Abstract

This article examines the appropriation of social media as platforms of alternative journalism by the protestors of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. The Toronto Community Mobilization Network, the network that coordinated the protests, urged participants to broadcast news using Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This particular use of social media is studied in the light of the history and theory of alternative journalism. Analyzing a set of 11,556 tweets, 222 videos, and 3,338 photos, the article assesses user participation in social media protest reporting, as well as the resulting protest accounts. The findings suggest that social media did not facilitate the crowd-sourcing of alternative reporting, except to some extent for Twitter. As with many previous alternative journalistic efforts, reporting was dominated by a relatively small number of users. In turn, the resulting account itself had a strong event-oriented focus, mirroring often-criticized mainstream protest reporting practices.

This application is the first public presentation of the work I’ve been doing together with Ingmar Weber at the Yahoo! labs in Barcelona. The current demo employs static data surrounding last year’s US midterm elections and displays actual (raw) queries. More to follow …

Some telling examples are:

• obama: queries for accomplishments are more left-wing and queries including rumors and obamacare are more right-wing
• tea party racist signs: very left
• best tea party signs: very right

To find out more about have a look at the about page.

This post is the fifth of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

So tools have politics too. Society and internet are closely intertwined; massive amounts of data are put online each day, so Internet is often quite up-to-date. This brings us to the final part: the web as an anticipatory medium.

Let me start with two quick examples in connection with the American elections. When time had come for the presidential nominees to come forward with their candidates for the vice-presidency, those who had been monitoring Wikipedia turned out to know the names of the candidates before they were announced. This was true for Palin as well for Biden.

Another entanglement of the virtual with the real can be found in a study carried out with the Issue Crawler, network location software. A set of web pages concerning a specific issue are entered as starting points. Then all those pages are being crawled, retrieving all their links. Then a method called co-link analysis is applied which, in subsequent iterations of crawling, only retains websites with at least two different sites linking to it. Just like Google, the Issue Crawler sees links as acts of association. This allowed us to track the websites of all democratic and republican presidential candidates since June 2007. The co-link map of all democratic presidential candidates attracted particular attention. It is common knowledge that Obama had a brilliant social networking strategy, where a lot of work was done locally, ‘from the ground’. When you look at subsequent Issue Crawler maps, you will clearly notice Obama had the same tactics online where Obama and web 2.0 websites take over the democratic candidates’ space, long before Obama got chosen to be the democratic nominee for the presidential elections.

The first maps show a strong presence in the liberal blogosphere (the place of gossip, activism, etcetera),

then, as the primaries are approaching, the different candidates become visible on the map,

and then very soon Obama’s strong presence, with sub sites, as well as a number of web 2.0 devices are noticeable.

This trend continues until March and April, when we see that the network is entirely dominated by Obama and Web 2.0 (at that time, Obama was not yet sure of his nomination).

These maps clearly demonstrate Obama’s online tactics: web 2.0 sites, connecting and reflecting the off-line behavior of good social networking.

Remember that in all maps shown the starting points for the crawls, and thus the maps, were the same: the homepage of each democratic candidate. In subsequent crawls, other moments in time, you clearly see obama taking over the network; even before the primaries – before Obama was chosen by the democrats as their presidential nominee!

This simple method, only allowing sites on the map if at least two other sites link to it, unveiled Obama’s tactics at a rather early stage . This method can be seen as a rhetorical tool. It is our angle, or cadrage, of the documentation of online strategies: it is our way of framing the story. Since the Issue Crawler was conceived in 1999 this method has proven solid in finding and representing different actors in network and debates. For instance: NGOs associate readily with companies, but those in turn hardly ever associate with NGOs.

So, the Issue Crawler tells a story from a certain viewpoint, and so has its built in politics, giving it its story telling power.

Journalists also recognized the anticipatory power of the web by regularly looking at Google’s Zeitgeist – an ever updating chart of the terms most searched for by Google’s users. According to an article by NRC handelsblad (November 8, 2008) political journalists regularly checked Google Trends to see which were the most popular terms looked for. Obama turned out to be more popular than McCain (http://www.google.com/trends?q=obama%2C+mccain). Nowadays all journalists have a blog and want to be read, so obviously they wrote more about Obama. He was what people were looking for, and journalists writing about Obama, mentioning him in their title would be read more (in this way having more impact, becoming more polpular, and often also earning more because of increased viewing of their embedded page ads). So tools can influence politics as well. Writing about Obama and Google trends became a vicious circle.

Another great example of the web as an anticipatory medium is Google Flu. Google noticed that when people are feeling sick they often query the web before going to the doctor. Google transformed this data into a prediction of flu epidemics at http://google.org/flutrends where past flu outbreaks are overlaid with this year’s prediction. Google claims they can detect flu outbreaks two weeks before the regular channels (e.g. hospital emergency rooms).

At the start of this presentation I claimed the internet is embedded in society. I then stated that the internet is more than one single medium. We have seen there is now more information available which can be accessed faster, but we should not loose sight of the political in and the politics of engines and tools when doing research with or about the web: all tools, engines and spheres need a specific approach.

Of course not everything is reflected on the web. Probably the internet penetration rates are the clearest example of this. Below, the first infographic depict the countries of the world scaled by the percentage of internet penetration in that country. The second depicts the same but with the percentage, and thus scale, inverted.

To conclude this series: different questions can be asked and answered with different media; they may be indexed by different engines and through different kinds of tools. Just think back at Cassian Harrison’s ‘Britain from Above‘, told with GPS. He used this particular medium for his specific problem: how to show patterns of movement in big geographical areas?

This post is the fourth of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

The previous examples clearly showed the built-in politics of engines: there are specific rankings, specific media on which the engines work and different kinds of source sets, amongst other things.

Apart from engines with built-in politics we are not always aware of, tools can also be devised for a specific kind of politics.

The research tool par excellence, devised for a specific kind of politics, is Wikiscanner. It is designed for scandal research and so enables you to answer specific kinds of questions. Wikiscanner is built on top of Wikipedia and uses a database linking IP addresses to companies. Wikipedia identifies the edits of non logged in users by the computer’s IP address used for the edit. By designing a tool linking the edits of Wikipedia to the editing company, Wikiscanner attracted a lot of press attention when users started looking for specific companies and their edits. The CIA, Scientology, Exxon Mobil, the BBC, and Diebold were all found to favorably edit entries concerning their own company. In Holland the mainstream press started writing about Wikiscanner when it turned out that the Royal Palace had edited the Mabel Wisse Smit entry. Mabel’s page on the English Wikipedia reported about the trial against her. In this particular paragraph, members of the Royal House had changed the accusations from ‘false and incomplete information’ into simply ‘incomplete information’. It is an offence to lie in court, and understandibly the Royals did not want this to be common knowledge – accessible on Wikipedia. Have a look at the edit at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/f.php?pagetitle=Princess_Mabel_of_Orange-Nassau, then clicking ‘Koninklijk Paleis Huis Ten Bosch’.

So tools have politics too. Society and internet are closely intertwined; massive amounts of data are put online each day, so Internet is often quite up-to-date. This brings us to the final part: the web as an anticipatory medium.

This post is the third of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

Now that we have discussed researching the political in the web, let us have a look at the politics of engines to illustrate the need for medium specific methods on the web.

Before Google, search engines would rank paying customers higher. In those days search engines were not too good anyway, but boosting paid results would lead users to a lot of mischief. Then came Google, which recognized hyperlinks as an act of association. Their page rank algorithm measured the relative importance of web pages within a set of hyperlinked documents. Or in simple terms: if a webpage received a lot of hyperlinks it was bound to be important, given that the pages linking to that page were also important (in terms of the number of hyperlinks received). Google thus took an egalitarian approach to ordering and ranking the web and promised never to boost paid results. Their company motto became “don’t be evil”. But in the end Google wanted to expand to China, a totalitarian regime with a lot of censorship. To enter the Chinese market Google had to censor its search results by altering the results’ rankings.

Have a look at this url: http://www.langreiter.com/exec/google-vs-google.html?q=hungary. This service queries google.com and google.cn, comparing the results. Each dot is a search result; a blue line shows the same search result in google.com and google.cn Hungary is a quite neutral query for the Chinese, so you see many results being equal and and many of those with a similar rank. When http://www.langreiter.com/exec/google-vs-google.html?q=tiananmen is queried, however, you immediately see that the results are completely different and that those who are equal have a completely different ranking. This clearly is an example of politics built into the Google engine.

Let us now have a look at http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/02/12/weekinreview/20060212kahn_graph.html:

This research was carried out by the New York Times in 2006; it clearly shows the difference in image results for the same query, Tiananmen, in the American and Chinese versions of Google’s image search. The Chinese version only shows peaceful pictures of the square which in the whole Western world is known for its massacre by the Chinese government on Chinese citizens. The American Google version shows the iconic image of the individual who stood up against a whole platoon of tanks. Note, however, that the results of both Google Image search versions depict a strong ideology.

Let us recapitulate for a moment: we started off by stating that internet reflects society. Sometimes, too, traditional political research can be pursued when the medium is digitalized. Often, however, the political gets built into engines. It is also important to understand that the internet is not one single medium and that each medium has its own format with its own different affordances. Think for example about how the following has been digitalized, changed, or started on the internet: newspapers (e.g. Google News), encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia), pictures (e.g. Flickr), instant messaging for a quick chat, Twitter for status updates, etcetera.

The internet has changed the amount of data and the access to it. Engines typically aggregate content of a specific medium (pictures, news, blogs, tweets, …) and they rank and privilege certain content. It is also important to know that all engines do it in a different way: they all have their own way of aggregating, ranking, and representing; they all have their own politics: some rank by paid results, some by inlinks, some by numbers of sources, some by the amount of attention, some by date.. The questions then becomes: “how stable are the results coming from this tool used by everybody?” In most countries with a high internet penetration, Google is the leading search engine, through which most people access internet (in Holland more than 90% of the population uses Google as their default search engine).

In a research subject called Google studies, we wondered how steady Google’s results were for a particular query; so we made a tool called the Issue Dramaturg. This tool queries Google each day on specific phrases. Google in turn gives us a maximum of 1000 results per query, which we store in a database. We then look at the fluctuation in the ranking of websites for the queries we monitor. One day, we noticed that 911truth.org, an umbrella site for skeptics of the official 9/11 explanation, did not figure any more in the results for the 9/11 query, when before 911truth.org always snugly figured in the top 10 returns for that query. With the Issue Dramaturg, we were able to document the disappearance from Google of an entire website. Two weeks later, 911truth.org was back in the rankings.

Although there are different explanations about the disappearance (linking policy of 9/11 or plain conspiracy), it is clear that Google has its own built in politics. But Google is not our main point here, the main point is that each piece of software has its own built in politics, it enables certain actions and limits others.

By now, it is clear that each engine does something, that each engine has its own set of rules. However, each engine also works on a particular medium. An indexing mechanism (for example a search engine) claiming to give access to all available digital content of a particular medium, generates what we at DMI call a sphere. Google News for example may be considered to give access to the news sphere.

To shed light on the difference of spheres, let us have a look at the DMI research concerning animals in relation to climate change. Firstly, a list of endangered animals was compiled on the basis of the WWF, Greenpeace and LiveScience web sites. Secondly, we added the cow as a popular animal in relation to climate change (because of its methane production, a greenhouse gas). Then, different engines aggregating different media were queried for all these animals.

The following infographic shows a tag cloud of animals associated with climate change in the newssphere. The names of the animals are scaled in proportion to the number of results for the query ‘animal + “climate change”’ in Google News, i.e. their occurrence in the news sphere. It is clear the news made the polar bear into an icon.

When the same queries are input to Google, i.e. the web in general or the websphere, the results are more egalitarian: no particular animal stands out.

Looking further into the occurrence of animals in a particular sphere, DMI searched for the imagery of animals in relation to climate change. The following infographic shows images, scaled like a tag cloud, for the news sphere. Striking in this research was the professionality of the content and approach in this sphere.

The same queries for images in the blogosphere resulted in a lot of amateur photographs. The endangered animals and the cow are no top returns anymore, but the activists dressing up like endangered animals and the activist pets are.

Different engines aggregate different types of content (other kinds of media) and favor different kinds of information. This again demonstrates the importance of a medium specific approach . But even engines working in the same sphere, or on the same medium, probably will not show the same results for the same query. This easily becomes clear by looking at the following infographic . It shows the results for the same query (mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl) in three different engines (Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Google). Only 5% results overlap in all engines, and only 19% overlaps in the engines specifically tailored for the blogosphere. Even in the same information space, using the same medium, the engines often deliver different results. This may be attributed to ranking mechanisms, but also to how and what the engine aggregates.

The previous examples clearly showed the built-in politics of engines: there are specific rankings, specific media on which the engines work and different kinds of source sets, amongst other things.

Apart from engines with built-in politics we are not always aware of, tools can also be devised for a specific kind of politics.

Next: the politics of tools

This post is the second of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

Let us go on by applying traditional controversy research to the web. One of the media digitalized and put onto the web are newspapers. Google News aggregates and ranks stories from thousands of international newspapers. The ranking is very traditional: by date, as well as by number of readers. Via Google as an interface, access to newspapers has changed: they are searchable, faster to consult, they contain more than in your local news outlet, national and language editions may be compared, etcetera.

In “Occupied and Unoccupied Media Spaces”, Anat Ben-David researched politics in a very traditional sense, comparing newspapers on the use of language and approach of an issue. Google News enabled her to make a traditional co-occurence analysis of terms and newspapers; she queried Google News for specific terms and counted the results per source. It is clear that Google News greatly helped her, as Anat did not have to get issues of all Palestinian, Israeli, and international newspapers and then go through all articles mentioning one of the terms.

In “Image Clash”, Anat Ben-David conducted similar research on Google Images: she compared the results for two different connotations of the same item: ‘Apartheid Wall’ vs ‘Security Fence’. The associated imagery clearly shows the term’s connotations.

Taking research into politics on the web one step further, NRC Handelsblad published an in-house study of home-grown right-wing Websites over the past few years (NRC Handelsblad, August 24, 2007). The most amazing line in the article, which seemed unusual for those accustomed to reading at least implicit distinctions between ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’, read: “The Internet reflects the increasing toughening up [of the right-wing] in the Netherlands.” Thus here the Web becomes the site to study social trends. The question now turns into “how improbable is it to study right-wing movement trends without the Internet”?

Because of the internet, the amount of data explodes. Not only traditional research data (like geographical or census data) are digitalized; the ubiquity of the web also generates new kinds of data. As may be gathered from the NRC example, where one previously would embed himself with the ‘right-wing’ groups but report from a distance, the ‘digital methods’ question becomes how to collect and analyze data and distill trends from the web.

In journalism often the question about the journalists’ methods concerns the trustworthiness of a source. Going from one source to another once was a ‘social network’ issue. Who else should I speak to? That’s the question at the end of the interview, if trust had been established. The relationship between ‘who should I speak to’ and ‘who else do you link to’ is asymmetrical in journalism, but it is the question asked by search engines when recommending information. How to ponder the difference between source recommendations from verbal and online links? Is search the beginning of the quest for information, ending up with some grounded interview reality beyond the net, happily maintaining the divide between the real and the virtual? Or is that too simplistic? Our ideal source set divide (real or virtual, grounded or googled) raises the question of what’s next. What do we ‘look up’ after concluding the interview, to check the reality? At DMI we take a ‘natively digital’, medium specific, approach; e.g. by focusing on the link. It is hardly ever possible to simply import methods from other disciplines and assume that they will work on the internet as well.

Next: the politics of engines.

This post is the first of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

To start with, let us have a look at this AP’s picture (click for higher resolution). :

Most people will not recognize this as a picture of Barack Obama addressing Berlin on 26 July 2008. The same picture in a newspaper would give the viewer more context in spite of the lack of geographical features and the fact that Obama’s picture is taken from behind. The point is that the medium photography is completely different from say a newspaper where a picture can get context, or a radio or a video report about the same event. Each medium has a different format which allows for different information to be represented.

Interesting about this picture are the incredible number of (consumer) cameras pointed at Obama. It makes you wonder what those cameras ‘see’. So many camera’s, so many stories.

Lets query Flickr, a popular photo sharing service, for ‘obama berlin july’: http://flickr.com/search/?q=obama+berlin+july&z=t Sorting the pictures on relevance immediately gives you a lot of pictures taken at the same place and the same time, but from a different perspective . Clicking on any of those pictures will show you more pictures of the same day at the same place, telling stories from the users who took and uploaded the picture. Flickr, as a service, changed the medium of photography. It is now possible to upload your photo to the web immediately after shooting it, compared to the long development time of photography on film. Flickr also made it possible to tag, rate, rank, geotag and comment on pictures. Moreover, Flickr enables you to easily search pictures, not on the basis of visual features (yet), but of the previously mentioned metadata.

This example shows clearly that society is embedded in the web. This is exactly the premise of our research with the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI). Working with the web as a reflection from the off-line is in stark contrast with previous theories about the web as cyberspace – some sort of a separate space. The internet these days augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it. Instead of becoming a separate cyberspace, our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life. If the web thus reflects the off-line to a great extent the question becomes: ‘how can the Internet be made to show what is happening in society?’

In what follows I will give a couple of examples of how the internet can be used to investigate politics. Firstly I will look for the political in the web, then I will describe the politics of engines and the politics of tools. Finally I will show how the web may be used as an anticipatory medium.

Lets start of with the political in the web.

Let me present myself first: I am Erik Borra, researcher and lead programmer at Govcom.org – a foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political web tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative – the New Media PhD program of the University of Amsterdam. I have a MSc in Artificial Intelligence and am preparing a MA in New Media Studies.

In my presentation I have addressed five points, which I have written out in five posts: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

The concept WALLED GARDEN addresses issues of identity, mobile communities and networks by focussing on the tendency towards online gated and closed communities. How does this affect the (in)accessibility of information and knowledge?

Basically the question we (DMI) asked is “given web2.0 sites as walled gardens, how many of it’s content is accessible from outside that specific walled garden (platform)”. We found this service usernamecheck.com, which checks if a given username is taken on a whole set of sites.

We extended this service, in the light of the Walled Garden conference, by querying usernames for their existence in all these services. For each service where the username is taken or active, we’ll query google for the name in the service and give back a ranked list of web2.0 services ‘leaking’ information about you.

You can try it yourself at leakygarden.net.

It would be really nice to do a followup by getting a representative sample of usernames from each of these services and querying them all in a search engine for ‘leaky content’. This touches questions of which sites feed whom, which sites allow only content to come in but not to get out, etc.

In this respect others of the DMI team started tracing and visualizing data flows of information between these walled garderns – which information goes in, and which information goes out. You will be able to find their results here soon.

vBird is a social bird which likes to fly, but cannot; it needs people to help it fly. The vBird project wished to build upon the successful by poly-xelor. The vBird’s heart has two parts: a camera with a wireless transmitter and a bluetooth Arduino with a serial RFID reader, a Lilypad accelerometer, and some leds. The former streams the flight to the vBird’s nest, the latter is used to identify the thrower and receiver of the vBird (by the RFID reader and the tags of the throwers). The accelerometer detects if the vBird is being thrown, flying, or being catched; an appropriate sound is then send out through the speakers in the nest (‘nice to meet you’, ‘wheeeeee’). The leds are used as the eyes.

Because we knew who threw the bird (because of the embedded RFID reader), we could upload the video fragments captured by the vBird to the appropirate profiles in the picnic network. The idea was powerful and the technique worked as a prototype. However, throwing hardware needs solid casing and a lot of stuff broke during the proces. It would have been better also to use a hi-speed camera as our current camera did not have a high enough sample rate to provide really cool videos. A couple of shots were quite nice though, of which you can find some here: with the flash interface or as a playlist of movies.

All in all it was a fun project, and we had a good team. As a prototype it worked quite well, to be fool proof it would need some tweaks. If you want to know more about the vBird, check out our page at Mediamatic. All the code for the vBird can be found here. And of course, the other teams made really nice projects too, like a physical mario cart, a google elevator contest, the ik-Run, breeders, a mobile massage couch, and more

Last year @ mediamatic’s hackerscamp we made iTea, an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. In the coffee cup on top of the table, you can place your rfid tag – which is given to you at the entrance of the conference and linked to a social network – and the table will start to display information about you – like an oracle.