Executions: power and expression in networked and computational media

Technologies, infrastructures and migrations: material citizenship politics

“…It describes how migrant subjects and collectives enact citizenship in an alternative way to those of dominant migration and border regimes. Alternative or interventionist technologies and 'oppositional infrastructures' (Snodgrass 2017) can be seen as dynamic ongoing experiments, and forms of improvising with alternative imaginations, interpretations and articulations of noncitizenship and as self-nominated and autonomous acts of citizenship.…”

API practices and paradigms: Exploring the protocological parameters of APIs as key facilitators of sociotechnical forms of exchange

“…A key insight on the part of some of the now dominant platform providers as to the value of Web APIs during this period was that APIs could facilitate rapid modes of expansion in regards to the reach of a particular service. As witnessed in popular examples such as Google's use of APIs as tools for supporting various forms of third-party applications (e.g., Google Maps API), YouTube, Flickr embeds, Facebook's suite of Social Plug-in and Graph APIs (Snodgrass, 2017), creative bots and other projects using Twitter (Bucher and Pipkin, 2015;Soon, 2018Soon, , 2011, along with many more examples, APIs in such cases played a key role in facilitating the projection of a service beyond its own pages and into the WWW and Web-facilitated services as a whole via their uptake by other Web and application developers.…”

“…This can be witnessed, for instance, in the example of Facebook's Social Plug-in APIs and the way in which their decentralization of data mining (via something like the embedding of a Like or Share button on an external Web site) is carried out with a more overarching centralizing aim of using these APIs to make data external to the platform capturable according to platform-native objects and techniques of the platform itself. An implementation of APIs that results in a clear expansion of what, in the larger picture, is a general centralization and solidification of a platform's power and reach over sociotechnical modes of cultural exchange (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013;Snodgrass, 2017). Such methods and implementations have the effect of leading to significant potential situations of what Tufekci (2014) describes as "information asymmetry" between these dominant API providers and their users, as well as other would be services operating in their domain.…”

“…Despite acting as key infrastructural elements and connectors within the networked environments of the present, the prominence and importance of APIs is still largely under recognised. This relative lack of discussion on APIs applies not only in terms of their practical usage in things such as application and platform development, but also with regards to the sociotechnical questions of the cultural and political implications of the parameters of accessibility and exchange that APIs have the ability to set, acting in this way as crucial arbitrators for a range of computational infrastructures (Bucher, 2013;Espinha, et al, 2015;Soon, 2016;Snodgrass, 2017;Verborgh, 2017). If, in Helmond's description, APIs can be understood as an "underlying technological glue of the social Web" [1], linking various platforms, applications, and information processes together, it becomes important to pay close attention to what forms of sociotechnical exchanges APIs have tended towards.…”

Para-Archives : Rethinking Personal Archiving Practices in the Times of Capture Culture

“…Historically, the ancient practice of ars memoriae involved training one's memory, recall, and creative thinking by assigning particular symbols, vivid images (Carruthers, 2008, p.186), imaginary architectural structures, and monuments to one's thoughts 11 . The highly inventive and performative practices of ars memoriae were based on actively tending to memory, spatializing it, and constructing its inventory by breaking it down into discrete expressions and projecting them onto either imagined or real parts of the environment.…”