User:Pedro Sá Couto/Reading, Writing & Research Methodologies 2nd

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

Editing with Lídia Pereira

13/03/2019

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/2019-03-13-rwrm

Version 01

 When I first came across with this thematic I had to immediately question myself. Why are we setting up our own routers and why are we in the pursuit of getting this status of being autonomous online. I also found myself a bit skeptical, on what degree are we really autonomous while still relying on an internet provider. I set my router in Tancredi's place. I live in a 21 stories building, where the internet is provided by one company to all the separated apartments and I didn't have physical access to the router, this was the first constraint from the start. In the placed where my router is hosted now I am not paying for internet directly but still, I am relying on a second party.
 My main question started then to be, what did it mean to be autonomous and what kind of examples did I have where I could see in a more direct approach on how communities rely on it and how do they manage it?

 *do you think the idea of being completely autonomous is impossible, to begin with, or do you think having little autonomy is better than having none?***************************************

 We were introduced to mastodon, an online social networked and self-hosted social media. I focused my research on this platform, where Users can either be part of an instance or they can host their own node in the network. I researched in the mastodon universe to understand what kind of communities are present and why did the move there. *LGBT groups* *Why is it big in Japan?*

 Mastodon.social started being used by some because it was the answer to a safety problem. We can take the example of the LGBT communities that used to rely on Twitter to discuss and share their point of views, but they stopped having a place for it. Twitter filled itself with hate bots, trolls that would skim through posts and at the first trigger word would act. This made users fled, mastodon was an alternative. When you create your own instance, you can state clear rules from what you imagine it being or not. It is interesting how some instances try to be autonomous and open to everyone, but in order to be a safe space, they have the need to draw heavy lines on what you can and cannot do. If I can give an example, in the instance "gravitas.cafe":

   "We have a zero tolerance policy for anyone breaking any of these rules, and they will result in an immediate suspension from this instance.

   — Do not participate in, engage in, or boost any form of harassment of other users in the fediverse.
   — Hate speech and bigotry are not tolerated. This includes, but is not limited to, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and ableism.
   — NSFW posts are allowed but must be behind a Content Warning and flagged as sensitive.
   — Do not follow any of our users with a follow bot. Users please report any follow bots that follow you."

 Taking profit from mastodon API I started to be able to get instances descriptions and to very specifically target how do characterize themselves.*for people who don’t know what is an API can you explained it roughly? what kind of information were you getting from the API?*
 You start to see patterns on this,



13/02/2019

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/special_issue_19_02_13

PALOMA && PEDRO

  • Economics
   — What will you need to be start a network. What are the resources (money, people, infrastructures) for this network? And to maintain it?

   — What does the funding model represent? Who is behind it? Why are they funding this project? (eg. Telegram (APP that is private. Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct. Cloud-Based.), founders are owners of VK, Russian social platform)

   — How is my network going to support an expansion? How is it going to grow? How will you deal with a network effect?


  • Politics
   — Is there any hierarchy? What are the rules? And limits? And who is the one that creates them?

   — How to control the decentralisation of Networks and its content?

   — What is the governance model of this project? Who establishes the rules, are there any?


  • Privacy
   — How can you maintain privacy while keeping it possible for you to connect to other people. What is the code that I need to find a user? There is no network if you are not connected to anyone.

   — What are your kind of agreements? (In facebook you are either in or out.) How to prevent this? How to give some power to the user, will this mean you will have to create limits to their access?

   — How am I going to be linked to other people, categories, in FB you are either a friend or not.

   — What kind of relations are you going to allow, and what are you going to label them?

Annotated reader

16/01/2019

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/annotated_reader

The Ruling Class and the Ruling ideas, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1845)

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/annotated_reader_Marx_Engels

(i) History of the Subaltern Classes; (ii) The Concept of 'Ideology'; (iii) Cultural Themes: Ideological Material, Antonio Gramsci (1929-35)

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/Gramsci_hegemony

Encoding, Decoding, Stuart Hall (1975)

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/sh_encoding_decoding

Sub Culture, the Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige (1979), Chapter One: From culture to hegemony

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/subculture_paloma

“The medium is the message.” In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan (1964).

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/The_medium_is_the_message

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