Carolin Gerlitz
I am Professor of Digital Media and Methods at the University of Siegen, Co-Director of the Graduate School Locating Media and Deputy Speaker of the Institute for Media Studies, Siegen. I hold a PhD and MA from Goldsmiths, University of London and a BA/MA from the University of Arts Berlin and am member of the Digital Methods Initiative Amsterdam since 2009.My work explores the various intersections between new media, methods and economic sociology, with a specific interest in web economies, platform and software studies, digital methods, brands, value, topology, measurement, numeracy, social media, digital sociology, inventive methodologies and issue mapping online. I am interested in advancing new methodologies to study digital and platform cultures drawing on digital research methods and its intersection to other methodological approaches. Among my key questions is how value is generated from digital data and how quantification and numbers participate in life in digital media.From April 2017 I am co-speaker (together with Tristan Thielmann) of the DFG funded Graduate School 'Locating Media' which explores media research in motion and in situ. The graduate school seeks to explore inventive methods for interdisciplinary media research, bringing together mobile, ethnographic and digital methodologies.I hold a 4 year NWO Veni grant for the project ‘Numbering Life. Measures and Metrics in Digital Media’ (2015-2019). The project investigates the socio-technical conditions and implications of quantification in social media platforms. It asks how phenomena such as Like or friend counts, popularity rankings or algorithmic metrics participate in what they attempt to measure and allow third-parties to make social media activities economically valuable.Together with colleague Tristan Thielmann, I am principal investigator of the project ‘Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces’ which is part of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen (2016-2019). The sub-project investigates social forms of navigation in the field of US routemaps, drones and social navigation apps to explore their media practices and technicity and the specific forms of navigations they enable. Together with Fernando van der Vlist, I focus on advancing new digital methods for analysing apps which can study the operation of software in mobile and situative ways. Furthermore, the project seeks to advance the field of platform studies, by exploring how drones and apps engage in and expand current understandings of platforms. I am part of the international App Studies Initiative.In addition, I am member of the interdisciplinary research initiative Popular Cultures at the University of Siegen which explores the nexus of pop and popularity. In this context I have been exploring interdisciplinary perspectives on lists, asking how lists create order, relations and values together with my colleagues Markus Helmerich, Johannes Paßmann and Matthias Schaffrick.Since 2009, I have been a member of the Digital Methods Initiative Amsterdam and have been involved in a multiplicity of projects, many of them still ongoing. Among these projects is the exploration of third party tracking ecologies, leading to a new tool to identify trackers and the Tracker Guide to the Cloud which was exhibited at MOTI, but also experimental projects on studying app ecologies as well as Twitter data. Furthermore, I am part of the Public Data Lab, an international consortium for inventive data-intensive research.
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Papers by Carolin Gerlitz
Welche Daten werden in digitalen Medien produziert und wie sind diese durch digitale und software-basierte Methoden für die Forschung zugänglich? Diese Sitzung beschäftigt sich mit den Traditionen, Möglichkeiten und Herausforderungen von software basierter Datenerhebung mit Schwerpunkt auf sogenannte Digital Research Methods und web native data. Ausgehend von online Plattformen wie Google, Twitter und Facebook wird die Spezifizität digitaler Daten betrachtet und diskutiert, wie software basierte Datenerhebung in den empirischen Zyklus von Erhebung, Ergebnis und Analyse eingreift, was der Wert von Small und Big Data ist und ob digitale Daten mehr über Medien oder über sozio-kulturelle Prozesse aussagen.
Praxisteil Software-based data collection
Diese Sitzung gibt eine Einführung in software-basierten Forschungsmethoden und Tools die im Kontext der Digital Methode Initiative, Amsterdam entwickelt wurden. Vorgestellt werden Tools, die sich sowohl Daten als auch analytische Kapazitäten von online Plattformen “aneignen” und für die empirische Forschung zugänglich machen, wie zum Beispiel Google Scraper, Issue Crawler und Twitter Capture and Analytics Toolset (zugänglich unter https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolDatabase). Im Kontext eines Mini-Projekts erhalten Teilnehmende Einblicke in dem Umgang mit diesen medium-spezifischen Methoden und können ihre Möglichkeiten sowie Grenzen diskutieren - bitte Laptop mitbringen.
This paper asks how Facebook has increasingly tied up the making of social and economic value by deploying a medium-specific perspective. It investigates how web objects specific to social media platforms are embedded in but also reconfigure web economies and explores the methodological potential of medium-specificity (Rogers 2009) for the study of socio-economic dynamics. The empirical focus of the paper are Like buttons and the newly introduced Want buttons and Collections, as well as their underlying cookies and tracking features, which at the same time invite for certain activities as framing devices, but also allow to render the actions they engender multivalent (Marres 2012). Clicking a social button is set up as co-articulation by the platform, as both social, economic and data-intensive activity, operating simultaneously alongside multiple value axis without collapsing them into each other.
Doing so, Facebook features create a specific continuity (Bell 2009) between the social and the economic, in which social (inter)action becomes increasingly partible (Strathern 1990), that is partly detached from users and partly attached and re-used by platforms or involved third party services such as advertisers or cooperating partners. It is the process of rendering social actions into specific forms of data that allows for both multi-valence and partibility, transforming intensive affective responses to web content and other users’ activities into comparable data points or enumerated entities (Verran 2010) which can enter ever new relations (Mackenzie 2012) and exchange flows in the backend. Contemporary social web economies, this paper concludes, are being animated by the making of continuity and multi-valence, ensuring the ongoing social engagement, whilst transposing it into new forms and facilitating its continuation into valuable directions through recommendation and notification features.
In this paper we are concerned with the question, in how far social media create a specific convergence between gifts and currencies. Engaging with the German Twitter and Favstar sphere as site of empirical inquiry, we ask how favs, retweets but also Flattrs create, transform and accumulate value. Thus the question emerges whether social media foster a form of hybrid gift-currencies, which render gifting and commercial exchange increasingly interdependent, or whether social media gifts merely mimic currencies without transforming its traditional character.
While social media currencies seemingly allow to transform intensive gift giving into extensive, comparable and accountable forms (DeLanda 2002), we show by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, that they come an inbuilt ambiguity of accountability, as favs or retweets might bear a multiplicity of social meaning. Or can social media activities function as social currencies precisely because they are multi-valent (Marres 2012) and partible (Strathern 1990), that is as long as their actual value remains ambivalent and is not called for explication? The more general question is, if social media renders gifts more accountable, does that undermine the (obligating) character of the gift as such, or whether this only surfaces a fundamental characteristic of the gift that remained mostly implicit in previous forms of gift giving."
In this paper we are concerned with the question, in how far social media create a specific convergence between gifts and currencies. Engaging with the German Twitter and Favstar sphere as site of empirical inquiry, we ask how favs, retweets but also Flattrs create, transform and accumulate value. Thus the question emerges whether social media foster a form of hybrid gift-currencies, which render gifting and commercial exchange increasingly interdependent, or whether social media gifts merely mimic currencies without transforming its traditional character.
While social media currencies seemingly allow to transform intensive gift giving into extensive, comparable and accountable forms (DeLanda 2002), we show by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, that they come an inbuilt ambiguity of accountability, as favs or retweets might bear a multiplicity of social meaning. Or can social media activities function as social currencies precisely because they are multi-valent (Marres 2012) and partible (Strathern 1990), that is as long as their actual value remains ambivalent and is not called for explication? The more general question is, if social media renders gifts more accountable, does that undermine the (obligating) character of the gift as such, or whether this only surfaces a fundamental characteristic of the gift that remained mostly implicit in previous forms of gift giving.
Of particular interest will be the relation between freshness and relevance as modes of organising online dynamics, following the assumption that fresh and relevant content create distinct paces and that the pace within each device is internally different and multiple in itself. In response to the idea of realtime as actual time or process speed, the paper further complicates the idea of a single notion of realtime and proposes to speak of multiple realtimes by specifying how realtimes are different per web device. This specification of pace enables to revisit the notion of realtime online, suggesting that realtime cannot be accounted for as temporal frame in which events happen or content is encountered in the now. Instead, web devices create specific forms of so-called ‘realtimeness’, in which realtime engagement with information and content is organised through features such as freshness and relevance. Pace and realtime online, the article suggests, are tied up to specific media spaces and their organisation of content. "
self-evaluation in the context of social media, that is tools that
allow users to make sense of the activities and data they produce
in social media platforms. While platforms focus on creating
climates of immediacy and now-ness, they offer little access the
past, to retrospectively search and make sense of one’s data. This
lack has lead to the emergence of numerous self-evaluation tools,
offering a re-organisation of data, activities and temporalities.
The primary focus lies on the performative capacities of such
tools, as suggested in the work of Power, Strathern and Espeland,
showing that the measurements they create are not designed to
capture a separate reality, but function as framing devices,
inviting some types of awareness, and action while ruling out
others. The framing dynamics are explored by focusing on the
production of numbers as enumerated entities (Verran 2010),
drawing attention to how numbers are never simply abstractions,
but construct relations and temporalities, most particularly
through algorithmic rankings and dynamics of ordinality. The
role of numbers is understood in relation to dynamics of
mediation and medium-specificity (Rogers 2009). Self-evaluative
tools not only draw on data and activities specific to social media
platforms, they also allow for new modes of organising these
activities, data and temporalities. The interlinked movement of
numbers, media and selves in self-evaluation is explored as
dynamic assemblage, opening up engagement with selected
intervals of the past, in order to create climates of anticipation
and future orientation.
From this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel methodologies for app studies. So far, methodological approaches for studying apps have focused on end-user interfaces and how users interpret app affordances (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym 2015), qualitative analyses of their political economies and the politics of location (Dyer-Witheford 2014; Wilken and Bayliss 2015), their social norms of use (Humphreys 2007) or their affective capacities (Matviyenko et al. 2015). The empirical investigation of apps and their ecologies currently faces multiple challenges: First, in contrast to most data collected from web sites and platforms, user activities can neither be simply observed or scraped from front-end interfaces nor easily be collected via APIs. In order to access app data, researchers may need to participate in using the app, which only affords a partial view (e.g. in the case of Tinder, Snapchat, and messaging apps) thereby opening up a number of ethical concerns. Second, method development has to respond to apps’ fast update cultures. Like other internet-enabled technologies, apps are considered as services rather than products and have frequent development cycles, including design and features changes, which do not only require researchers to constantly adjust their tools and approaches, but which also make it particularly difficult to reconstruct the history of an app or its features.
This panel responds to these methodological challenges by advancing methodological approaches that all share a common device or medium-specific perspective, departing from the specific features of each app to attend to its data ecologies, political economies, practices, or histories, whilst reflecting critically on the relations between method and medium. One contribution advances digital methods for app analysis by mapping larger platform ecosystems in which apps emerge and thrive. It explores how apps reinforce, alter, and interfere in the interpretation of social media platforms and their features. Engaging with Facebook’s mobile app and its political economy, the second paper attends to the difficulties of getting access to historical app information whilst tracing relations between the introduction of new features and the advancement of the platform’s business model. A different approach to writing a microhistory of apps is offered in the third paper on the Twitter’s retweet button. Bringing together historical and ethnographic insights, this paper offers a detailed narrative of the becoming of a platform feature at the intersection of technicity, use practices, third-party apps and platform politics. The fourth and final paper focuses on the WeChat app and draws on ethnographic methods to explore the affordances of entanglement when the only way to study an app is by joining and participating in it.
All four papers approach apps not as discrete technologies, but as being situated and subject to distributed accomplishments of technicity, economics, practices, data, third parties, and platform politics. They connect platform studies and app studies by drawing attention to their intricate relations, e.g. in the case of platforms offering apps, apps built on top of platforms, apps facilitating practices that inform platforms, and apps functioning as platforms. The papers outline relations between and gaps in app and platform studies, as the study of platforms has identified the relevance of data circulation and the involvement of third parties, but has not explicitly asked how apps capitalise on platforms and vice-versa, or how they reinvent and inscribe into each other. From the perspective of app studies, adding a focus on platforms allows researchers to map the ecologies in which app data circulates as well as the regulatory rules and conditions for their development. The panel thus advances the field of app studies by exploring novel methods for empirical app research which allows to attend to the technicity, political economy, history, and enactment of app ecologies.
their increasing investment in consumer involvement, participation and co-creation.
Revisiting the role of brands in contemporary capitalism, it shows that brands are not
discrete, purely economic entities, but emerge in relations to multiple actors and are
distributed across a series of spaces, societal issues and temporalities. The key objective
of this thesis is to explore how brands are involved in (re)organising the boundaries
between economy and society, allowing for a multiplication and continuation of value
production.
In an empirical exploration featuring two case studies on Dove’s Campaign for Real
Beauty and American Apparel, this thesis brings together social and digital research
methods in order to trace and map the distributed becoming of both brands. Attention is
directed to three key intersections: the embeddedness of brands in relations, the
distributed spatialisation of brands, and the role of bodies and sexuality as issue
deployed in branding practices. What a brand stands for, I argue, cannot be limited to
its strategic ‘making’, but is tied to its emergent and distributed ‘happening’.
Informed by my the fieldwork, I develop the claim that contemporary brands are
increasingly partible, as they are reliant on their constant re-appropriation by a variety
of actors and are therefore entangled in a ‘becoming topological’, as they are defined
through relations which can only be accounted for from the inside. Brands emerge as a
specific socio-economic form involved in what I call ‘continuous economies’, in which
economic value production increasingly arises from non-economic activities and
becomes inherently partible in social activities. Such continuous economies are being
animated by the brands’ capacity to create multi-valence, in which consumer activities
are at the same time social, cultural and economic acts. Continuity, in this context,
addresses a specific mode of boundary making, one that brings together brands and
consumers without dissolving them into each other but that maintains a specific
imbalance and asymmetry between them. Brands do not, as suggested by some
sociological critique, merely subsume social activities into exploitative labour, but
enable the organisation of continuity and discontinuity between the social and the
economic in immanent ways, while at the same time displacing value production
temporally and pre-structuring its potential futures.