Time: Friday, 23 March, 10:00 

Place: protoSPACE (Zaal D)

Mapping Web Space & Politics, 1992-2012 by Richard Rogers

Abstract:

Here I briefly periodize understandings of Web space, and the distinctive types of politics associated with their mappings, broadly conceived. In the Web as hyperspace period, where random site generators invited surfers to jump from site to site, mapping was performed for sites’ backlinks. It tethered Websites to one another, showing distinctive ‘politics of association’ from the linking behaviors of government, non-governmental organizations and corporations. In the Web as public sphere or neo-pluralistic period, circle maps served as virtual roundtables. What if the Web were to decide who should be at the table? As ideas about the Web shifted from new public spheres to more of a set of social networks, the cluster maps displayed ‘issue spaces,’ clusters of actors engaged in the same issue area, but now either central or marginal. Finally, in what is dubbed here as the revenge of geography, in the current locative period, maps show the distributed geography of engagement. Networking actors are temporarily ‘based’ and traveling physically from event to event; do they remember what is happening on the ground? The piece treats the shift in focus away from the ‘metaphysics’ of software-enabled spaces (the ‘virtual’ spheres) and critiques of the new ‘grounds’ (mobile network) to the return of classic questions now that cyberspace has been grounded. 

About the speaker:

Prof. dr. Richard Rogers is University Professor and holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Among other works, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). His latest book, Digital Methods, is to be published by MIT Press.