[Hi all, sorry about the missing post on Monday. It was a public holiday in
the UK. I thought the following maybe of interest to listmembers. It is a
conference report -- in 2 parts -- of the recent Shaping the network Society
Conference by David Silver. Part 2 to follow. John]

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From: david silver [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 30, 2000 10:54 PM
To: CULTSTUD-L: A listserv devoted to Cultural Studies
Subject: [cultstud-l] Shaping the Network Society: A Conference Review
(1 of 2)


cultstudders,

i thought this might be of interest to some. because of its length, 
in comes in two parts.

david silver
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~dsilver/

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  Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing 2000: Shaping the
  Network Society: The Future of the Public Sphere in Cyberspace
  
  Sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
  May 20 - 23, 2000, Seattle, Washington, USA
  http://www.scn.org/cpsr/diac-00/


Setting E-Commerce Aside: A Conference Review
By David Silver, University of Maryland


As we slouch towards the real millennium, Internet dreams have turned
quickly into dot.com desires.  The worthy yet too often utopian hopes of
cyber-jumpstarted cultural, social, and political revolutions have been
ditched largely for IPOs, untaxed e-commerce, and millionaire teens and
twenty-somethings.  Indeed, for many, the dominant mantra of our times may
very well be: start up, pitch fast, sell out.

But not for all, including the several hundred scholars, students,
activists, artists, community leaders, computer scientists, politicians,
techies, and freaks who showed up last weekend in Seattle for "Shaping the
Network Society: The Future of the Public Sphere in Cyberspace," sponsored
by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.  Informed, perhaps,
less by the Nasdaq and more by the events that went down during the WTO
protests in the fall, conference attendees were asked what directions and
implications does cyberspace foretell for community, democracy, education
and culture? what is the public sphere in cyberspace? what should it
be? how can people use it? and what experiments, projects, and policies
should we initiate?

To answer such questions, conference organizers threw a wide net,
attracting folks from within and without academe, folks from across the
disciplines, and folks from around the world, including Argentina,
Australia, Canada, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United States, and
the former Yugoslavia.  Matching the international flavor of the
conference was organization diversity: on the first day alone, artists,
activists, and scholars representing Adbusters, the American Library
Association, the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, Paper
Tiger Television, PovNet (Poverty Network), the San Jose Information
Technology Planning Board, the Seattle City Council, the Social Science
Research Council, the Society for Old and New Media, the Vancouver Public
Library, and a few dozen colleges and universities delivered papers and
conducted workshops.  For this conference attendee -- still jazzed by but
growing weary of academic conferences; quick to test theoretical
frameworks and methodological minutia but even quicker to test
applications -- the diversity was a welcomed bonus.

So what went down?  The conference was divided largely into three
categories:  research sessions; workshops; and special events.  There were
ten research sessions -- Regional Snapshots; Foundations; Crossing
Boundaries; Socio-Technical; In the Community; Museums, Libraries, and
Culture; Public Policy Issues; Public/Private Sector Tensions; Looking at
the Community; and New Models -- ranging, as their titles suggest, from
conceptual frameworks and research models to disciplinary and
inter-organizational convergences to public policy and community
applications.  Unfortunately, the research sessions were held concurrently
(more on that later), which prevented this conference attendee from
sitting in on all the sessions.

The ones I did attend, however, were amazing, and provided equal amounts
of questions and answers, complex dilemmas and partial solutions facing
progressive- and community-minded cybernauts.  For example, in the
research session title Foundations, an international panel of scholars
explored and discussed a number of models with which to assess online
environments.  Ian Beeson, Professor of Computer Studies and Mathematics
at the University of the West of England, presented a number of
theoretical positions to understand better the ways in which communities
might use hypermedia to tell their individual and collective
stories.  Jenny Preece, Chair of the Information Systems Department at the
University of Maryland Baltimore County and author of the forthcoming book
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability,
addressed the multiplicity of definitions of online communities and argued
for the need for online communities to support well designed usability and
well supported sociability.  Celia Romm from Central Queensland University
in Australia analyzed existing literature on community informatics and
applied her Autonomy/Harmony model to four case studies.  Finally, Erik
Stolterman from the Department of Informatics at Umea University in Sweden
argued that creating a public sphere in cyberspace is, in part, a matter
of design, a process in which members of the community must be involved.

My own research session, Socio-Technical, was comprised of graduate
students from a number of American universities and, informed by theories
of human-computer interaction and models of participatory design, explored
the intersections between interface design and online community
formations.  Kelly Parker, a graduate student in Philosophy from Grand
Valley State University, examined the potentially dramatic social and
political implications of the Open Source/Free Software movement.  Josh
Berman, a graduate student in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of
Technology, showcased The Turing Game 
<http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/turing/>, an online environment he developed
with Amy Bruckman, to reveal the ways in which identity is expressed --
and tweaked -- within cyberspace.  My own presentation, growing out of my
work in American Studies and the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies
at the University of Maryland, challenged the prevailing and dangerous
assumption that the Net is a neutral, barren, and settlerless frontier,
and argued instead for the need for scholars to explore the cultural and
historical construction of online communities.  Finally, Warren Sack, a
recent graduate of the MIT Media Lab, wowed the audience with Conversation
Map <http://www.media.mit.edu/~wsack/CM/>, a piece of software he
developed to map visually the kinds of threads and interactions that take
place within discussion lists.

Like most conference attendees, I solved the problem of concurrent
sessions by racing frantically between rooms, hearing a paper here,
sitting in on a Q and A there.  The result was worth the effort.  In 
this manner, I was able to hear Maja Kuzmanovic, a digital artist par
excellence from Amsterdam, brainstorm and discuss what a truly
participatory and interactive cyberspace would/could look  like.  
Similarly, Adrian Mihalache, a Fullbright Scholar from Romania
currently visiting Western Michigan University, offered a review of
existing discourses of cyberspace and concluded with a spirited call for a
second generational countercultural movement.  Eszter Hargittai, a
graduate student in Sociology at Princeton, explored the discrepancy
between accessibility and prominence of public interest, not-for-profit
content on the Web, and offered a list of useful guidelines for such
organizations to get their word out.  Finally, Murali Venkatesh, an
Associate Professor and Director of the Community and Information
Technology Institute at Syracuse University, discussed early findings from
a large scale grant to construct a number of community networks for New
York-based economically disadvantaged communities, focusing especially on
the gap between technologists and community organizers.

(end of part 1).



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