This past three days have been a whirlwind of nerding out on questions surrounding connected societies, emerging technologies and life online at the annual conference for the Association of Internet Researchers. It’s so fresh, that I am yet to get a real handle on which ideas and experiences will stick in my mind.  For sure, I know that the opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson on indigenous internet users will be one of these experiences. She used the keynote platform well to make a few key points that resonated across her presentation. The ones that have stuck with me were that indigenous uses of social media platforms must incorporate safe spaces for connecting with kin and culture. Much activity online will occur in closed groups due to the horrific levels of racism and disgusting encounters they will have through public engagement online. The commentary and examples of racist comments was gut wrenching. While I knew of this, being confronted by what this looks like “in the flesh” was just a new level. She underscored this aspect by pointing out that indigenous communities were not likely to have “trust in the system”, and for good reason. Bronwyn also pointed out, that whilst being on the public internet was difficult, it was also an important platform through which to make indigenous concerns and activism visible. The double edged sword of visibility.

I would say that amongst the many amazing presentations, the other idea and research that is sticking with me, is the discussion of machine vision by Nicholas Carah, Daniel Angus and Adam Smith.  Something to chew on there.  I’m not sure how it’s perculating and permutating in my brain, but a tool that analyses large data sets of images from festivals and clusters images with similar signatures has put my creative brain box into an exploratory and wandering space.

However, the key aspect of this conference for me, was the opportunity to be involved in two excellent panels. The first, Digital Pleasures, with Naomi Smith (ASMR) and Jenny Davis (our theoretical hug), PJ Patella-Rey (Sex Camming) and Monica Barratt (Digital Drugs) appeared to hit a point in time. You can see the extended abstract here. It was exciting to be able to bring this suite of work to the conference, which had been cooked up initially in a Melbourne bar after a conference the previous year. Here is the presentation that Monica Barratt presented on Digital Drugs.  

What was so fascinating for me is that for many people who attended the panel this was new knowledge. Monica and I had been sitting on this knowledge that we had gained from a paricipant in our Silk Road research sooooo many years ago (late 2013/early 2014). In preparing for the presentation, I’d done a search for information online and within the scholarly databases, but there wasn’t much to draw on. In 2010 there had clearly been a marketing drive for the app I-Doser, a couple of YouTube “experience” videos and then just lots of examples of binaural beats created with drug names. So, I was like “oh, this old thing”. But I guess this is what happens when you start connecting into interdisciplinary spaces, it’s an opportunity to introduce and conceptualise social phenomena with new audiences. What I enjoyed most about this presentation was collaborating with Monica again, of course. But also the opportunity to develop the concept of the digital-body instrument, centre the body in discussions of digital artefacts and focus on viscerally of experience in the form of pleasure.  These tools were a lot of fun to play with.

Speaking of fun, the second panel I was involved in was cultural cosmologies of the internet. The panel line up was a real highlight with Heather Horst (free culture), Jolynna Sinanan & Gerhard Weisenfeld (Demonic technologies), Michaela Spencer (Digital First T&L for indigenous communities) and Marcus Carter (Killing in online gaming). Here’s the  extended abstract for your viewing pleasure. In this panel, I had the opportunity to present on Digital Pirates

The presentation also drew on the Silk Road research (the study that just keeps giving) and sought to draw on the anthropological approaches to the study of illicit communities, through a theory of piracy. This presentation is based upon a forthcoming paper in a special issue in the new JDSR, an open access journal that I am excited to be in one of the early issues and support this initiative of providing alternative publishing models for scholars. The highlight of working on this paper has been to immerse myself in a whole new body of literature on Pirates.  Yes there was a wiggle and a waggle in my tail while doing that work.  I hope you enjoy the product of that fun time.