First-person Social Networking

Research Workshop (dates and participants to be updated soon)

One of the critical implications of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of
social networking platforms is the displacement of site maps in lieu
of me-centric navigational structures. The emergence of new technical
tools to represent our-selves and our networks from first-person
vantage points, not only on the Web but equally on gaming platforms and
wireless handheld devices, has political, economic, ethical, legal, and cultural
consequences. In many ways our selves are increasingly being coded and
represented through first-person objects and individuated lenses.
While such forms of first-person subjectification are often overt,
coded by our-selves on platforms such as facebook and myspace, they
are also, and less obviously, culled through automated social
networking sites like zoominfo.com, and more broadly in search engines
like google. This research workshop will share, make use of, and
elaborate on interdisciplinary methodologies and tools for researching
first-person interfaces and networks that have emerged across
new media platforms including wireless and gaming platforms. We propose to examine
how new software and hardware participate in the creation of
new modes of subjectification involving coding and networking
individual vantage points. The goal of this workshop is twofold:
First, to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue about the social,
political and cultural impacts of first person interfaces emerging in
new media forms (including privacy concerns, commercialization of
personal information, commoditization of identities, narrowing of the
public sphere, digital narcissism, possibilities for social and
political organization, emergent forms of public communication, etc.);
and second, to elaborate a set of methods for researching first-person
networks across the fields of software studies, code studies, game
studies, mobile technology studies, and virtual reality studies.