The Diffusion of Pastebin Tools to Enhance Communication in FLOSS Mailing Lists

Part 2: Communication and CollaborationInternational audienceThis paper describes how software developers who use mailing lists to communicate reacted and adjusted to a new supplementary collaboration tool, called a pastebin service. Using publicly-available archives of 8800 mailing lists, we examine the adoption of the pastebin tool by software developers and compare it to the model presented in Diffusion of Innovation (DoI) theory. We then compare the rate at which software developers decided whether to accept or reject the new pastebin tools. We find that the overall rate of pastebin adoption follows the S-curve predicted by classic DoI theory. We then compare the individual pastebin services and their rates of adoption, as well as the reaction of different communities to the new tools and the various rationales for accepting or rejecting them

Decentring Devices : Developing Quali-Quantitative Techniques for Studying Controversies with Online Platforms

This thesis considers the role of online platforms (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in digital social research from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective and proposes new conceptual, methodological and visual tactics, drawing on a series of empirical case studies concerning controversies over nuclear power. Recent work in STS seeks to map science controversies (GM foods, nanotechnology, climate change, etc. Venturini 2010) using digital tools, which repurpose online platforms for social research (Rogers 2009). Yet these platforms not only provide data about controversies, they may also intervene in them as well andI propose that this requires studying them ‘in action’, drawing on the techniques of controversy analysis (Latour 1987) and actor-network theory (ANT). However, this research presents several challenges. How to delineate a study when controversies transcend particular platforms? How to define what is relevant when these platforms have their own relevance-defining metrics? How to track information flows within or between platforms? The central argument of this thesis is that while researchers should capitalise on the affordances of these platforms, they must diverge from them as well. Theoretically, this means maintaining a tension between studying controversies and studying the platforms themselves. Methodologically this means decoupling methods from platform data structures: scraping less obvious data, juxtaposing quantitative and qualitative traces and presenting data in novel ways. Over three case studies, I will develop a series of mapping techniques for analysing controversies which qualify the quantitative and make the less calculable more calculable, revealing imbalances in the articulation and dissemination of controversies online which would remain hidden to platform-specific or qualitative approaches on their own. These exploratory techniques, which draw on work in the sociology of scientific representations (Woolgar and Lynch 1992), have implications for debates about big data, digital sociology, media studies and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods

Hacking the web 2.0: user agency and the role of hackers as computational mediators

This thesis studies the contested reconfigurations of computational agency within the domain of practices and affordances involved in the use of the Internet in everyday life (here labelled lifeworld Internet), through the transition of the Internet to a much deeper reliance on computation than at any previous stage. Computational agency is here considered not only in terms of capacity to act enabled (or restrained) by the computational layer but also as the recursive capacity to reconfigure the computational layer itself, therefore in turn affecting one’s own and others’ computational agency. My research is based on multisited and diachronic ethnographic fieldwork: an initial (2005–2007) autoethnographic case study focused on the negotiations of computational agency within the development of a Web 2.0 application, later (2010–2011) fieldwork interviews focused on processes through which users make sense of the increasing pervasiveness of the Internet and of computation in everyday life, and a review (2010–2015) of hacker discourses focused on tracing the processes through which hackers constitute themselves as a recursive public able to inscribe counter–narratives in the development of technical form and to reproduce itself as a public of computational mediators with capacity to operate at the intersection of the technical and the social. By grounding my enquiry in the specific context of the lifeworlds of individual end users but by following computational agency through global hacker discourses, my research explores the role of computation, computational capacity and computational mediators in the processes through which users ‘hack’ their everyday Internet environments for practical utility, or develop independent alternatives to centralized Internet services as part of their contestation of values inscribed in the materiality of mainstream Internet