conference travels from the past..

In Austria, we’re diving through the “4th Corona wave” right now including a hard lockdown. Yet again, I’m sitting in my home (office) with the kids on my lap in case more than two school kids get infected in the same class. The responsibility has been fully shifted onto teachers, parents, and their kids by now. Politics has given up on the Covid-management of schools, as it seems. In the middle of this chaos, I’m enthusiastically thinking back to my (real!) trip to Lund two months ago. Olof Sundin and Alison Gerber invited me to give a keynote lecture at the interdisciplinary symposium In Search of Search (and its Engines). This workshop was a kind of gathering of pioneering search engine scholars that accompany me since my PhD (more than 15 years now). I finally met Elizabeth van Couvering, for example, whose work on the commercialization of Google and the creation of its business model based on the “traffic commodity” had a great impact on my PhD research. Also, Richard Rogers, Dirk Lewandowski, Jutta Haider, and other great scholars were there and it was FUN! (and not only because of the real food & drinks!) The best part is that we keep the lively debates about search engines, search engine research, and its academic & sociopolitical impact alive. We’re currently working on a special issue for Big Data & Society called The State of Google Critique and Intervention co-edited by Ov Cristian Norocel, Richard Rogers, and myself. We’re planning a workshop and a public event in Vienna (12 April 2022), which I love to organize in the middle of this 4th wave as a possibility to work towards a light at the end of the tunnel.. 😉 So stay tuned!

blogMoreover, almost as an exception to the rule, I attended a great 4S online session this year: Wiring digital justice: Embedding rights in Internet governance by infrastructure organized by Stefania Milan, Niels ten Oever, and Francesca Musiani. Despite the shitty online platform the conference was running on, the session organizers managed to trigger fruitful discussions by providing thoughtful comments after each of the presentations. My paper was titled “Encoding Freedom: Analysis of open search technology between German hacker ethics and Asian start-up culture” and triggered debates about Chinese tech development and the “metrics of freedom” that I’m still thinking about – now that I finally have time to analyze my rich empirical materials on open source communities and other alternative search projects.

4th ICTs and Society-Conference 2012 or “marx is back”

Last week I attended an excellent conference in Uppsala/ Sweden organized by Christian Fuchs and colleagues. The conference was concerned with “Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society” (all conference abstracts could be found online) or “Marx is Back”, as the opening panel suggested. Accordingly, numerous scholars from various disciplines – old and young – discussed Marx, Marcuse, and many other thinkers in the tradition of Critical Theory in the context of new media and Internet technologies. In fact, developing critical theories of social media was the main purpose of the gathering.

Contrary to other Internet-related and social media events, this conference was hence saturated with philosophy, theory and critical thinking. Theoretical papers were mixed up with empirical studies scrutinizing corporate Internet services including big players like Google, Facebook and co., but also alternative technologies such as Diaspora, Crabgrass and others. Issues discussed ranged from user exploitation, commodification of social relations, free labour, knowledge workers, crowdsourcing of surveillance, privacy, data protection, ideologies, capitalist modes of production, creation of surplus value in the digital age, pratices of resistance, revolution, social movements, ethics 2.0, circuits of struggle, the commons, participation, and the long march towards a sustainable, democratic information society.

The line-up of keynote speakers was impressive! I particularly enjoyed the following lectures: by Vincent Mosco, who posed the central question whether knowledge workers will unite and suggested to focus on strategies and tactics for activism. By Graham Murdock, who talked about the privatization of the commons and the promotional enclosure of everyday life. By Charles Ess, who analyzed privacy and collective property in the context of Western and Eastern developments. By Christian Fuchs, who underlined – once again – that Marxian thinking is crucial in contemporary informational capitalism and hence advised Castells and Jenkins to read Marx in order to develop more critical concepts. By Trebor Scholz, who talked about the Internet as playground and factory and pictured us, the users, as “renting the product of our own labour” and demanded hybrid (public/ private) solutions for the future. By Mark Andrejevic, who made us think about the “big data divide”, predictive analytics, and the question who has access to big data (corporations) and who has not (e.g. researchers). By Andrew Feenberg, who conceptualized the Internet as a site of struggle between the consumption model and the community model and suggested (following Marcuse) to “enter the institutions and contest them from within” – whether that would also include entering corporations and contesting them from within remained open though. For the keynote talks I didn’t mention – because I missed and/ or treated them shabbily see Christian Fuchs’ comprehensive article on the tripleC website (Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society).

The parallel sessions were yet not less interesting! (Again, the list won’t be complete since I didn’t attend all of them.) I liked the “Antagonistic Lives of Knowledge Workers” and its discussions on knowledge struggles on web 2.0 platforms  (Brian Loader), affective labour and self-promotion of young academics on Twitter, Blogs & Facebook (Mike Frangos) and Romanian journalism in a digital era (Romina-Gabriela Surugiu). “Surveillance 2.0” featuring an excellent talk on the ideological packaging of ICTs (Heidi Herzogenrath-Amelung and Pinelopi Troullinou), empirical case studies on social media use & privacy in Austria (Verena Kreilinger and Thomas Allmer) and, last but not least, a presentation on theorizing social media policing mentioning amazing – and truly frightning – cases of crowdsourcing surveillance such as the Internet Eyes in the UK (Daniel Trottier). Finally, my own panel “Commodification and Ideology” was really cool; covering, among other issues, time conflicts and global capitalism (Wayne Hope), corporate social (ir)responsibility and its problems (Marisol Sandoval), and the alienated labour of academic publishing (Wilhem Peekhaus). Moreover, I got great feed-back and food for thought after my own presentation on algorithmic ideology including comments on hierarchical features of Žižek’s theory and the need for democratic algorithms and alternative (net) politics – Christian Fuchs would call it Communism, I suppose.

Accordingly, at the conference dinner the Internationale was played and everyone stood up to it. A truly amazing conference, as I said. Thanks to everyone – Christian, Marisol, … – who made this event happen!!! I’ll be there for the next one (assuming there is another ICTs & society conference since there were other events in the past; see once again Christian’s review)! Finally, it was great meeting Ramon Rodriguez-Amat and Katharine Sarikakis from the Communication Studies department in Vienna (let’s unite indeed!!!) & it was fun hanging out with Mike in Stockholm.

goodtosee #12: geek girl meetup Umeå

Before leaving Umeå on Friday (!) I’ll turn into a geek girl tomorrow afternoon! According to the HUMlab blog (and Emma Ewadotter, who is in the Geek Girl Umeå steering committee) Geek girl

“started out in Stockholm in 2008 as a way for women interested in web, technology and innovation to meet and exchange ideas. It is for women, by women and all about professionalism and fun. It has become increasingly popular and the growing number of Geek Girls is a good indication that it is something that is here to stay. It is indeed  a marvelous concept that is already spreding over the world (there are Geek Girl initiatives in London, Gothenburg and Copenhagen just to mention a few).”

I’ve heard about Geek Girl Dinner in Vienna, which seems to be some kind of sister event, which was founded in London (2005) by Sarah Blow “who was tired of being the only woman at technical events” (Wikipedia). Since I haven’t attended any Geek Girl events yet I’m excited to present my work in this illustrious circle.

The motto of tomorrow’s meeting is search engines, and Google in particular. I’ll talk about the “Googlization of Everything” (Vaidhyanathan 2011) and about social search, as well as user profiling, surveillance and exploitation, most importantly. Moreover, Mikaela Pettersson will be speaking about search engine optimization. I’m looking forward to that! It should be fun (and will distract me a little from the annoying packing, tidying, cleaning, …, I’ve to do right now!) 😉

Documentation of the event: video & pics. Thx for a great evening & good luck with future Geek Girl events!!!


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found in the woods..


swedish wood

Going into the wood shows that academics are not the only ones working hard. It also impressively demonstrates that life is truly gorgeous outside the office. And yes, the title is a reference to the beautiful Beatles song Norwegian Wood.




































Even construction sites have their own charm. Sometimes.

finally: the most spectacular note from the north

Right next to the University, and it was not even that cold. Jenna and I were highly impressed!!! ..and still are :)

jokkmokk revisited

Last week-end a couple of HUMlab postdocs went to Jokkmokk to visit the Sami winter market. Besides huge piles of snow we saw a reindeer race, had reindeer food in multiple forms (including reindeer pizza), were amazed by extravagant fur clothing, enjoyed Sami joiking (a variation to the Austrian Yodel) and even saw a northern light – faint, but still.. This photo blog shows it all 😉

surströmming or “the stinky fish movie”

According to Wikipedia Surströmming, “known colloquially as Scandinavian rotten fish, is a northern Swedish dish consisting of fermented Baltic herring. Surströmming is sold in cans, which often bulge during shipping and storage, due to the continued fermentation. When opened, the contents release a strong and sometimes overwhelming odour, which explains why the dish is often eaten outdoors.”

Despite its scary description we decided to try – what we called – the stinky fish nevertheless. Following the advise to eat Surströmming outdoors we took it to the woods, together with other ingredients the fish is supposed to be eaten with. The purpose of this undertaking was to actually eat the fish.. the outcome of our adventure may be seen in the movie below. I hope it does not hurt Swedish feelings, but as a lot of Swedes don’t like the fish either, it should be ok, I hope. Especially as it also well-documents the HUMlab postdoc crowd! At least parts of it, as Charlotte has left us in the meanwhile.. we miss you!! & thanks for editing the film! :) & thanks also to Michael, who documented the whole fish procedure with the camera (and unfortunately left us too!!).

Tip: When watching the film, please consider that I actually said, that I swallowed the fish for a moment – a clear sign of the fish’s ability to confuse my brain..

P.s. the movie was shot about a month ago, the present snow-situation is like this: