Tech Trends
Studying Tracking Technologies in Web Archives: Theories and Methods for Historical Studies of Web Tracking
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janne Nielsen
The world wide web is not only the place for a large part of social, cultural and political life today but also for widespread tracking of users and behavior online. Tracking technologies (cookies, beacons, local storage, fingerprinting etc.) are used for a variety of purposes, including personalisation, social profiling, advertising, and analytics. These virtually ubiquitous practices, which are part of a huge industry but also raise significant privacy concerns, have played an important role in the shaping of the web, and still do so today. To contribute to the understanding of the development and spread of tracking technologies, this presentation offers a theoretical background for a historical study of tracking technologies and their impact on the web. To study the historical development of tracking, we need web archives, where the web of the past has been collected and preserved, but tracking technologies are not necessarily included in the materials available in web archives. Furthermore, working with archived web materials poses significant methodological challenges. The presentation will discuss, which possible traces of tracking technologies that can be expected to be found in web archives, and reflect on the different methods that might be applied in historical studies of web tracking.
Gamification: Pitfalls and Potentials
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Clemens Ackermann, Max Hossfeld, Johanna Kleinen
"There was once […] an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game.” Today, we are accustomed to highly sophisticated online opponents in gaming, however, in 1770, when Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed his gaming machine, a seemingly inanimate counterpart that could win ad libitum was something utterly new. No longer was there a strict boundary between two players who competed against each other on a leveled playing field, but the constellation had changed. The game as a medium was no longer truly in the middle, but instead, the human player was pitted against a machine in control of the medium. However, as we learn in Walter Benjamin’s Concept of History, the human player was not actually competing with an automaton, but with a “hunchbacked dwarf […] who sat inside”. The player never realizes that it is him who is being played by, as Benjamin concludes, the puppet that is “historical materialism”. Kempelen’s automaton created an illusion that blurred the relations of power whilst leading the human player to believe that he is “just” playing. This talk inquires the potentials of gamification and whether it is a tool that gives back agency to the player and takes away the burdens of labor or whether it is a means that furthermore obscures the boundaries between the various stakeholders thus solidifying the role of the worker as cog in the (online) machinery.
Symmetrifying a Smart Home: A Topological Study of the Internet of Things
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sungyong Ahn
Media studies’ recent interest in topological culture suggests that today’s networked infrastructures with finer-granularity despatialize the places of cultural practices and relocate them on a sort of continuum always not-enough-differentiated or further-differentiable. For instance, streams of digital signal do not simply transmit fixed forms of objects in a predefined space, but unfolds a space itself as the result of an application, e.g. a filtering, performed on the streams to (re)differentiate their continuum into the provisional boundaries of objects and subjects. Interconnecting various physical entities and smart devices in a regional domain, the Internet of Things (IoT) also transforms today’s smart home into a topological continuum differentiable into many different problem-spaces according to its applications that function to individuate each singular problem latent in our everyday practices. One’s domestic interior under this smart system is strategically kept in a metastable state to be constantly re-bifurcated into a more optimal future state, which can be achieved only through the system’s proactive individuation of the most urgent problem embedded in the continuum and its realignment of the devices for the solution. We can borrow a mathematical concept 'manifold' from Bernhard Riemann’s differential geometry and Henri Poincaré’s group theory to examine how this topological continuum redefines today’s domestic interior as full of problematic relations susceptible of commodification into the form of smart applications. By doing so, we can infer a regime of power that governs the marketability of IoT and the human behaviors under its space making.
