The Nonstandard Web

Standards and Modernity, in: Christian Bonah u.a. (Hg.), Harmonizing Drugs. Standards In 20th-Century Pharmaceutical History, Paris 2009, S. 45-60. , 2009

Annual Review of Sociology, 2010

Standards and standardization aim to render the world equivalent across cultures, time, and geography. Standards are ubiquitous but underappreciated tools for regulating and organizing social life in modernity, and they lurk in the background of many sociological works. Reviewing the relevance of standards and standardization in diverse theoretical traditions and sociological subfields, we point to the emergence and institutionalization of

Canadian journal of communication, 2006

This paper calls for a cultural analysis of the World Wide Web through a focus on the technical layers that shape the Web as a medium. Web technologies need to be acknowledged as not only shaped by social processes, but also deployed, through standardization and automation, as agents that render representation possible by following specific technocultural logics. Thus, the focus is on the relationship between hardware, software, and culture through an analysis of the layers of encoding that translate data into discourse, and vice versa. Résumé : Cet article appelle au développement d'une analyse culturelle du Web axée sur les couches technologiques qui transforment le Web en média. Les technologies Web ne doivent pas seulement être reconnues comme étant façonnées par des processus sociaux, mais aussi comme étant déployées, au travers de phénomènes de standardisation et d'automatisation, comme agents qui rendent toute représentation possible en suivant des logiques technoculturelles spécifiques. Ainsi, la priorité est donnée aux relations entre le matériel informatique, les logiciels et les processus culturels au travers d'une analyse des couches de codage qui traduisent les données informatiques en discours, et vice-versa.

The Information Society, 2002

Governance, Regulation and Powers on the Internet, 2012

Paper prepared for Governance, Regulation, Powers on the Internet collection-E. Brousseau, M. Marzouki and C. Méadel (Eds.) X.1 Introduction Yet there is a need to understand how technical, political, economic and social norms are articulated, who are the main actors of this transforming process and how they interact, how these changes may influence the world ruling in terms of individual rights, public liberties, property rights, market competition, conflict management, sovereignty of states.... Topic and contents outline for workshop Governance, Regulations and Powers on the Internet (GRPI) held in Paris, France on May 27-28, 2005 organized by E. Brousseau, M. Marzouki and C. Méadel. In framing the topic of the workshop which led to this collection the editors extended its remit from the governance of the technical structures of the Internet to the emergence of less clearly articulated but nonetheless highly significant norms of behavior. They suggested that in order adequately to address issues of governance we need to be aware that much of what the Internet comes to be is shaped from the bottom up, by its users, as much as it is dictated from the top down by its inventors, its vendors and its regulators. While some versions of Internet governance focus exclusively on the allocation of addresses and domain names, the issues far exceed this technical focus (MacLean 2004). The existing governance of the Internet is itself an emergent mosaic (Dutton and Peltu 2007) comprised of many different approaches and focusing on diverse objects of regulation. In this chapter I will be focusing on part of the level of governance which Dutton and Peltu (2007) term "user-centric". I will be looking at the ways in which users themselves conceive of appropriate standards of behavior on the Internet, and the mechanisms and frames of reference which they deploy to do so.

Transforming Culture in the Digital Age. International Conference in Tartu , 2010

Critical Inquiry, 2018

What is standardization? Three relatively recent books by social scientists all use the same tactic to introduce the topic. First, these books open with an example. It can even be the standardization of the paper of the book in your hands. Then, having thrust an example of standardization into the foreground, they alert us to the invisibility of standardization, its ordinary operation in the background, and at the same time contrast that with the ubiquity of standardized objects and processes, their presence all around, which their example also demonstrates. Largely unnoticed but everywhere thus becomes a theoretical frame—proceed to a number of further disparate examples. The examples are captivating. They are shown to evidence, as one might expect, how standardization empowers or disempowers people as they go about their lives, how it comes in categorizable forms, and how it intersects with the many social dimensions of humans and things. But there is a problem with the way these authors have framed the subject. The difficulty is not merely that even if successful standardization may involve some participants remaining unconscious of its presence, the supposed social in-visibility of standardization seems dubious given the countless stories of standardization, from railway gauge to MP3, all highly visible to extended I thank for their insights and unflagging encouragement the University of California, Los Angeles graduate students in our seminar on standardization—Devin Beecher,

Various studies find that marketing communications reflect specific cultures. Most of these studies conceptualize culture in terms of one cultural framework, use a two-country sample, focus on print or television advertising, and do not statistically validate the measures used. This study addresses these issues by testing the applicability of the cultural frameworks of Hofstede [Hofstede G. Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values. California: Sage Publications, 1980] and Schwartz [Schwartz S. Beyond individualism/collectivism: new cultural dimensions of values. In: Kim U, Triandis HC, Kagitcibasi C, Choi SC, Yoon G, editors. Individualism and collectivism: theory, method, and applications. California: Sage; 1994. p.85–119] to study the reflection of culture in web communications. The article includes the results of a content analysis of web content from 15 countries. The results suggest that a combination of both frameworks, not either alone, best conceptualizes culture's influence on marketing communications. The findings and the framework guide culturally adapting an existing Taiwanese website. An experiment finds that Taiwanese informants prefer websites adaptations reflecting Taiwanese culture.

Cultural, ethnicity is "set" along with birth, the ability to speak the "native" language, the cultural environment in which it falls and which, in turn, "sets" the generally accepted standards of behavior and self-realization of the individual. Identity in the context of transculture is under intense pressure, where sustainable self-consciousness suffers, based on a sense of belonging to "one's own" group. At the same time, the construction of a specialized identity in the electronic information format of society goes both with establishing a more significant distance with other ethnosocial groups, and with actualizing the very identity resource of the collective ethnic "I" as a kind of social "prize" in competitive linguistic policy strategies in a globalizing the world. At the same time, transcultural conflicts vividly demonstrate an example of social deviation, being a natural manifestation of the urgent contradictions in the sphere of culture, education and intercultural communication, they have a significant impact on the livelihoods and reproduction of social systems and political regimes themselves.

Ambareva, H. (2014). Does Internet culture create new values? In T. Shopova (ed.) “Digital Culture and Society” (p.78-86)/Дигитална култура и общество (сборник доклади)(стр. 78-86). Изд.: Югозападен университет "НеофитРилски". ISBN: 978-954-680-938-4. The thesis of the paper is that computers and the Internet create a cultural environment which influences people's attitudes and values. The paper presents the distinctive features of the view of life and values that make the surfing on the Internet generations different. The study focuses on three groups of Internet and computer users who are representative carriers of the Internet culture – hackers, gamers, and social networks users, and traces out and summarizes the characteristic features of their attitudes and values. The report summarizes hackers' values like open source, creativity, networking; it presents gamers' values of learning, achievement, intrinsic rewards; it also studies the social networks users' values of community, publicity, and activity. The conclusions from the analysis are: 1) there are value differences among Internet generations and pre-Internet generations, caused by the active involvement of the former in the Internet environment; 2) Due to the fact that the usage of the Internet in Bulgaria is well expressed among the young people and is weak among the population over 55 years of age, the Internet culture can be considered a " youth " culture. And 3) it could be expected that the differences caused by the Internet/information age can be easily perceived to express differences usually existing among younger and senior generations, but not as differences related to the real change of the environment.