IPR article - HackMD

# IPR article # Extended abstract from the conference # Trusted commons ## Why ‘old’ social media matter? ### Maxigas and Guillaume Latzko-Toth `2019–02-28` ## Abstract Internet Studies scholarship tends to focus on new and hegemonic digital media, overlooking persistent uses of "older", non-proprietary protocols and applications by some social groups who are key to configuring the nexus between technology and society. In response, we examine the contemporary political significance of using "old" social media through the empirical case of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) use. First, we argue that it is necessary to rethink digital media history in a use-centered manner, correcting a bias towards innovation-centric accounts. Second, we advance a critique of platforms (closed, centralised, hegemonic social media) that we contrast with co-constructed devices that deeply involve users in their technological design and social construction. As a contemporary but long used online chat protocol, IRC serves as an important source for the critique of the currently hegemonic — but increasingly distrusted — infrastructures of computer-mediated communication. Drawing on Boltanski and Chiapello's theory of critique and recuperation, we contrast the uses and underlying social norms of IRC with those of currently mainstream social media platforms. We claim that certain technical limitations that actors of IRC development did not feel necessary to address have kept it from incorporation into regimes of capital accumulation and social control, but also hindered its mass adoption. Ultimately, IRC continues to serve social groups key to the collaborative production of software, hardware and politics. While the general history of digital innovations illustrates the logic of critique and recuperation, our case study highlights the possibilities and pitfalls of resistance to it. ## 1. Introduction Scholarship in Internet Studies tends to focus on the new and the emerging field in the field of digital media, overlooking persistent uses of other protocols, formats and applications that have been around for decades and yet are still used by various social groups. One striking example is the Internet Relay Chat protocol from the late 1980s. The open source, federated, text-based, synchronous communication technology is often regarded as an obsolete harbinger of recently born social media offering text-based instant messaging. However, closer look at current IRC uses reveals that, far from being a “residual media” [@Acland2007a], this protocol is a key component of peer production communities’ communication infrastructure. Using this empirical case, our intent, with this paper, is two-fold. First, we critique the scholarly tropism towards studying hegemonic and new “social media” at the expense of less recently introduced decides with similar functionalities, but attending to user communities of much smaller sizes. By ignoring them, or labelling them as old, dated, or obsolete, we fail to recognise that they constitute non-commercial, democratic alternatives to corporate social media, and to see their enduring uses by some social groups as a form of resistance to the “platformization” of computer-mediated communication. This leads us to argue that it is necessary to rethink digital media history in a *use*-centric manner, correcting a bias towards *innovation*-centric accounts. This would avoid the production of “blind spots” in social media history, since the production communities that made IRC a tool of choice have been often instrumental in producing the *innovations* at the centre of attention in the study of “new social media”. Studying devaluated, non-mainstream devices sheds light on other ways of conceiving, studying and valuing social media; and opens to a new historiographic conception of media history. But there is another reason why ‘old’ social media like IRC matter, which takes us to the second aim of this paper: to advance a critique of the current development of social media. Older social media matter because they offer a model of socio-technical governance which constitutes an alternative to closed digital media or so-called “walled gardens”. As an *unfinished artifact*, which deeply involved users throughout its design process, IRC stands in stark contrast with those of hegemonic social media monopolies which emerged after the dot-com bubble. In this perspective, IRC serves as an important resource for the critique of the currently hegemonic forms of computer-mediated communication, especially social media. Using Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) theory of critique and recuperation in technological cycles, and the concept of *unfinished artifact*, we offer a theoretical framework to contrast the uses and underlying social norms of IRC with those of recent mainstream social media platforms. When technologies such as online *chat* devices appeared, they manifested a critique of the existing order of computer uses and technically mediated communication. However, during the course of time subsequent versions of the device are increasingly constructed in a way that ties into hegemonic requirements for capital accumulation and social control, even if they answer to a specific demand. Therefore, the democratic values that are characteristic of *unfinished artifacts* and that can be found at the core of IRC design and governance principles are not merely incidental. IRC is constructed according to socio-technical norms prevalent in the early stages of the Internet. We claim that certain technical limitations that significant social groups of IRC did not feel necessary to address have kept it from incorporation into regimes of capital accumulation and social control. While they also hindered its mass adoption, IRC yet continues to serve social groups key to the collaborative production of software, hardware and politics. Although the general history of chat devices illustrates the historical logic of critique and recuperation, the particular case of IRC highlights the possibilities and pitfalls of resistance to it. Before expanding these three steps of our argument in separate sections, the first section of this paper will describe our methodological approach and our relation to data used as empirical grounding of our claims. The last section will summarise our conclusions and discuss the limitations of our work and suggest directions for future research. ## 2. Research design                                  Our claim that IRC is still popular as the everyday backstage communication solution of peer production communities rests on the study of three specific user groups from the realms of software, hardware and politics. In software, we looked at the communication practices of FLOSS developers, FLOSS being the prototypical example of collaborative software development. In hardware, we investigated the media use of hackerspace members, since these shared machine workshops are considered “the infrastructure of peer production in the physical realm”. In politics, we surveyed the reported technological choices of participants in the Anonymous hacktivist group, because they have been the most popular and visible example of peer produced politics of the last years. We structured the data collection and systematic analysis into three phases: Initially, the hypothesis was formulated based on our online and offline participative observation and historical ethnography. Maxigas focused on the technical repertoire of hackers, while Latzko-Toth researched the social affordances of IRC networks. We noticed that the continued use of IRC constituted a routine practice in peer production communities while other user groups slowly but surely migrated away to more popular social media platforms over the years. Then, we used quantitative, computational methods to test the hypothesis. We collected data from community platforms about how to contact the respective peer production projects for support. We analysed the frequency of IRC as a contact option offered by the projects, versus other ways of communication. We verified the results by correlating them with the names of these projects occuring in the list of IRC channels on popular networks (mainly freenode.org). Finally, we conducted semi-structured interviews in order to contextualise and refine the results of the preliminary analysis. We used the statistical data analysis as a prompt during the interviews. A dozen interviews were conducted in total, six with selected key participants of the contemporary IRC infrastructure (developers and maintainers), and a further six with casual but heavy users of the chat device. ## 3. Against innovation-centric social media history Social media received massive scholarly attention in the last decade, so much so that Social Media Studies is emerging as a field in its own right – as attested by the journals and conferences devoted to them [^journalsandconferences]. However, the term *social media* is problematic. First, because as Papacharissi [-@Papacharissi2015a 1] puts it in the inaugural issue of *Social Media + Society*, “all media are social” and “invite [their] own form of sociality”. Secondly, as a category, it lacks a clear boundary that would allow us to decide which devices belong to that category and which not. In order to overcome this problem, Hogan and Quan-Haase [-@HoganQuanHaase2010a 310] suggest to consider the “social affordances of social media,” and identify the “two-way audience” – or *many-to-many* communication – as the greatest common denominator of these media devices. Notwithstanding these cautions, using the phrase “social media” as a way to categorise a bound set of digital communication devices may be seen as a negation of the social affordances of a number of other technological artifacts that existed prior to them. It pertains to a rhetoric of periodisation that has become commonplace in studies of digital media [^periodisation]. By drawing the attention to the most recent technologies, a large portion of this scholarship contributes to framing already existing technologies as “old” in the derogatory sense of “no longer current” and “irrelevant”. In that perspective, these works tend to undermine the possibility for users of technologies that are not in the spotlight of the larger public’s attention to contribute to a social critique of dominant technologies, overlooking their political and subversive potential. By investigating all devices in use regardless of their “newness”, we can see media that enjoy continued use as legitimate technologies, rather than mere oddities surviving thanks to their users’ nostalgic attachments to a past technological “era” – as reported in @Lindsay2003a on TRS-80 retrocomputers. Dunbar-Hester’s work on low power radio activism shows how political values attached to the understanding of media in continued use shape the appropriation of new technologies [-@DunbarHester2009a; -@DunbarHester2014a]. We would like to build on her arguments to show “how” old media uses can inform a critique of new media. Here we simply note her insight that social practices such as collaborative production are closely tied to their means of technological mediation, and other means are evaluated in the context of already accumulated experience. Sally Wyatt [@Wyatt2008a 9] wrote about the *digital imperative*, a strong social expectation for people to adopt and pay attention to new technologies. She calls continued users of old technologies *resisters* (“never had access and never wanted it”) and *rejecters* (“tried it but gave it up voluntarily”). While our relationship to technology is strongly structured around the modern myth of progress – the technological determinist assumption that technological development goes hand-in-hand with social development – it can be helpful to pay attention to users who go against the grain in their technological choices, especially if we are interested in critical perspectives. Therefore, it is necessary to re-historicise studies of technological innovations. Only a critical history of technological devices allows to shed light on contemporary debates about them. Discussing these technologies as new obscures what is actually lost or gained with them. This is in line with Edgerton’s [-@Edgerton2008a] plea for decentering our historical accounts of technology from innovations to uses. *Use-centered* history of technology – as opposed to *innovation-centric* – is based not only on the invention date but historically specific about the use of the said technology, that is, who was using it, how long, for what purposes, and to which effects. It allows media scholars to theorise properties of devices stemming from their origins via path dependency; as well as emergent properties that are gained through maintenance, development and a changing socio-technical context. In our final argument we provide examples of both kinds of properties. ## 4. Critique and recuperation in technological cycles In this section we borrow a theory from pragmatic sociology and adopt it to our own devices in Science and Technology Studies. @BoltanskiChiapello2005a propose a theoretical framework where historical developments are analysed as an alternating series of critique and recuperation. Their particular case involves the artistic critique of alienation in the 1960s through a wide-spread cycle of struggles and the associated desires it would unleash. The critique of alienation was implemented by firm managers so that particular demands would be met at the same time as the main thrust of the critique would be derailed. Anne Barron already showed how FLOSS (Free and Open Source Software) — a social movement built around a technological artifact – went through such an ideological cycle from critique (free software) to recuperation (open source software). Established as a critical response to the commodification of code that have been freely shared before by academics, amateurs and indeed, corporations, in a few decades FLOSS technologies became an organic part of capital accumulation practices in the information technology industry. While the demands of the free software community for code sharing (a critique of property rights) at that time were gradually accepted and implemented by major industrial actors and safeguarded by some of the most powerful nation states, its associated values paradoxically became the “ethical foundations of contemporary capitalism” [@Barron2013a 19]. Drawing the methodological moral of Barron’s results, @SoderbergDelfanti2015a suggest that the critique/recuperation framework is general enough to be applied to the study of different time frames, while it is especially attractive for hacker studies: > Whereas Boltanski and Chiapello’s argument dwells on the evolution of > organizational forms, they have little to say about the role of technology > in the processes they describe. Yet technical innovations spawned by > hackers … constitute the material infrastructure of today’s capitalism. > [W]e argue for including hacking as one of the sources of the processes that > constitute such infrastructure [@SoderbergDelfanti2015a 3]. Weaving these threads together, we suggest that the critique/recuperation framework of the pragmatic school can be applied to technological cycles over much tighter time frames [@Maxigas2017a]. With such a twist, the framework becomes much more interesting and relevant for Science and Technology Studies, or media and communication scholarship, or even adjacent fields such as innovation studies and the history of technology. We propose that at least some successive technological regimes are initially formulated as a critique of the present conditions, yet they fall prey to recuperation on their way to mass adoption. Following @Liu2004a and @Fleming2009a who make a formally similar claim regarding “cool” and “authenticity” (respectively), we posit that the capitalist system feeds off the technological creativity at its fringes and makes use of the results for its own purposes. Notably, such a conception can be understood as a politicised reading of the user-innovation phenomena described by @vonHippel2005a. To tie its relevance to our empirical material, we refer to the observation that IRC today is mainly used by peer production communities: exactly the ones that exhibit the user-innovation dynamics analysed by von Hippel. ## 5. How IRC resists recuperation?  In this light, the general trajectory of chat devices follows the logic of critique/recuperation, in which what once constituted “hacks” and fringe uses of computer networks became *products* and *platforms* delivered by major corporations [@LatzkoToth2010a; @LatzkoToth:Maxigas2018a]. In contrast, the continued use of IRC by a significant but limited social group appears as an anomaly that opens up rare potentials to challenge the logic of recuperation in general, and commodification in particular. *Commodification* is the simplest form of recuperation in which something authentic becomes a commodity. Authentic is not an essentialising term – it simply refers to an element of human life that is outside market relations at a particular moment. Since commodification is the simplest form of recuperation, it is compatible with the fast pace of technological cycles. While the history of chat devices as a whole shows a pattern of recuperation and especially commodification, the particular trajectory of IRC defies such a logic: again, potentially offering valuable lessons on resisting the historical logic of recuperation. What remains to be argued is what is so special about IRC that it can fend off recuperation and commodification? We propose that IRC has certain technical limitations that have positive social consequences, at least regards to resisting recuperative tendencies. Namely, the IRC protocol, its software implementations and the associated infrastructures do not maintain a *backlog* for users. Users can follow conversations as long as they are logged in. Conversely, if they log out of IRC then they miss what happens on chat, until they join again. Furthermore, answers to questions can take anywhere between a few seconds to a few days to arrive, depending on the level of activity on the respective channels. Therefore, the only way to get the full IRC experience of a social life is to be logged in all the time. The conventional way to achieve a continuous presence is to run the IRC client software on a server computer that has uninterrupted Internet access. Sophisticated IRC users log in to such a server remotely and attach to the running IRC client in order to participate on chat channels. Such a practice is demonstrated by the evidence gathered on the netsplit website [@netsplit2016b]. The site collates statistics on the number of nicknames (closely corresponding to logged-in users) on the major public IRC servers. The charts show that the number of users is fairly stable, with only a small fluctuation according to the time of the day. We suggest that this means most IRC users are always logged in, not only when they actually have time to spend on IRC. Clients are always running and connected – users find other ways to look at them when they can dedicate the time. [^statistics] Doing so requires three things. First, actual user level access to a server (a *shell box*): infrastructure. Second, basic familiarity with command line interfaces: expertise. Third, involvement in activities discussed on IRC – we showed that these most prominently pertain to peer production. ## 6. Conclusion We started with the observation that the study of media and communication – especially social media – is subject to the rhythm of technological innovation, adoption and press coverage. Following @Edgerton2008a we called this tendency *innovation-centric* media history, which should be counterbalanced by *use-centered* media history. The latter looks at all media in use regardless of their novelty, and evaluates them according to the structural role they play in the contemporary media landscape. From such a vantage point, it is easy to see that IRC plays an interesting role today, as the backstage communication infrastructure of peer production communities. Ironically, despite they use an “outdated” communication medium, otherwise the activities of these communities can be described as disruptive innovations in their respective fields. While the innovations associated with the respective communities are widely studied, the backstage medium that underpins them did not receive substantial scholarly attention. Our contribution is not simply to fill such a gap in the literature, but also to explain why the gap was there in the first place. These observations beg the question what specific affordances [@Bucher:Helmond2018a] IRC offers that more widely adopted media lack. The question leads to critical reflection on contemporary mass media monopolies [@Lovink2013a]. We characterise IRC as an unfinished artifact whose features and infrastructures are shaped by its users [@LatzkoToth2014a]. This is achieved through specific design strategies, open protocol standards and distributed governance practices. Mainstream chat devices, on the other hand, have been subject to platformisation that transformed them into walled gardens. Finally, we proposed the theoretical framework of critique and recuperation to explain both the longevity of IRC and the parallel evolution of mainstream chat devices. While chat has always been an answer to the very human desire for real time, technologically mediated conversations, it has been incorporated to the requirements of capital accumulation and social control descriptive of capitalism [@LatzkoToth:Maxigas2018a]. At the same time, IRC suffered from technical defects that had positive social consequences: namely, they fended off recuperation and commodification. Here, instead of analysing the positive technical features of IRC, we emphasised its technical limitations. We argued that the lack of backlogs and state-of-the-art graphical user interfaces prevented the recuperation and commodification, but also the mass adoption of IRC. All in all, the results call into question the coupling of social progress and technical progress that is modernity’s own. Strategically, the moral of IRC tends towards *the democratisation of expertise* rather than the *democratisation of technology*. It seems that relevant social groups who could preserve control over their means of communication in face of recuperative structural logics were ones that preferred the simplicity and flexibility of unfinished artifacts to the user friendly interfaces of platforms [@Maxigas2017c]. ### Future work and limitations In order to understand the social significance, social history and quantitatively important use patterns of IRC, more research is needed into the contributions of the criminal underground to the protocol, infrastructures, and the social life of IRC networks. Apart from correcting this blind spot of IRC scholarship, there are two main directions to continue working for a social history of IRC. One is to look back and actually write the social history of the protocol from the point of view of its users (continuing the work began by Latzko-Toth), since here we mainly focused on contemporary user groups – and only briefly – in order to argue for the continued relevance of IRC as a social media. The other is to integrate findings and results from IRC research into the broader field of social media studies, as well as Media and Communication scholarship in general. We hoped to show here that IRC is still at the heart of collaborative production that underpins much of what researchers in these fields are looking at, from Twitter through community media to hacktivism. Our single most important suggestion was that the social history of IRC offers a fresh perspective on the political economy of chat devices touching on topics such as the critique of social media monopolies, platformisation, commodification and recuperation.  [^journalsandconferences]: A yearly Social Media and Society international conference was established in 2010, and a journal bearing an almost identical name – with a “+” instead of “and” – was launched by Sage Publications in 2015. [^periodisation]: The question of newness has been instrumental in structuring the research agenda on media technologies [@Gitelman2006a; @ParkJankowskiJones2011a]. Beyond specific objects, the interest for the new and the emerging seems to be related to an epistemological stance that favours the study of media technologies at a particular moment of their existence, that is, “at nascent stage”. This is particularly clear in the field of Internet Studies, where every two or three years a new “trendy” device captures the attention of researchers. [^statistics]: Further evidence is that Freenode shows the most fluctuation. First, it is the largest and therefore most known network to novice users. Second, it is dedicated to the technical support of FLOSS users, who often come in without a prior knowledge of IRC simply to get answers to questions. As we argue several times in the article, more research is needed to understand IRC and its significance in the contemporary media ecology. [^hackerspaces]: Multi-sited field work in hackerspaces included /tmp/lab, Paris (2013, May); BitLair, Amersfoort (2012, March); C-base, Berlin (2018, May); Calafou, Catalunya (2010-2017); Frack, Leeuwarden (2012, March); H.A.C.K. (Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge), Budapest (2010-2017); HacMan, Manchester (2018, May); Hack42, Arnheim (2012, March); HSBXL (Hackerspaces Brussels), Brussels (2018, February); LAG Lab, Amsterdam (2012-2017); Lancaster and Morecombe Makers (LAMM), Lancaster (2018 May); London Hackspace, London (2011, December); MadLab, Manchester (2018, May); MetaLab, Vienna (2011, August); Progress Bar (2010, June; 2016, March); RandomData, Utrecht (2012, March; 2013 December; 2018 March); Sk1llz, Almere (2012, March); TechInc (Technologia Incognita), Amsterdam (2012-2017); Tkkrlab, Enschede (2012, March); Toulouse Hackerspace Factory, Toulouse (2015, May; 2016 May); TOG, Dublin (2013, June); VoidWarranties, Antwerp (2012, March); μCCC, Munich (2015, December). Hacker conventions included Camp++, Komarom (2016, August); Chaos Communication Camp, Finowfurt (2011, August); Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin/Hamburg/Leipzig (2011-2017, December); FOSDEM (Free Software Developers’ Meeting), Brussels (2018, February); Freenode.live, Bristol (2017, November); Hackon, Amsterdam (2017, July); OHM (Observe, Hack, Make), Heerhugowaard (2013, August). [^interviews]: Focus group interviews were conducted at the 2017 Freenode #live conference in Bristol, UK and in the 2019 Chaos Communication Camp in Mildenberg, Germany). ## References