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Research proposal for PhD Fellowship at the

Faculty of Humanities, IMK Taina Bucher
University of Oslo taina.bucher@gmail.com

Title: Technologies of immediacy: understanding the interplay between subjects and
time/location specific social software.

Proposed supervisor: Anders Fagerjord, IMK, University of Oslo
Proposed co-supervisor (abroad): Geert Lovink, University of Amsterdam
Proposed co-supervisor (national): Hilde G. Corneliussen, University of Bergen

Brief summary:
This project seeks to understand the extent to which the underlying software architectures of
microblogging and similar hybrid web-based communications platforms create forms of
subjectivity and social interactions. Social software, like microblogs, are user-friendly
publishing tools but also produce, represent and bring about human practices and culture.
Academically this research situates itself within the emerging field of software studies,
which holds that the properties of digital media are defined by the make-up of particular
software. The tools which the software provides determine what we can do with digital media
and how we understand it. I ask what kinds of assumptions about the world are embedded in
the software and how these mindsets are appropriated or made use of by its users. More
specifically, the aim of this project is to investigate social software that hinge on time or
location specific awareness, through forms of immediacy and timeliness. The objects of study
include the social software and microblogging platforms Twitter.com, Dodgeball.com,
Plazes.com and Origo.no. It is my contention that these hybrid web-based communications
platforms are technologies of immediacy, constituting key cultural techniques for
contemporary culture. My project will aim to explore how the Zeitgeist of time efficiency and
ubiquitous information demands tools suitable for the expression of self and resourceful
communication. With ever-evolving techniques, tools and software underlying social
interaction it is my intent to support efforts to increase an understanding of sociable media
as contingent on medium-specific features. This project asks: How is participatory culture
performed in interactions with particular software tools, how are practices defined by
medium-specific features, how do they evolve from this and what kind of worldviews does
social software promote and represent?
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Presentation of the problem/hypothesis

Research question: How do subject-software relations manifest themselves within
contemporary media culture? Specifically, What is the relationship between microblogging
software and its users?

A widespread contention in the vast literature on new media is that the emergence of the
social web has changed fundamental aspects of how we relate to the world. It is a truism that
the development of such applications as Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace have redefined
how people interact, collaborate and share information on the web, and greatly expanded the
domain of the social in what used to be a much more technology-dominated sphere. But what
is the underlying mechanism behind this perceived paradigm shift? In what way has Web
2.0 and its social software changed human-computer interaction, and perhaps more
importantly; contemporary culture in general?
This project's over-arching objective is to critically assess contemporary culture as
manifested through the interplay between subjects and software tools in participatory media
environments. What role does the software underlying new media applications play in
facilitating sociality? And what practices are defined by and evolve out of these software
functionalities? By looking at a set of new media applications, I will aim to provide an
account of how social software determines and forms contemporary media use. One such case
is that of microblogging, a new form of communication in which users can describe their
current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web.
The hybrid media application Twitter (www.twitter.com), being one example, allows for
constant contact as it provides social options not seen in previous new media applications. It
allows for the opportunity to send short messages (status updates) to a distributed public on a
wide variety of media platforms, as such relating uniquely to present time.
It is my contention that microblogging occupies a particularly interesting place in
contemporary culture, as it uniquely projects notions of time and place. I argue that
microblogging can be seen as a technology of immediacy, understood as technologies that
embeds an awareness of present time and/or place. Microblogging services relate, express and
perform the present in a way that affects our notion of immediacy. Twitter and similar
services present an array of usage possibilities, for instance acting as an instant news source
providing more up to date opinions on news events for public dissemination than any other
communications platform. Being global in its reach, it also provides a good possibility for
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following current discourses on a worldwide scale as well as on the individual level. Twitter
acts as a performative technology, representing and enacting current cultural conditions, such
as scarcity of time and ever-evolving expectations of immediate value.
Following Donna Haraway (1997), I will attempt to understand contemporary culture
and its media environments as emerging from a relational feature between the technical and
the social. Haraway emphasizes how human practices are constructed in relation to, and along
with, non-humans. As a direct consequence of this, the aim of my project will be to
investigate time and location specific social software, from both the software layer and the
social layer. This in order to understand how the interplay between the technical and the
social represents, produces and brings about forms of contemporary culture. The relational
aesthetics
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at play here provides a way of judging software as a cultural object by means of
the types of connections it facilitates.
I am interested in the ways of thinking and doing understood as culture that leak
out of the domain of software and into everyday life. As such I am interested in the ways in
which recent Internet applications relate to sociality, and what the social that is built into
social software amounts to. In line with Sherry Turkle (1995), I consider the computer and the
digital media devices of our time to fundamentally affect our awareness of ourselves and our
relationship with the world. I ask what kinds of assumptions about the world are embedded in
the software and how these mindsets are appropriated or made use of by its users.
An aesthetics of appearance
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considers the conditions through which the world is
given to us and presents itself. As such, software tools can be seen as devices through which
appearance is produced, while making media the crucial cultural platform on which people
interact with the world. The logic of the now appears as timeliness and immediate, being
constitutive of what I call technologies of immediacy. The catchphrase of Twitter, what are
you doing?, and the name your plaze question of the event-creator site Plazes
(www.plazes.com), prompt answers about the appearance in time and space. I believe this
notion of the present fits well with the condition of the contemporary communication
environment characterized by a scarcity of time and attention. Questions that arise from this
and which will illuminate how subject-software relations manifest themselves within
contemporary media culture are the following:


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Nicholas Bourriaud (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Bourriaud provides an aesthetic theory in which artworks are
judged based upon the inter-human relations which they represent, produce, or prompt.
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Martin Seel (2000) sthetik des Erscheinens takes on Nelson Goodmans concept of appearance to signify the
ways in which we relate to the world by constellations in the present.
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1) How is participatory culture performed in interactions with particular social software
tools?
2) How are practices defined by and evolve from medium specific features?
3) What kind of worldviews does social software promote and represent?

Background of the project
Academically, my intent is to support efforts to increase an understanding of sociable media
as contingent on medium-specific features. Research on new media and the participatory
culture of user-generated content production has largely concentrated on a narrow
understanding of the social. Current debates on sociable media are centred on discourses
concerning identity, patterns of use, social capital, community, public sphere, activism, etc. In
contrast, very little research has been undertaken on how the social is operating in and
through the specific software functionalities that form part of that sociable web. Following
Geert Lovink (2008), this project contends that the path to understanding contemporary media
culture lies somewhere between an analysis of the dominant software functionalities and the
cultures that shape and are affected by the software. Facebook for instance makes you
participate by offering a set of apps and social options such as poke, comment on photos,
tag pictures, status updates, write on walls etc. YouTube constructs interaction by
functionalities such as share/post video/add to groups. These are properties of the software
which enable certain pattern of responses. Lev Manovich pushes the line further by
suggesting that software even generates new social behaviours: with newly created social
media behaviour we also need a new field of study to bring into focus the elements of digital
culture created by software. Software shapes media behaviour and that is why we need to
study it
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.
It is my contention that the technical aspects of the medium, in this case social
software, plays an equally important role to the social aspects, such as identity and
signification, in understanding society and culture. Whereas most research take the
technicalities of a given medium for granted, I want to follow a methodology that treats
(social) software inherently as a human-technical hybrid and therefore needs to be studied
accordingly.
I believe this proposed research is an important contribution to the emerging field of
software studies, as it draws attention to the underlying engines driving digital culture and

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Talk on user-generated content given by Lev Manovich at the Video Vortex conference in Brussels 05.10.2007
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media studies the software itself. The Software Studies Initiative at UCSD is a recently
established research center for the interdisciplinary study of the logic of new media
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directed by Lev Manovich. There is a clearly stated need for academics and practitioners to
pay attention to the software layer of contemporary society, as it has received little or no
academic attention. According to Manovich, an interest in the cultural and social effects of
ICT must be accompanied by an interest in the logic of these media. The intention is to bridge
research in the humanities and social sciences by thinking of software as a cultural object. I
want to contribute to the theoretization and conceptualization of a contemporary media
condition by situating the research interdisciplinary, and to come up with new concepts
suitable for thinking about networked and participatory media culture.

Data/material and method
The question of how subject-software relations manifest themselves within contemporary
media culture will be investigated by means of different case studies. Detailed case studies of
Twitter.com, Dodgeball.com, Plazes.com, and Origo.no will provide the opportunity to study
both the technical specificities of the social software in question, the affordances of these
objects, the social and cultural effects of the medium and how these matters relate and affect
contemporary media culture. I will recruit 10 informants from each of the microblogging
services mentioned above and conduct interviews with the informants during the first year of
the research. In Twitters case, informants are to be selected off the platforms public
timeline
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leading to their personal Twitter page, which provides additional information such
as links to their blogs or e-mail addresses. This will make it easier to approach the users
asking them to participate in my study. Probably I will use an instant messaging platform or
Skype to conduct the interviews as I want to recruit people on a global scale. I will further
conduct ethnographic observation on usage of these services, by following my informants
status updates and conversations. Moreover I will use several mash-ups like
Twittervision.com and Tweetscan.com to conduct a content and discourse analysis. Content
analysis provides a detailed account of what a text contains, to locate themes, to seek nuances
and for identifying patterns. Discourse analysis allows for investigating how language and
meaning-making practices constructs and is constructed by social practice.
Three case studies informed by an ethnographic approach will be conducted in

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The logic of new media, according to Lev Manovich in his seminal work The Language of New Media (2001),
is understood in terms of its programmable nature. Thus, what makes new media new is its programmability.
Software makes new media programmable and renewable.
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http://twitter.com/public_timeline
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collaboration with my supervisor Anders Fagerjord, my co-supervisor Geert Lovink and
possibly also with Lev Manovich at the Software Studies Initiative at UCSD. Taking into
account that the field of new media changes fast, there might be applications and services that
have not yet emerged, but might become crucial and interesting to focus on by the time this
research is going to start. It is my contention that we will witness a rise in location and time
specific social technologies in the years to come, including communication platforms
experimenting with wireless, RFID, GPS and mapping techniques. The rise of microblogging
serves as an exciting object of study located in-between traditional social networking sites,
such as Facebook, and future technologies that emphasize time and location specific
awareness.
My methods are influenced by recent social studies of technology (Haraway 1997,
Latour 2005) that treat technical concepts, objects or practices as hybrid social-material
entities to be investigated by following the thing, the people and the metaphor (Marcus
1998). Such a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry pays particular close attention to the shifting
of contexts, changes in status, how the object of study enters into a variety of discourses and
practices, and the ways in which it is subject to distinct modes of participation and circulation.
I will further draw data from various other sources including mailing lists (Nettime,
AOIR, softwareandculture, MEA), wikis, blogs and magazines to trace the discourses and
practices surrounding the microblogging software and usage. As part of the participant
observation I will use all the mentioned platforms on a regular basis, conducting
fieldnotes by setting up a blog account (which allows for interactions with other
bloggers/users), in providing a framework for a reflexive understanding of using the
software. I also want to use software tools that are specifically created for online research.
There are some tools available and more so under development.
My research will deal with ethical issues concerning the nature of online research,
including questions concerning access to data material (membership requirements versus
publicly available data), informed consent and whether to treat data material as texts or
people are just some of the issues that will be more closely elaborated on during the course
of my research. The Association of Internet Researchers guidelines will serve as my fixed
point in conducting ethical research.

Theoretical locus
In addressing the issues I have set out, I will draw on a rage of data from different
disciplines. Work in software studies and new media will be particularly important in
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answering questions on the interplay between subjects and software functionalities, as well
as in framing a cultural conceptualization of software (Chun 2006, Manovich 2001,
Galloway 2006 , Fuller 2003, Mackenzie 2006, Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003). Recent
work on social networking and computer-mediated communication (Boyd and Ellison
2007, Humphreys 2007, Donath 2007) illuminate the various social implications digital
media have on issues of privacy, presentations of self, social interactions, discursive
formations etc. These forms of research show how identity and social performance are co-
constituted, but also highlight how software impacts the social expressions online (Dibbel
1998), and how it shapes social (inter)actions (Boyd 2007, 2008). Theories of technology
(Latour 2005, Heidegger 1977, Marcuse 1982, Winner 1986, Ihde 1990, Mackenzie and
Wajcman 1999) provide perspectives on how to conceptualize social software in terms of
technology and what kinds of imaginaries that go into social software as tools. What is it,
that social software is held to assist us in? As a tool, what kind of actions does social
software perform? And what kinds of social effects do these media technologies achieve?
In one sense this project comes close to the kind of media materialism associated with
Friedrich Kittler (1999). Focus is here on the material structures of technologies and the
changes these introduce into culture. Kittler provides some useful entry points into the
field in terms of thinking about the transformative possibilities of the technical. Theories of
material culture will serve as another entry point for my research (Miller 2005, Brown
2004, Latour 1992) and in understanding culture as practice, as a ways of doing. The
concept of affordance illuminates how practices may evolve from and be designed by the
quality of the software allowing for actions to be performed (Gibson 1977, Hutchby 2001).
Meaning making practices such as collaboration, content contribution, participation,
browsing, blogging etc. are seen as the cultures of software. My theoretical starting point
will be Matthew Fullers conceptualization of software:

as a form of digital subjectivity that software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of
software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world that at once contain a
model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is
used (2003, p.19)

Rancires (2004) notion of the Politics of Aesthetics that determine a mode of articulation
between forms of actions and thought reflects the kind of aesthetics at work in software. In
establishing his political-aesthetic theory, Rancire provides very interesting perspectives
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on the relational nature of social software and its social implications. The everyday ways
of doing and the webs of significations of participatory media culture will be discussed
by tracing connections between theories of digital culture that deal with modes of
production and consumption and the kinds of networks that are at play (see Benkler 2006,
Lovink 2008, Jenkins 2006, De Certeau 1984, Virno 2004).
Last but not least, rhetorical theory and particularly the concept of kairos
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(Covino and
Joliffe 1995, Kinneavy 2002, De Certeau 1984) provide perspectives on the particular
awareness of time and place that microblogging and locative media (understood as
communication-facilitating media bound to a geographical location) are entangled in.
Kairos highlights the importance of timeliness in oration, illuminating how a given context
of communication both calls for and constrains speech. Seeing blogging (and participating
on the internet in general) as a kind of oration, and as such affected by kairos, calls for a
whole set of new questions to be asked. For instance, what are the opportunities offered by
a rhetorical situation and what role do the technicalities of the medium play in acts of
persuasion?
In my MSc dissertation (Bucher 2007), I show how the rhetorical construction of
participation in citizen journalism is facilitated by an active use of kairos. Here I looked
at how people were encouraged to take part in the production of news stories, giving of
their time in order to change the nature of journalism. It is my contention that the value of
immediacy, the significance of here-and-now, is one of the driving forces behind
participatory culture. As a consequence, I want to look at how technologies act rhetorically
through imperatives such as upload content, tag this, edit this page in order to
understand practices of participation and content contribution. These instructions are part
of the software architecture and work in different ways to operationalize the social.

Supplementary information:
It is with a profound interest in human-non-human relations, technological and social change,
as well as a deep interest in the Internet as a medium and phenomena that this project has
come about. Having studied cultures of participation on the web through my MSc thesis at the
London School of Economics, I have developed my interest in socio-technical constellations
further and thus become intrigued by the emerging field of research on software studies.

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In rhetorical theory, kairos is used to describe the opportune time for action (speech). Kairos is what presses the
rhetor forward to speak while at the same time constituting the value of speech. Kairos is always designates a
rhetorical situation and a particular relation to time (and place). Kairos can be linked to Michael De Certeaus
notion of tactics, understood as the ways one makes use of the opportunities offered by a particular situation.
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Coming from both a sociological and communications background I consider software to be a
very important, yet understudied, domain in cultural and media studies.
I have established contact with various scholars associated with the emerging field of
software studies and plan on conducting some of my research in affiliation with this network.
I will be co-operating with Geert Lovink, an associate professor in new media at the
University of Amsterdam, who has published widely on critical internet culture, new media
and network theory and blogging (2008, 2003, and 2002).

Publicising:
I plan on getting four articles published during the course of my three year PhD period.
Possible journals for submitting articles include: First Monday, Fibreculture, New Media &
Society and Convergence. I will also attend as many relevant conferences as possible and
network events that will benefit my thinking and research. I would also like to create a forum
for academic debate at IMK, in forms of seminars where people can present their ongoing
research and exchange ideas on a regular basis (once a month). I think such seminars would
be valuable especially for PhD and master students.

Progress plan:
2009: Initiation of my research by writing small chapters. Research phase. Read up and
conduct research on the technical features of microblogging software and other software
architectures that will be relevant for my study. Attend theory courses of 30 study points.
Start writing on theory and present my first ideas on graduate conferences/summer school and
other conferences. I will recruit informants from Twitter.com, Dodgeball.com, Plazes.com,
and Origo.no and start conducting interviews. I plan on writing one article based on my initial
research findings. Twitter conversations, participatory culture and the role of Twitters
underlying software architecture in shaping these participatory practices.

2010: Spend six months at either the University of Amsterdam or Goldsmiths University.
Collaborate on microblogging case study with scholars undertaking similar research. I will
aspire to write two articles during my second year, possibly based on my discourse and
content analysis of Twitter conversations, participatory culture and the role of Twitters
underlying software architecture in shaping these participatory practices.
Continue writing chapters on theory, methods and case study. Research phase.

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2011: Probably a shorter stay at the Software Studies Initiative at the University of California,
San Diego. Probably conducting a case study on the role of interface in hybrid media,
investigating the role that different interfaces (IM, web, mobile) play in time and location
specific media use (possibly through a microblogging platform). Writing one article based on
findings. Revising of theory, methods and case study chapters. Final writing phase.

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