April 29-30, 2005 - Hefter Center Milwaukee, WI
2005 Speakers:
Richard Bartle (University of Essex, design) is the original creator of the MUD and one of the world’s foremost virtual world designers.
Why Governments aren't Gods and Gods aren't Governments
Virtual worlds (also known as MMORPGs, MMOGs and other acronyms) pose unique questions regarding their governance, central to which is the status of the designers of these worlds. The currently-solidifying legal establishment view is that the designers are the effective government of their respective creations but are themselves subject to the laws of whatever real-world government asserts jurisdiction. The players of virtual worlds, however, while agreeing that real-world governments take precedence, have traditionally not considered designers to be acting as governments; rather they regard them as deities for that (virtual) reality. This paper argues that the players' view is the better metaphor, insofar as it leads to better virtual worlds than does the designers-as-government model.
Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology, design) creates political games for educational and campaign use.
Playing Politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism, and Advocacy
Videogames have dominated popular culture for some time, but only in 2004 did they make a significant break into the world of politics, advocacy, and activism. This paper provides an overview of a variety of types of games used for political speech, from endorsed party messages to activist dissent. After explaining the state of the field, I discuss approaches to design and measure success for such artifacts. While some political opinion is black and white, most issues occupy grey areas, heavily influenced by other public policy issues. Can healthcare reform really be separated from taxation, national budgeting, tort reform, and social security reform? Far from neatly isolated problems, policy issues are complex systems that recombine and interrelate with one another. In particular, I will interrogate how videogames afford a new perspective on political issues, since they are especially effective at representing complex systems. Central to the process of creating and understanding such games is an understanding of “procedural rhetoric” — the way that a videogame embodies ideology in its computational structure. By understanding how games express rhetoric in their rules, we not only gain a critical vantage point on videogame artifacts, but also we can begin to consider how to design games whose primary purpose is to editorialize, teach, and make political statements.
e-mail / websites: www.lcc.gatech.edu/~bogost
Sandra Braman (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, communication) does research on the macro-level effects of digital technologies and their policy implications.
From Governance to Government to Governmentality:
The Regulatory Roles of Cyberspace in the Post-Law Era
Law as we commonly think of it -- socially produced, the subject of negotiation and interpretation and, at least in its ideal forms, transparent -- is a product of the modern nation-state. With the transformation to a postmodern informational state, therefore, it should not be surprising that both the nature of law and its relationships with society are also undergoing change. Familiar faces of the law of course remain. However, the globalization, privatization, and obscuring of law via complexity, on one hand, and organizational fiat, on the other are all processes by which the surface forms of the law are being emptied of effectiveness while other structural forces are gaining in strength. This paper will offer a theoretical frame for the Command Lines conference by contextualizing emergent regulatory aspects of the design of the information infrastructure, the activities that take place within cyberspace, and global electronic flows of information and communication vis a vis other qualitative changes in the nature of constitutive decision-making. These manifest themselves in the formal laws of government, the formal and informal governance mechanisms of state and non-state actors, and the cultural practices of governmentality that sustain and enable both governance and government.
Edward Castronova (Indiana University, economics) analyzes the economies and other aspects of synthetic worlds.
The Social Question: Games for People Left Behind
In the late 19th century, the "Social Question" of what to do about the widening income gap became the dominant issue of governance, capable, if not resolved, of toppling the entire political order. The human dynamic behind the Social Question appears whenever we play a persistent, open-ended game of competitive resource acquisition with rewards: since rewards are also resources for further acquisition, those who pull ahead at the start acquire an advantage that they never relinquish. Those left behind become dissatisfied and either quit the game or demand a change in the rules. In the context of real-world governance, these are, respectively, the sentiments behind violent and peaceful opposition. In the context of synthetic world governance, the same sentiments lead respectively to falling participation rates and campaigns for changes in the code. This kind of user discontent is as important for the owners of Secondary Worlds as it has been for governments in the Primary World: satisfying the mass of those who do not win competitive games is a matter of sheer survival. This paper considers different ways of making persistent competitive games fulfilling for everyone, win or lose, by drawing on lessons from contemporary political economy and professional sports.
Leopoldina Fortunati (University of Udine, communication) does research on issues raised by mobile information and communication technologies across cultures.
User Design and the Democratization of the Mobile Phone
When the mobile phone was first introduced into Italy, it was considered a vulgar technology used only by those at the margins of society. Today, however, the mobile phone is used across all Italian social classes and is considered highly fashionable. This transformation in perceptions of this technology -- and, therefore, its uses -- can usefully be understood as, simultaneously, the democratization of the mobile telephone. One of the most important factors that made this technology more acceptable in Italian society was its redesign as a material object, undertaken in response to the actual needs and practices of users. Once individual users found their own identities and desires reflected in the mobile telephone, they were far more likely to incorporate this technology into their personal ecologies. Even though mobile telephones are very much the product of large industrial organizations, this case also demonstrates the contribution of users to design of the technological environment that then in turn governs their own behaviors.
Alexander Galloway (New York University, communication) writes on digital media and its reliance on technical protocols.
How Machines Govern
This analysis aims to derive general principles for understanding governance in the information age through an examination of the global computer networks that facilitate it. Computer networks are created via shared technical standards called protocols. These protocols exhibit several key characteristics, including openness, flexibility, robustness, and voluntary adoption. While computer networks such as the Internet were originally invented to avoid specific social and political threats during the height of the cold war, today networks suffer from a host of new vulnerabilities, and likewise produce their own political solutions. Computer viruses provide a case study for understanding these new vulnerabilities and the future political challenges posed by networks of all kinds.
Eric Goldman (Marquette University, law) was previously General Counsel of Epinions, Inc. in Brisbane, CA and, before that, a technology transactions and Internet lawyer at Cooley Godward LLP in Palo Alto, CA. Recent research publications have dealt with such internet governance issues as spam, regulation of warez trading, and internet trademark law.
Panel Chair, Governing Architecture
Email: eric.goldman@marquette.edu
Website: http://law.marquette.edu/cgi-bin/site.pl?10905&userID=729
Lane Hall (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, visual arts )works collaboratively with Lisa Moline on print and multimedia site-specific installations that are responsive to architectural and cultural settings. Through the non-sentimental depiction of nature - primarily animals and their traces – Hall and Moline explore the boundaries between the "natural" and the technological. From cosmological maps and astronomy, radical enlargements of bacteria and parasites, to the flora and fauna of the suburban landscape, they explore issues of scale, representation, and the mapping of knowledge.
Introduction, Public Talk
Email: lanehall@uwm.edu
Website: www.badscience.org
Robin Harper (Linden Lab) is Senior Vice President for Community and Support, and is responsible for the management of the online community of Second Life, a virtual world created by Linden Lab.
Governance in a Virtual World: Cases and
Conundrums from Second Life
Email: robin@lindenlab.com
Website: http://www.secondlife.com
John Horrigan (Pew Foundation) is Director of Research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Pew Survey Research Findings Related to Internet Governance
Stewart David Ikeda (IMDiversity.com, vice-president) is vice president of a leading multicultural media publisher and diversity-oriented recruitment e-business, and author of What the Scarecrow Said. He is also a co-founder of the Asian Pacific American Creative Coalition, a national progressive politics organization.
Panel Chair, Governing Users
Email: stewartikeda@sbcglobal.net
Website: http://www.stewartikeda.com
Rob Kitchin (National University of Ireland, geography) specializes in the social geography of technology.
Code, Everyday Life, and Mundane Governance
In this paper we detail how the practices of everyday life - domestic living, working, communicating, travelling, and consumption - are increasingly mediated and disciplined by software and distributed management systems. Despite the widespread intrusion of new forms of regulatory mechanisms and procedures - pin numbers, swipe cards, transponder fobs, id cards, biometrics, networked surveillance cameras - they have largely been greeted with ambivalence or welcomed, rather than resisted, quickly becoming a banal part of everyday living. We argue that these powerful new forms of mundane governance gain their banality because they are accompanied by a sophisticated discursive regime that blends discourses of safety, security, efficiency, anti-fraud, citizenship, productivity, reliability, flexibility, economic rationality, and competitive advantage. In short, citizens are seduced by the so-called 'benefits' of new forms of governance at the same time as they are disciplined by them. This enables 'control creep' and the introduction of further, more pervasive systems.
Paper co-authored with Martin Dodge.
e-mail / websites: www.may.ie/staff/rkitchin
Hans Klein (Georgia Institute of Technology, public policy) looks at interactions between the technological architecture of the information infrastructure and its governance.
System Architecture, Geography, and Global Internet Governance
Today's widespread debates over global governance reflect an underlying mismatch of geography. The functional geography of global systems (e.g. trade, environment, communications) diverges from the political geography of nation states. The Internet illustrates this in an extreme form: its functionality extends globally, while the regulatory authority of national governments is constrained by territorial boundaries. However, the Internet is more spatially defined than is commonly believed: the architecture of the domain name system (DNS) defines a logical geography of both function and of control, and that geography coincides to a significant degree with the nation state system. In this paper I explain how a system architecture creates a functional geography, I compare the Internet's functional geography and the world's political geography, and I assess policy makers' attempts to align the two in order to achieve a global capacity for regulation. The empirical focus is on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and its relations between national governments as it tries to secure contracts for the management of country code domain names. Insights from the Internet system architecture apply to other global systems, such as transport, navigation, and energy.
Marwan Kraidy (American University, communication) is an expert on cultural consequences of globalization.
Inter-Media Dynamics and Reality Television in the Arab Region
The advent of new media has altered the information dynamics that shape public discourse. Convergence, miniaturization, personalization, interactivity, and mobility have blurred the boundaries between producers, consumers, and regulators of information. The role and impact of old mass media such as radio, television and the press, has changed as a result of their interaction with electronic mail, cellular phones, digital cameras, among others. Through an examination of public discourse surrounding Star Academy, the most popular and most controversial program in Arab television history, this paper explores how dynamics of information between different media have shaped the Arab public sphere. Based on five months of fieldwork in 2004, the analysis focuses on electronic fatwas, press commentary, new legislation to 'protect morality', SMS messages from fans, cellular phone voting, participatory television talk-shows, and media marketing strategies. The following questions will be addressed: What inter-media (including the Internet, cellular phones and SMS, television, and the press) dynamics are triggered by media events such as Star Academy? What new articulations between political, cultural religious and commercial factors do these dynamics enable, and how do these new links alter Arab public discourse? The conclusion will seek to build a model of inter-media dynamics.
Greg Lastowka (Rutgers School of Law, cyberlaw) focuses on the regulation of information and technology, with an emphasis on the laws of trademark and copyright.
The Jurisdiction of Play
Our paper examines the law and policy of massively multi-player online role-playing games (“MMORPGs”), an emerging form of internet community. In the first part of our paper, we conclude, based on traditional analyses of jurisdictional theory, that MMORPGs should lay claim to jurisdictional independence. There are two reasons for this. First, MMORPGs are new, socially real, spaces. They form a meaningfully separate context where injuries occur. Second, MMORPG are styled as games. Game spaces, from the standpoint of law, are often perceived as separate jurisdictional spaces. In the second part of our paper, we ask whether, if we conclude that MMORPGs are separate jurisdictions, this conclusion raises troubling issues for policy. MMORPGs are marketed as new frontiers. They promise liberation from the constraints of physical identity, social conformity, and boredom. In a more accurate sense, however, MMORPGs are frontiers because they evade normal legal policing and facilitate exploitation. Within virtual worlds, exploiters are printing counterfeit currencies, defrauding victims, and engaging in elaborate forms of social and identity experimentation that are forbidden within physical space. In light of our jurisdictional conclusions, these new practices pose vexing questions about the relation of law and play. First, should the law concern itself with regulating socially valuable illusions? Second, what are the limits of the utility of law in structuring worlds of play? In other words, is there some fundamental tension between the formalist, positivist, and bureaucratic mechanism of law and the transgressive, experimental, and fundamentally ambiguous jurisdiction of play?
Paper co-authored with Dan Hunter.
e-mail / websites: www.chaihana.com/pers.html
www.terranova.blogs.comDavid Levy (University of Washington, computer science/book arts) studies the impact of digital technologies on the quality of life.
More, Faster, Better?
As digital technologies and practices continue to mature, and are more broadly adopted, we are becoming increasingly aware of the downside - some would say the dark side - of these powerful new modes of communicating and acting. Greater access to information of all kinds is leading many people to feel overloaded and overwhelmed. Greater availability of information sources and devices vying for people's attention further fragments one of our most valuable and limited resources: our conscious attention or awareness. The range of requests, demands, and opportunities coming through these devices contributes to a disturbing, and counterproductive, sense of busyness. And one of the strongest selling points of the technologies, the speed with which they allow us to operate, worries people not just because "speed kills," but because the pace of life seems to be accelerating, with no endpoint in sight. Increasingly, various negative effects of these developments are being noted: on physical and psychological health, on social cohesion, and on people's general sense of satisfaction and well-being. In this paper I want to explore some of the implications and consequences of these phenomena for individual and collective governance. In what ways are these phenomena acting as a form of social control? If we want to moderate or counteract them, where are the likely pressure points or choice points, individually and collectively?
Thomas Malaby (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, anthropology) studies the role of games and contingency in society.
Coding Control: Ethics and Contingency in the Production of Online Worlds
Approximately 8 million people worldwide regularly participate in persistent, graphically-realized, online virtual worlds (including Everquest, UltimaOnline, SecondLife, and Lineage). Originally built on computer game platforms, these worlds are in many respects the most viable online arenas for broad-based social action; their participants pursue lasting social relations as well as globally-consequential economic activities that elide the boundary between offline and online experience. Legal scholars and policy makers have begun to wonder if (and in some cases, how) offline laws concerning property, free speech, vice, and the like should apply. Yet amidst this increasing scrutiny, the producers of these worlds themselves are already confronting in practical terms emergent ethical and other challenges (and implementing solutions) as they seek to foster their worlds' stability and growth. How are they doing this, and in particular how are they developing their own ethical position as those effectively in ultimate control? This paper, based on preliminary ethnographic research with a group of such producers, will answer this question and consider to what degree this position may be rooted in modernist conceptions of agency, contingency, and control.
Helen Nissenbaum (New York University, communication) conducts research in the social, ethical, and political dimensions of information and communications technology.
Values at Play: Method and Application
The idea that values may be embodied in technical systems has taken root in a variety of disciplinary approaches to the study of technology and humanity. A pragmatic turn from this largely descriptive posture sets forth values as a design aspiration. Yet significant epistemological and methodological burdens face even the most conscientious designers. In this paper, I outline the three central elements of a systematic approach to incorporating values in the design process: discovery, implementation, and verification. These elements are articulated and applied to RAPUNSEL, a research project to design and build a game environment for teaching middle-school aged girls to program computers,In applying these elements to a socially-oriented game, we gain understanding of the variety of sources of values (especially in socially oriented software), the many contingencies of embodying values in concrete form, and the complex interplay between a system and context of use.
Tasha G. Oren (University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, english) is the author of Demon in the Box: Jews, Arabs, Politics and Culture in the Making of Israeli Television (Rutgers University Press), co-editor of Global Currents: Media and Technology Now (Rutgers University Press) and East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (New York University Press). She researches and teaches courses in Film and Media Theory, Globalization, Media history, screenwriting, and Popular Culture.
Panel Chair, Governance Crossing Over
Email: tgoren@uwm.edu
Website: http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/English/film/people/oren.html
Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum, digital art) writes extensively on new media, net art, information architecture, hypermedia, and hyperfiction.
Digital Art/Public Art: The Networked Commons
The talk will give an overview of the ways in which digital art has expanded, challenged, or even redefined notions of public art and supported the concept of a networked commons. Crucial to this concept are issues of agency within online, networked "systems" and "communities," which are traditionally understood in opposition to the privileging of the individual. Electronic networks enable exchange and collectivist strategies that can question existing structures of power and governance. Networks will be examined as public spaces that offer enhanced possibilities of interventions and of archiving and filtering these interventions over time in an ongoing process. Among the topics to be discussed will be networked activism and tactical response as well as artistic practice that merges physical and virtual space and augments physical sites and existing architectures.
websites: artport.whitney.org
publications: Christiane Paul, Digital Art
Mat Rappaport (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, digital media) is a multimedia artist who explores the space between experience and memory formation through the use of immersive, interactive and media based structures that implicate the viewer’s own re/collective processes.
Panel Chair, Mundane Governance
email: mat@meme01.com
Websites: http://www.meme01.com
Jonathan Sterne (McGill University, history/cultural studies) is an expert on the history of aural technologies and the aural environment.
Command Tones: Acoustic Space and the Ordering of Motion
Recent scholarship in sound studies has shown the ways in which auditory cues (such as bells) and auditory frameworks (such as church architecture) organized social life in early modern communities. This paper takes the questions raised regarding these earlier moments forward to the present day. Institutions of all sorts now use auditory cues to organize everyday flows of movement. Three short case studies of this phenomenon – automated telephone menus, recorded messages that instruct passengers on airport trams and subways, and programmed music – reveal the morphological similarities between corporations and more “public” institutions in terms of their attempts to regulate and order everyday practice. To better understand this process, we need to rethink central analytical categories like “mediated” and “unmediated” or “virtual” and “real.”
T.L. Taylor (IT University of Copenhagen, digital aesthetics/communication) focuses her research on the social and political dimensions of virtual worlds.
Beyond Management: Participatory Governance in Emergent Player Culture
This paper will take up the issue of the relationship between players and the owners of the MMOG virtual worlds they inhabit. While much of the language around these large scale communities currently focuses on "management", I will propose we consider a more radical framework - that of participatory governance. The tendency to see these complex social systems as almost mechanical in nature has led to a kind of preoccupation with creating or retrofitting systems which can be constantly monitored, tuned, regulated, and controlled. Though the language often turns to things like "cheating", "griefing", disruption of the magic circle, etc. I would suggest that the underlying anxiety about unruliness, transgressiveness, and the emergent nature of these spaces as sites of culture needs to be more fully addressed. Players are central productive agents in game culture and more progressive models are needed for understanding and integrating their work in these spaces. This piece will in turn explore potential reconciliation points between the commercialization of MMOGs and participatory approaches.
Ed Valauskas (Dominican University, information science) is the Chief Editor of First Monday, a peer reviewed journal about and on the internet.
Facilitator: Dangling Thoughts
Deborah Wheeler (Oxford Internet Institute/US Naval Academy) studies the development and impact of the Internet in the Islamic World.
Digital Politics, Responsive Governance and Cyber Freedoms Meet
Authoritarianism in the Arab World: Results still Emerging
This paper will analyze new data regarding the political meanings of the Internet in the Arab world. The main data for this paper comes from 250 interviews with Internet cafe users in Jordan and Egypt. The main question motivating this research is, " Are citizens acting to voice their concerns in new ways via IT; and/or is the state more powerfully able to police citizen voices and thus curtail freedoms of expression that might be enabled by the Internet. The paper concludes with a consideration of the question: Who benefits from the Internet revolution in the region? Is this just a ploy to expand the customer base of Western IT companies in search of new markets? Is this just a cyber-Imperialism movement, all dressed up in fancy and appealing promises of increased economic growth, more human and humane development, more equalized relations with global markets and cultures. These questions will be addressed in light of data gathered in 2004-5 in Jordan, Egypt and Oman.
e-mail / websites: www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?rq=faculty_past_visiting
www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol8/issue2/Michele White (Wellesley College, art history) focuses on the visual and aesthetic dimensions of representation on the internet.
Guest Work: The Use of the "Other" in Producing
Rules and Identity Norms in Internet Settings
Internet settings and communities often have rules about how users should behave and threaten to enact legal and setting-specific punishments when legislated behaviors are not followed. Virtual communities also provide elaborate depictions of individuals who threaten to undermine settings and practices. Descriptions of disruptive "guests" and "newbies" justify the continued development of rules and laws, while allowing participants to articulate what they believe are the appropriate aspects of their site, practices, and identities. This presentation considers how the concepts of newbie and guest are used by text-based and graphical "chat" setting participants to validate their own practices and identities. A term such as "newbie" designates not only individuals who seem unfamiliar with Internet systems, but also those who simply employ a setting in a different way. Some guidelines for Internet settings are based on hardware and software requirements but most continue to produce an illegible culture where there is always going to be a clueless newbie. The term carries a derogatory connotation, and narratives about and treatment of newbies encourage conformity and define community status. Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Nancy Hartsock, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Edward Said, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explore how such techniques of exclusion and prohibitions are used to render normative beliefs, garner power, and articulate group identity by defining an "other." Considering such tactics of exclusion is particularly imperative within larger questions of governance since rules and ideas about what users look like and how they should behave may become the basis for a government's Internet regulatory strategies.
e-mail: mwhite@michelewhite.org
website: www.michelewhite.org
Guobin Yang (University of Hawaii at Manoa, sociology) examines how the normative development of governance practices within online communities shapes civil society in China.
Activists beyond Virtual Borders: Internet-Mediated
Networks and Informational Politics in China
This paper analyzes the main features and political functions of internet-mediated networks in China. These are networks that inhabit and traverse online and offline realms. They derive strength from their amphibious character. The paper distinguishes between two types of internet-mediated networks, those that are primarily based online and those that are primarily offline based. Adapting the analytical framework developed by Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink for studying transnational advocacy networks, this paper shows how internet-mediated networks in China shape the rules, practices, and institutions of Chinese politics by engaging in information politics,symbolic politics, leverage politics, and accountability politics. The issue areas examined are environmental protection and those involving physical harm to vulnerable individuals. Addressing the theme of this workshop, the paper argues that internet-mediated networks in China influence the governance of Chinese cyberspace and Chinese society most visibly by contributing to the rise of an informational politics. The concluding part of the article outlines the prominent features of this informational politics and discusses how in this informational politics, new norms about information and information technologies are articulated and contested and what implications they have for democratic struggles in China.