes compared to the control group. The authors of the study point out that even very small percentages of increased voter mobilization are potentially very important on Facebook, since their network includes tens of millions of potential voters. (Bond, 2012.)

These results reinforce the idea presented previously that political use of Facebook may not be very useful informationally speaking, but is powerful in its ability to encourage general engagement and awareness via strong social ties.

The newcomer to the “document the vote” scene this year was Instagram, a new app that caters to the ability of mobile phone users to visually document their lives and share these photos broadly with their social network or “followers”. Instagram also easily meshes with Facebook and Twitter, with some people choosing to automatically send images from Instagram to their other social networks.

Like Facebook, Instagram is generally oriented to the happenings of everyday life. However, it also takes on some of the qualities of Twitter. Since these pictures are often taken and uploaded by mobile, on-the-go users, they have an important “in the moment” quality about them, amplified by the concreteness of an image rather than a verbal description. In the case of documenting the vote, Instagram, even moreso than Facebook, makes the act of voting seem more pressing, immediate- it gives the viewer the feeling that “This is happening right now!” We can only theorize that this helps activate the notorious “FOMO”, or fear of missing out, a clear effect of social media use. This fear, amplified by the popularity of these Instagram documentations of voting, may help encourage users to get our and vote.

Apart from amplifying the social expectation to vote, it is possible that Instagram and other social media platforms amplify the potential social rewards for voting. This tweet by Glee star Darren Criss, retweeted over 5,000 times, may suggest that the chance for public documentation may in fact be a big motivating factor:

Social media, in many ways, can be seen as a sort of expansion of the sphere of ethical feedback. Although the Internet is notorious for allowing “flaming”, bullying, and other irresponsible actions to be taken under the guise of anonymity, social media seems to have the opposite effect, putting people’s actions and behaviors under sometimes all-too-public scrutiny. But this can be an elective practice as well, providing an opportunity for individuals to display their ethical activities for public approval. In these days, when people seem increasingly inclined to think that their vote doesn’t matter anyway, this potential for social reward can be an important motivator. 

The general practice if self-documentation and blogging can in some ways be seen as a kind of democratic practice. Narcissistic, but also essentially build on cultural notions of the importance of the individual and their voice. The narcissism of inane self-representation via new media can be seen as related to the kind of narcissism that encourages one to think that their vote, their opinion is important and will have an effect on the course of the nation as a whole.

This cultivation of practices of potentially narcissistic self-representation via new media (of which “document the vote” is a part) can be read as either positives or negatives for the cultivation of democratic engagement. The “slacktivism” model would suggest that new media creates this sense of self-importance and the need to voice one’s opinion, but it also satiates it, as a kind of closed loop that encourages more tweeting and more blogging but may never encourage actual political engagement. However, we can also imagine that this sense of self-importance, of self-efficacy, could have the potential to encourage people to make their voice heard by actual voices of authority and power. One might imagine that many of those who participated in the Occupy movement were students who had voted  for Obama in 2008, felt that the election of their candidate signalled that their voices were really being heard, and were disillusioned with the lack of “change” that actually came about from this vote. It is also possible that both of these scenarios are real consequences of growing practices of new media self-representation.

Although it is not currently possible to know all the motivations and effects of the “Document the vote” phenomenon in 2012, we can be sure that it reflects a growing practice of self-representation and documentation via the tools of new and mobile media, which can sometimes cross over into the land of “citizen journalism”. In this case, it also seems evident that this practice helped encourage and mobilize potential voters to take concrete political action. It is still unclear whether this same kind of practice would be as effective for more difficult or politically charged mobilizations.