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1. Protest Bots

   With half a century’s worth of profound social and technological change, the 1960s protest movement is far removed from today’s world. Networks, databases, video games, social media, and the rise of algorithmic culture and the sharing economy have irrevocably altered our landscape. What, in this world, is the 21st century equivalent of that key feature of the sixties protest movement: the protest song? This paper argues that one possible answer is the protest bot, a computer program that algorithmically generates social and political critiques on social media.

   Using Habermas’s imperfect account of the public sphere as my starting point, I suggest that five characteristics define protest bots—or bots of conviction, as I also call them. Bots of conviction are topical, data-based, cumulative, oppositional, and uncanny. After explaining these five characteristics, I explore several well-known and lesser-known bots on Twitter, showing how they are or are not protest bots. Throughout this paper I adopt a critical code studies approach, diving into the procedural DNA of several bots of conviction of my own creation.

   Hannah Ackermans - 10.11.2015 - 10:07

2. Boolean Poetics: The Search String as Post-Literary Technique

   Over the past decade, expanding access to Big Data has produced a number of innovations in electronic literature and digital culture more broadly, ranging from Twitter bots, media art and generative poetry utilizing social data to vernacular creative writing, journalism and fictocriticism on platforms such as Tumblr and BuzzFeed. These divergent modes of expression all rely on the ability to find and sort high-volume, real-time, multimodal digital data – for example tweets, Instagram photos, animated GIFs, YouTube videos, SoundCloud audio tracks and more – and recombine them in novel works of bricolage. Yet despite the increasing prominence of these writing practices, they have received scant scholarly attention.

   Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:16