Sky Croeser
My research focuses on how activists use, and re-shape, the technologies of everyday life. My book, 'Global Justice and the Politics of Information: The struggle over knowledge', came out in September 2014, and since then I've continued my usual nonsense of bouncing around studying a range of different interconnected bits and pieces.
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Papers by Sky Croeser
This paper examines Twitter’s use within the Occupy Oakland movement. We use a mixture of ethnographic research through interviews with activists and participant observation of the movements’ activities, and a dataset of public tweets containing the #oo hashtag from early 2012. This research methodology allows us to develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how movement activists use Twitter by cross–checking trends in the online data with observations and activists’ own reported use of Twitter. We also study the connections between a geographically focused movement such as Occupy Oakland and related, but physically distant, protests taking place concurrently in other cities. This study forms part of a wider research project, Mapping Movements, exploring the politics of place, investigating how social movements are composed and sustained, and the uses of online communication within these movements.
Non-state actors (NSAs) are increasingly coming under consideration within the field of international relations, and transnational social movements (TSMs), particularly the global justice movement (GJM), are seen as having a role in pushing for progressive change. The emergence of the GJM has relied in large part on the growth and accessibility of various information and communication technologies (ICTs). Various attempts are now being made to place limitations on the uses to which ICTs can be put by NSAs. These attempts, intentionally or unintentionally, will affect the work of the GJM. In order to fully understand these developments, scholars of international relations need take a critical perspective on science and technology and understand these areas as contested spaces.
This paper examines Twitter’s use within the Occupy Oakland movement. We use a mixture of ethnographic research through interviews with activists and participant observation of the movements’ activities, and a dataset of public tweets containing the #oo hashtag from early 2012. This research methodology allows us to develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how movement activists use Twitter by cross–checking trends in the online data with observations and activists’ own reported use of Twitter. We also study the connections between a geographically focused movement such as Occupy Oakland and related, but physically distant, protests taking place concurrently in other cities. This study forms part of a wider research project, Mapping Movements, exploring the politics of place, investigating how social movements are composed and sustained, and the uses of online communication within these movements.
Non-state actors (NSAs) are increasingly coming under consideration within the field of international relations, and transnational social movements (TSMs), particularly the global justice movement (GJM), are seen as having a role in pushing for progressive change. The emergence of the GJM has relied in large part on the growth and accessibility of various information and communication technologies (ICTs). Various attempts are now being made to place limitations on the uses to which ICTs can be put by NSAs. These attempts, intentionally or unintentionally, will affect the work of the GJM. In order to fully understand these developments, scholars of international relations need take a critical perspective on science and technology and understand these areas as contested spaces.
The global social justice movement attempts to build a more equitable, democratic, and environmentally sustainable world. However, this book argues that actors involved need to recognise knowledge - including scientific and technological systems - to a greater extent than they presently do.
The rise of the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring and the Wikileaks controversy has demonstrated that the internet can play an important role in helping people to organise against unjust systems. While governments may be able to control individual activists, they can no longer control the flow of information. However, the existence of new information and communications technologies does not in itself guarantee that peoples' movements will win out against authoritarian governments or the power of economic elites. Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, this book illustrates the importance of contributions from local movements around the world to the struggle for global justice. Including detailed case studies on opposition to genetically-modified crops in the south of India, and the digital liberties movement, this book is vital reading for anyone trying to understand the changing relationship between science, technology, and progressive movements around the world.
In the face of globalization’s massive social and economic transformations and the resulting persistent inequality, activists, labor organizers, and advocacy NGOs are seeking and creating change beyond the confines of formal state politics and across national borders. Given the breadth of local issues activists face, the ways they define the problem and seek redress vary widely. This book provides a unique perspective on these efforts, gathering into one volume concrete examples of the implementation of different strategies for social change that highlight the challenges involved. This provides useful lessons for those involved in social change, as well as for those studying it. Contributors to the volume are scholars and practitioners around the world, and they draw on strong connections with people working in the field to improve working conditions and environmental standards of global production systems. This allows readers to develop a more comprehensive and grounded understanding of strategies for social change
This book maintains a strong balance between breadth and specificity. It provides an overview of the themes of social change, which contextualizes and draws common threads from the chapters grounded in specific geographic locations and political spaces of change. The chapters analyze environmental and social problems and the varying degrees of success activists have had in regulating industries, containing environmental hazards, and/or harnessing aspects of an industry for positive social and economic change. Contributors draw upon different ways of creating change, which include corporate social responsibility schemes, fair trade regimes, and community radio. By providing insight into the potential and limitations of actions taken at different levels, the book encourages a critical perspective on efforts for social change, grounded in an understanding of how conditions around the world can affect these activities.
However, the growing use of big data, social media-oriented approaches in the study of social movements raises new analytical and ethical challenges. There are important differences between big data research methodologies and previous approaches to social movement research, including a radically altered relationship between researchers and movement participants. Social media data capture and analysis around these topics can be carried out without having to be physically near or involved in the movements in question, which raises concerns about how to evaluate potential risks to participants; reciprocity; the accessibility of research to activists, including for comment and criticism; and how researchers engage with movement participants as knowledge-producers. Analytically, the use of big data methods for social movement research requires a careful attention to the biases in available data. Biases and gaps in the data may be introduced through strategic avoidance of social media or self-censorship by activists; the limitations of platform architecture and content policies; practices such as subtweeting and screen-capping which deliberately obscure links between accounts; the use of images and other non-text forms not captured by big data tools; the openness of different social media platforms to data capture; and the limitations of data capture tools themselves.
In response to these challenges and concerns, we advocate the use of a mixed-methods approach that combines participant observation, in-depth interviews, and big data methods. This approach offers a framework for balancing the benefits of new quantitative methods with a need to prioritise an ethical approach to social movement research, as well as correcting some of the biases introduced by big data methods. This approach has been developed through the Mapping Movements project, which has examined movements and events in North America, Africa, and Europe. This chapter draws most prominently on the first published case study of the project, looking at the use of Twitter within the Occupy Oakland movement (Croeser & Highfield, 2014). This research demonstrates that a mixed-methods approach allows a better understanding of the contexts of social movements and their uses of social media. Considering both the online and the physical aspects of social movements enables a nuanced analysis of social media use by activists, looking beyond the object of study (the social medium of choice) at a quantitative level, to examine the intersections between these aspects of social movements. Crucially, our work demonstrates how blended methods can combine the strengths of different research approaches to collectively overcome the limitations of big, social media data, providing detail and explanation for activity found in – and hidden from – these datasets, addressing some of the gaps in big data research. We have not, however, dealt with the Occupy Oakland case study in detail here; rather, we have attempted to outline some of the most pressing ethical and analytical issues for big data research on social movements which are more broadly relevant, and to offer potential avenues which may provide (partial) solutions.
While there is some recognition that educational ‘consumers’ of services such as Facebook need not take them at face value, accepting the norms, etiquette, and affordances encouraged by the site’s architecture, most work on Facebook and education focuses on individual responses used by teachers or students. While this work is valuable, it predominantly fits within the scope of what de Certeau called ‘tactics': hidden, “clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things” (1984, p. xix). Tactical responses do not change Facebook’s architecture, rather they respond to it in a temporary way, contingent on Facebook’s tacit approval or inability to enforce its terms of service. For example, Munoz and Towner recommend that teachers create profile pages “for professional use only” (2009, p. 8), which directly contravenes Facebook’s ban on multiple accounts (Facebook Help Centre, 2012) if teaching staff already have a profile. In contrast to this, browser extensions arguably work at the level of strategy. While de Certeau sees strategies as primarily deployed by those in power, he defines them with reference to the structure of systems and totalizing discourses, the way in which (physical) spaces are organised and controlled (1984, p. 38). Browser extensions which combat Facebook’s ability to track users across external sites (Felix, 2012) as well as blocking advertising on the site make fundamental shifts to the users’ experience of Facebook and the structure of the site architecture, changing the way in which the space is organised and controlled.
Despite the potential benefits of browser extensions as a strategy for (re)gaining user control of the Web, only a small percentage of Internet users employ browser extensions. Adblock, the “most popular extension for Chrome” (Gundlach, 2012), is only installed by approximately ten per cent of Chrome users. Around nine per cent of users across browsers have some sort of ad-blocking extension, although this is higher for visitors to technology-related content (ClarityRay, 2012). There is therefore a need for increased education around the use of these strategies, as well as further discussion of the contradictions involved in using a commercial platform while simultaneously attempting to subvert it. This chapter concludes by suggesting a framework for the use of browser extensions for teachers who wish to use Facebook in their teaching.
Issue 26 2015 Entanglements - Activism and Technology
Editors: Pip Shea, Tanya Notley, Jean Burgess, Su Ballard
Articles:
FCJ-188 Disability’s Digital Frictions:
Activism, Technology, and Politics—Katie Ellis, Gerard Goggin, Mike Kent
FCJ-189 Reimagining Work: Entanglements and Frictions around Future of Work Narratives—Laura Forlano, Megan Halpern
FCJ-190 Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives GNU social, Quitter, rstat.us, and Twister—Robert W. Gehl
FCJ-191 Mirroring the Videos of Anonymous: Cloud Activism, Living Networks, and Political Mimesis—Adam Fish
FCJ-192 Sand in the Information Society Machine: How Digital Technologies Change and Challenge the Paradigms of Civil Disobedience—Theresa Züger, Stefania Milan & Leonie Maria Tanczer
FCJ-193 Harbouring Dissent: Greek Independent and Social Media and the Antifascist Movement—Sky Croeser & Tim Highfield
FCJ-194 From #RaceFail to #Ferguson: The Digital Intimacies of Race-Activist Hashtag Publics—Nathan Rambukanna
FCJ-195 Privacy, Responsibility, and Human Rights Activism—Becky Kazansky
FCJ-196 Let’s First Get Things Done! On Division of Labour and
Techno-political Practices of Delegation in Times of Crisis—Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Jara Rocha & Femke Snelting
FCJ-197 Entanglements with Media and Technologies in the
Occupy Movement—Megan Boler & Jennie Phillips
Practitioner Reports:
FCJMESH-005 Technology and Citizen Witnessing:
Navigating the Friction Between Dual Desires for Visibility and Obscurity—Sam Gregory
FCJMESH-006 From Information Activism to the Politics of Data—
Maya Indira Ganesh and Stephanie Hankey
FCJMESH-007 Our Enduring Confusion About the
Power of Digital Tools in Protest—Ivan Sigal and Ellery Biddle
FCJMESH-008 Solutions for Online Harassment Don’t Come Easily—Jillian C. York
FCJMESH-009 Ranking Digital Rights: Keeping the Internet Safe for Advocacy—Nathalie Maréchal
FCJMESH-010 Getting Open Development Right—Zara Rahman
FCJMESH-011 : ‘We don’t work with video, we work with People’:
Reflections on Participatory Video Activism in Indonesia—M. Zamzam Fauzanafi & Kampung Halaman
debated not just in science fiction and speculative research
agendas but increasingly in serious technical and policy conversations.
Much work is underway to try to weave ethics into advancing ML research. We think it useful to add the lens of parenting to these efforts, and specifically radical, queer theories of parenting that consciously set out to nurture agents whose experiences, objectives and understanding of the world will necessarily be very different from their parents’. We propose a spectrum of principles which might underpin such an effort;
some are relevant to current ML research, while others will become more important if AGI becomes more likely. These principles may encourage new thinking about the development, design, training, and release into the world of increasingly autonomous agents.