Current research (see, for example, Cheong, Martin and Macfadyen, 2012) on patterns of global and intercultural new media penetration and use nevertheless reveal the thinness of earlier utopian hopes for a technologically mediated “global village.” Nevertheless, new media are transforming local, political and cultural landscapes. What has (and who have) been made newly in/visible by new media and technologies? Participants in this panel will present\ud
and discuss aspects of their current research that shed light, in different ways, on questions of in/visibility in this, the Internet’s ‘Third Age’ (Wellman, 2011)

Green, Leila

Hrachovec, Herbert

MacFayden, Leah P.

Sorensen, Kristin

van der Velden, Maya

English

Elektronisch archivierte Theorie - Sammelpunkt

  
M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards 
Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 187-192. 
IN/VISIBILITY IN THE INTERNET’S THIRD AGE 
LELIA GREEN1, HERBERT HRACHOVEC2, LEAH P. 
MACFADYEN3, KRISTIN SORENSEN4 AND MAJA VAN DER 
VELDEN5 
1Mass Communications, Media and Cultural Studies, School of 
Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University, Australia 
2 Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria 
3 Arts ISIT, Faculty of Arts, The University of British Columbia, Canada  
4 Department of Global Studies, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA 
5Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway 
Abstract. Current research (see, for example, Cheong, Martin & Macfadyen, 
2012) on patterns of global and intercultural new media penetration and use 
nevertheless reveal the thinness of earlier utopian hopes for a technologically 
mediated “global village.” Nevertheless, new media are transforming local, 
political and cultural landscapes. What has (and who have) been made newly 
in/visible by new media and technologies? Participants in this panel will present 
and discuss aspects of their current research that shed light, in different ways, on 
questions of in/visibility in this, the Internet’s ‘Third Age’ (Wellman, 2011). 
1. Context 
At the start of the second decade of the new millennium, there is increasing awareness 
of the development and use of newer “smart” and more interactive media that is 
happening with precipitate speed in many parts of the world. The uprisings in the Arab 
region in 2011, for instance, focused attention on the use of digital social media and 
acknowledged their role in movements for political engagement and change. Terms 
such as the “Twitter revolution” and the “Facebook revolution” have been used widely, 
conceptualizing the notions of “dynamic media” or “Web 2.0” as potentially radical, 
disruptive, and socially transformative.  
 Indeed, one might be fooled into believing that “old” debates about technology 
and Internet access and media control are dead, and that future work should begin with 
the premise that novel technologies are now driving changes in the way that ‘all’ people 
relate to each other, within and across cultures. Current research (see, for example, 
Cheong, Martin & Macfadyen, 2012) on patterns of global and intercultural new media 
penetration and use nevertheless reveal the thinness of such utopian and technological 
determinist hopes, which proclaimed the arrival of a new technological enlightenment 
and the inevitable development of McLuhan’s long-forecasted “global village.” At the 
same time, continuing work does not simply uphold the pessimistic predictions of 
dystopian naysayers who insisted (as did commentators on earlier technologies) that the 
188 L. GREEN ET AL. 
 
Internet and new media would fragment human relationships and cultures and divide us 
from each other. Instead, diverse studies give evidence of the multiple, often 
contradictory and apparently muddled ways in which our online and offline lives 
interweave and interact with one another, as communication technologies become ever 
more seamlessly integrated into human lives and cultures. What actually happens in 
praxis when digital media are implemented within and across cultures continues to be 
contested and negotiated within complex local, cultural and political conditions, and 
patterns of technology and media access remain uneven.  
2. Panel Contributors and Contributions 
Participants in this panel will present and discuss aspects of their current research that 
shed light, in different ways, on questions of in/visibility in this, the Internet’s ‘Third 
Age’ (Wellman, 2011). Whose images and words are now seen/presented/promoted and 
whose are not? Which gaps remain in current scholarship regarding cultural attitudes 
towards technology and communication? Which social contexts have, as yet, been 
dramatically understudied? Is objective representation of the realities of, marginalized 
groups better than no visibility at all, even if the people in question do not have access 
or skills to present themselves as subjects? Which realities of corporate or political 
control of media and communications may be masked by the new structures of social 
media? The following summaries and references give insight into their current research 
interests. 
2.1. LEAH P. MACFADYEN (PANEL ORGANIZER) 
Leah P. Macfadyen (PhD, The University of British Columbia, Canada) is a Researcher 
and Instructor in the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia in 
Vancouver, Canada. She is interested in the many and varied intersections (and 
collisions) between the social and the technological, and her research agenda includes 
educational technology studies, global and transformative education, and Internet 
research. Her most recent writings on aspects of culture, identity, and online education 
have appeared in edited collections such as Digital Differences: Perspectives on Online 
Education (2010) and Learning Cultures in Online Education (2010). 
 In 2011, together with Pauline H. Cheong and Judith N. Martin, Leah has co-
edited and contributed to a new edited collection: New Media and Intercultural 
Communication: Identity, Community and Politics (2012). 
2.2. LELIA GREEN, DEBBIE RODAN, AND LYNSEY URIDGE 
Lelia Green (PhD, Murdoch University, Australia) is Professor of Communications at 
the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University and a Chief 
Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative 
Industries and Innovation. The author of The Internet: An Introduction to New Media 
(2010), Dr. Green’s research interests focus on audiences, users, and the social and 
cultural aspects of communication technologies.  
 IN/VISIBILITY IN THE INTERNET’S THIRD AGE 189 
2.2.1. Negotiating a New Identity Online and Off-Line: The HeartNET Experience 
Debbie Rodan, Lynsey Uridge and Lelia Green have been working with an online 
community of heart patients since 2007. HeartNET has provided an environment in 
which to observe the interaction of new media, identity formation and the cultural 
positioning of heart patients. Imposing the identity of heart patient upon a person 
challenges the individual’s notion of self.  The challenge comes from the threat to an 
identity which to that point in people's lives might have appeared whole and stable. As 
a result of having a heart event, heart patients are named and positioned in particular 
ways by others, and in this respect a heart patient identity operates in ways similar to 
other identities such as gender, race and class. One reason for this positioning is the 
media’s very narrow conception of a heart patient’s identity which is constructed as 
either the tragically ill medical model, or the superhuman recovered tri-athlete. 
HeartNET is one of the few online communities that offers a range of differing 
identities to heart patients and the potential for a renewed idea of the self. 
2.3. HERBERT HRACHOVEC  
Herbert Hrachovec (PhD, University of Vienna, Austria) is Lecturer in the Department 
of Philosophy, at the University of Vienna, Austria. He has held scholarships and 
visiting appointments at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), the University of 
Münster (Germany), Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (USA), Freie Universität 
Berlin, Universität Duisburg-Essen (Germany), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar 
(Germany), University of Bergen (Norway), and The University of Klagenfurt 
(Austria). His areas of specialization are analytic philosophy, aesthetics, and media 
theory. He was a member of the Academic Senate and Chair of the Central Committee 
for Curriculum Planning at the University of Vienna from 2005 to 2010. For further 
details, see http://hrachovec.philo.at 
2.3.1. Possibilities and Contradictions in HTML: The Case of the University of 
Vienna’s Unibrennt Platform 
A crucial, yet often neglected, difference between visibilities is at the core of the 
WWW. Browsers render HTML code for general public use. They are fed sequences of 
semi-comprehensible ASCII signs and produce multimedia web pages. A site's 
underlying HTML version is no secret, but its visibility (and comprehensibility) is one 
step removed from ordinary perception. 
 Pronouncements carried by a web site can be contradicted by the underlying code. 
Mischievous collections of passwords are an obvious example, but there are more 
refined and theoretically interesting cases of contradictions between the appearance of a 
site and its "conditions of possibility". One instructive example is the popular web page 
of a student's protest movement at Vienna University in autumn 2009. Its appeal against 
neo-liberal, globalized edu-business stands in marked contrast to what is revealed by 
the HTML input. 
190 L. GREEN ET AL. 
 
2.4. KRISTIN SORENSEN  
Kristin Sorensen (PhD, Indiana University, USA) is Associate Professor of Global 
Studies at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her research investigates the 
manner in which cultural identities, historical memories, and their associated traumas 
circulate through the media and public culture in contemporary Latin America. Her 
book, Media, Memory, and Human Rights in Chile, was published by Palgrave 
Macmillan in 2009 and is forthcoming in Spanish by RiL Editores. Dr. Sorensen has 
published articles in the Journal of Human Rights, Cuadernos de Información, Peace & 
Change, and SECOLAS Annals. She has also contributed chapters to the following 
edited books: Democracy in Chile: The Legacy of September 11, 1973, Global 
Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age, and The 1980s: A 
Critical and Transitional Decade. 
2.4.1. New Media and Social Change in Chile 
In recent years, new technologies and new forms of social media have taken on a 
greater role in promoting social change in contemporary Chile.  The high school and 
university student movement for reforms to Chile’s education system, a grassroots 
movement started in 2006 by young Chileans from a wide array of socio-economic 
class positions, which gained dramatically in numbers and visibility in 2011 and now 
2012, relies heavily on social media in order to plan events, marches, sit-ins, and school 
take-overs, as well as to document excesses and abuses of the militarized police who 
confront the student protesters.  While the students’ use of online media does not 
replace their public activism in the streets and in the schools, it has become the primary 
method for organizing their public actions.  Since Chilean youth are most likely to feel 
comfortable using this media, it is no surprise that they have been the first to use is so 
productively for organizing and bypassing more censored mainstream media outlets.  
Social media is taking on a more important role in other Chilean movements as well, 
including opposition to the development of massive hydroelectric power plants in 
southern Chile, the activism of Mapuche and other indigenous groups, and the struggle 
for more visibility and equal rights for members of the LGBTQ community in Chile.  
Nonetheless, access to this media is still limited and problematic for many Chileans. 
2.4.2. References 
Gordon, N., & Sorensen, K. (2012). Jamaica and Chile Online: Accessing and Using the Internet 
in a Developing World Context. In P. Hope Cheong, J.N. Martin and L.P. Macfadyen 
(Eds), New Media and Intercultural Communication: Identity, Community and Politics (pp. 
275-289). New York: Peter Lange. 
Howard, P.N., & Parks, M. R. (2012) Social Media and Political Change: Capacity, Constraint, 
and Consequence. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 359-362. 
Nisbet, E.C., Stoycheff, E., & Pearce, K.E. (2012). Internet Use and Democratic Demands: A 
Multinational, Multilevel Model of Internet Use and Citizen Attitudes about Democracy.  
Journal of Communication, 62(2), 249-265. 
Valenzuela, S., Arriagada, A., & Scherman, A. (2012). The Social Media Basis of Youth Protest 
Behavior: The Case of Chile.  Journal of Communication, 62(2), 299-314. 
 IN/VISIBILITY IN THE INTERNET’S THIRD AGE 191 
2.5. MAJA VAN DER VELDEN 
Maja van der Velden (PhD, University of Bergen, Norway) is a Researcher and 
Lecturer at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is 
currently investigating the relationship between human autonomy and automation, 
including the way patient privacy is negotiated on social media and continues her 
ongoing exploration of the relations between information technology and the diversity 
of knowledge. For further details, see 
http://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/english/people/aca/majava. 
2.5.1. Making the Invisible Visible 
“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access 
to the Sum of all Human knowledge.” Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia founder 
(Oslo, April 23, 2012) 
Also in the Third Age of Internet and Internet Studies (Wellman, 2011), research 
focuses mainly on the users, use, and content. Web 2.0 platforms, the technologies 
underlying blogs, social networks, wikis, etc., are ignored in these studies. The lack of 
attention to platforms (Bogust & Montfort, 2009) makes the agency of technology 
invisible (van der Velden, 2007). These platforms establish the channels and perform 
the connections through which information circulates (Langlois et al, 2009). Take the 
case of Wikipedia, the largest collection of user-generated online content and one of the 
most popular Internet site, with 460 million visitors a month. Wikipedia has de-
centered (Cunningham & Williams, 1993) the authoring of knowledge but has a 
centralised platform with protocols and templates that define, order, and circulate 
knowledge. This platform is based on the values of a print culture with its focus on 
details, rational analysis, and linear storytelling (St. Clair 2000). The human knowledge 
that doesn’t fit the Wikipedia platform becomes invisible, is marginalised, or 
diasporized (Olson & Ward, 1997). By including the platforms, softwares, codes, 
protocols, standards, and templates in our Internet studies – the way they shape users, 
use, and content, and at the same time are shaped by them – we can make visible what 
has become invisible. 
2.5.2. References 
Bogust, I & N. Montfort (2009). Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers. In 
Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009. Irivine: University of 
California, Dec. 12-15, 2009. Retrieved April 23, 2012 from 
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.pdf 
Cunningham, A., & Williams, P. (1993). De-centring the “Big Picture”: The Origins of  Modern 
Science and the Modern Origins of Science. British journal for the history of science, 26(4), 
407–432. 
Langlois, G., McKelvey, F., Elmer, G., & Werbin. K. (2009). Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 
Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis. FibreCulture, 14. Retrieved April 23, 2012 
from http://fourteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-095-mapping-commercial-web-2-0-worlds-
towards-a-new-critical-ontogenesis/ 
Olson. H., & Ward, D. B. (1997). Ghettoes and diaspora in classification: Communicating across 
limits. In B. Frohmann (Ed), Communication and Information in Context: Society, 
192 L. GREEN ET AL. 
 
Technology and the Professions (pp. 19-31). Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of 
the Canadian Association for Information Science. 
St. Clair, R. (2000). Visual Metaphor, Cultural Knowledge, and the New Rhetoric. In J. Reyhner, 
J. Martin, L. Lockard, and W. Sakiestewa Gilbert (Eds), Learn in Beauty: Indigenous 
Education for a New Century (pp. 85-101). Flagstaff, Arizona: Northern Arizona 
University. 
van der Velden, M. (2007). Invisibility and the Ethics of Digitalization: Designing so as not to 
Hurt Others. In S. Hongladarom & C. Ess (Eds), Information Technology Ethics: Cultural 
Perspectives (pp. 81-93). London: Idea Group Reference. 
Wellman, B. (2011). Studying the Internet through the ages. In M. Consalvo and C. Ess (Eds), 
The Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies (pp. 17-23), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 
References 
Cheong, P., Martin, J., & Macfadyen, L. P. (Eds.). (2012). New Media and Intercultural 
Communication: Identity, Community and Politics. New York: Peter Lang. 
Wellman, B. (2011). Studying the Internet through the ages. In M. Consalvo & C. Ess (Eds.), The 
Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies (pp.17–23). Oxford, United Kingdom: Wiley-
Blackwell. 


In/Visibility in the Internet’s Third Age

Name not available

  M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 187-192. IN/VISIBILITY IN THE INTERNET’S THIRD AGE LELIA GREEN1, HERBERT HRACHOVEC2, LEAH P. MACFADYEN3, KRISTIN SORENSEN4 AND MAJA VAN DER VELDEN5 1Mass Communications, Media and Cultural Studies, School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University, Australia 2 Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria 3 Arts ISIT, Faculty of Arts, The University of British Columbia, Canada  4 Department of Global Studies, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA 5Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway Abstract. Current research (see, for example, Cheong, Martin & Macfadyen, 2012) on patterns of global and intercultural new media penetration and use nevertheless reveal the thinness of earlier utopian hopes for a technologically mediated “global village.” Nevertheless, new media are transforming local, political and cultural landscapes. What has (and who have) been made newly in/visible by new media and technologies? Participants in this panel will present and discuss aspects of their current research that shed light, in different ways, on questions of in/visibility in this, the Internet’s ‘Third Age’ (Wellman, 2011). 1. Context At the start of the second decade of the new millennium, there is increasing awareness of the development and use of newer “smart” and more interactive media that is happening with precipitate speed in many parts of the world. The uprisings in the Arab region in 2011, for instance, focused attention on the use of digital social media and acknowledged their role in movements for political engagement and change. Terms such as the “Twitter revolution” and the “Facebook revolution” have been used widely, conceptualizing the notions of “dynamic media” or “Web 2.0” as potentially radical, disruptive, and socially transformative.   Indeed, one might be fooled into believing that “old” debates about technology and Internet access and media control are dead, and that future work should begin with the premise that novel technologies are now driving changes in the way that ‘all’ people relate to each other, within and across cultures. Current research (see, for example, Cheong, Martin & Macfadyen, 2012) on patterns of global and intercultural new media penetration and use nevertheless reveal the thinness of such utopian and technological determinist hopes, which proclaimed the arrival of a new technological enlightenment and the inevitable development of McLuhan’s long-forecasted “global village.” At the same time, continuing work does not simply uphold the pessimistic predictions of dystopian naysayers who insisted (as did commentators on earlier technologies) that the 188 L. GREEN ET AL.  Internet and new media would fragment human relationships and cultures and divide us from each other. Instead, diverse studies give evidence of the multiple, often contradictory and apparently muddled ways in which our online and offline lives interweave and interact with one another, as communication technologies become ever more seamlessly integrated into human lives and cultures. What actually happens in praxis when digital media are implemented within and across cultures continues to be contested and negotiated within complex local, cultural and political conditions, and patterns of technology and media access remain uneven.  2. Panel Contributors and Contributions Participants in this panel will present and discuss aspects of their current research that shed light, in different ways, on questions of in/visibility in this, the Internet’s ‘Third Age’ (Wellman, 2011). Whose images and words are now seen/presented/promoted and whose are not? Which gaps remain in current scholarship regarding cultural attitudes towards technology and communication? Which social contexts have, as yet, been dramatically understudied? Is objective representation of the realities of, marginalized groups better than no visibility at all, even if the people in question do not have access or skills to present themselves as subjects? Which realities of corporate or political control of media and communications may be masked by the new structures of social media? The following summaries and references give insight into their current research interests. 2.1. LEAH P. MACFADYEN (PANEL ORGANIZER) Leah P. Macfadyen (PhD, The University of British Columbia, Canada) is a Researcher and Instructor in the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is interested in the many and varied intersections (and collisions) between the social and the technological, and her research agenda includes educational technology studies, global and transformative education, and Internet research. Her most recent writings on aspects of culture, identity, and online education have appeared in edited collections such as Digital Differences: Perspectives on Online Education (2010) and Learning Cultures in Online Education (2010).  In 2011, together with Pauline H. Cheong and Judith N. Martin, Leah has co-edited and contributed to a new edited collection: New Media and Intercultural Communication: Identity, Community and Politics (2012). 2.2. LELIA GREEN, DEBBIE RODAN, AND LYNSEY URIDGE Lelia Green (PhD, Murdoch University, Australia) is Professor of Communications at the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University and a Chief Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. The author of The Internet: An Introduction to New Media (2010), Dr. Green’s research interests focus on audiences, users, and the social and cultural aspects of communication technologies.   IN/VISIBILITY IN THE INTERNET’S THIRD AGE 189 2.2.1. Negotiating a New Identity Online and Off-Line: The HeartNET Experience Debbie Rodan, Lynsey Uridge and Lelia Green have been working with an online community of heart patients since 2007. HeartNET has provided an environment in which to observe the interaction of new media, identity formation and the cultural positioning of heart patients. Imposing the identity of heart patient upon a person challenges the individual’s notion of self.  The challenge comes from the threat to an identity which to that point in people's lives might have appeared whole and stable. As a result of having a heart event, heart patients are named and positioned in particular ways by others, and in this respect a heart patient identity operates in ways similar to other identities such as gender, race and class. One reason for this positioning is the media’s very narrow conception of a heart patient’s identity which is constructed as either the tragically ill medical model, or the superhuman recovered tri-athlete. HeartNET is one of the few online communities that offers a range of differing identities to heart patients and the potential for a renewed idea of the self. 2.3. HERBERT HRACHOVEC  Herbert Hrachovec (PhD, University of Vienna, Austria) is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Vienna, Austria. He has held scholarships and visiting appointments at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), the University of Münster (Germany), Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (USA), Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Duisburg-Essen (Germany), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany), University of Bergen (Norway), and The University of Klagenfurt (Austria). His areas of specialization are analytic philosophy, aesthetics, and media theory. He was a member of the Academic Senate and Chair of the Central Committee for Curriculum Planning at the University of Vienna from 2005 to 2010. For further details, see http://hrachovec.philo.at 2.3.1. Possibilities and Contradictions in HTML: The Case of the University of Vienna’s Unibrennt Platform A crucial, yet often neglected, difference between visibilities is at the core of the WWW. Browsers render HTML code for general public use. They are fed sequences of semi-comprehensible ASCII signs and produce multimedia web pages. A site's underlying HTML version is no secret, but its visibility (and comprehensibility) is one step removed from ordinary perception.  Pronouncements carried by a web site can be contradicted by the underlying code. Mischievous collections of passwords are an obvious example, but there are more refined and theoretically interesting cases of contradictions between the appearance of a site and its "conditions of possibility". One instructive example is the popular web page of a student's protest movement at Vienna University in autumn 2009. Its appeal against neo-liberal, globalized edu-business stands in marked contrast to what is revealed by the HTML input. 190 L. GREEN ET AL.  2.4. KRISTIN SORENSEN  Kristin Sorensen (PhD, Indiana University, USA) is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her research investigates the manner in which cultural identities, historical memories, and their associated traumas circulate through the media and public culture in contemporary Latin America. Her book, Media, Memory, and Human Rights in Chile, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009 and is forthcoming in Spanish by RiL Editores. Dr. Sorensen has published articles in the Journal of Human Rights, Cuadernos de Información, Peace & Change, and SECOLAS Annals. She has also contributed chapters to the following edited books: Democracy in Chile: The Legacy of September 11, 1973, Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age, and The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade. 2.4.1. New Media and Social Change in Chile In recent years, new technologies and new forms of social media have taken on a greater role in promoting social change in contemporary Chile.  The high school and university student movement for reforms to Chile’s education system, a grassroots movement started in 2006 by young Chileans from a wide array of socio-economic class positions, which gained dramatically in numbers and visibility in 2011 and now 2012, relies heavily on social media in order to plan events, marches, sit-ins, and school take-overs, as well as to document excesses and abuses of the militarized police who confront the student protesters.  While the students’ use of online media does not replace their public activism in the streets and in the schools, it has become the primary method for organizing their public actions.  Since Chilean youth are most likely to feel comfortable using this media, it is no surprise that they have been the first to use is so productively for organizing and bypassing more censored mainstream media outlets.  Social media is taking on a more important role in other Chilean movements as well, including opposition to the development of massive hydroelectric power plants in southern Chile, the activism of Mapuche and other indigenous groups, and the struggle for more visibility and equal rights for members of the LGBTQ community in Chile.  Nonetheless, access to this media is still limited and problematic for many Chileans. 2.4.2. References Gordon, N., & Sorensen, K. (2012). Jamaica and Chile Online: Accessing and Using the Internet in a Developing World Context. In P. Hope Cheong, J.N. Martin and L.P. Macfadyen (Eds), New Media and Intercultural Communication: Identity, Community and Politics (pp. 275-289). New York: Peter Lange. Howard, P.N., & Parks, M. R. (2012) Social Media and Political Change: Capacity, Constraint, and Consequence. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 359-362. Nisbet, E.C., Stoycheff, E., & Pearce, K.E. (2012). Internet Use and Democratic Demands: A Multinational, Multilevel Model of Internet Use and Citizen Attitudes about Democracy.  Journal of Communication, 62(2), 249-265. Valenzuela, S., Arriagada, A., & Scherman, A. (2012). The Social Media Basis of Youth Protest Behavior: The Case of Chile.  Journal of Communication, 62(2), 299-314.  IN/VISIBILITY IN THE INTERNET’S THIRD AGE 191 2.5. MAJA VAN DER VELDEN Maja van der Velden (PhD, University of Bergen, Norway) is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is currently investigating the relationship between human autonomy and automation, including the way patient privacy is negotiated on social media and continues her ongoing exploration of the relations between information technology and the diversity of knowledge. For further details, see http://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/english/people/aca/majava. 2.5.1. Making the Invisible Visible “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the Sum of all Human knowledge.” Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia founder (Oslo, April 23, 2012) Also in the Third Age of Internet and Internet Studies (Wellman, 2011), research focuses mainly on the users, use, and content. Web 2.0 platforms, the technologies underlying blogs, social networks, wikis, etc., are ignored in these studies. The lack of attention to platforms (Bogust & Montfort, 2009) makes the agency of technology invisible (van der Velden, 2007). These platforms establish the channels and perform the connections through which information circulates (Langlois et al, 2009). Take the case of Wikipedia, the largest collection of user-generated online content and one of the most popular Internet site, with 460 million visitors a month. Wikipedia has de-centered (Cunningham & Williams, 1993) the authoring of knowledge but has a centralised platform with protocols and templates that define, order, and circulate knowledge. This platform is based on the values of a print culture with its focus on details, rational analysis, and linear storytelling (St. Clair 2000). The human knowledge that doesn’t fit the Wikipedia platform becomes invisible, is marginalised, or diasporized (Olson & Ward, 1997). By including the platforms, softwares, codes, protocols, standards, and templates in our Internet studies – the way they shape users, use, and content, and at the same time are shaped by them – we can make visible what has become invisible. 2.5.2. References Bogust, I & N. Montfort (2009). Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers. In Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009. Irivine: University of California, Dec. 12-15, 2009. Retrieved April 23, 2012 from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.pdf Cunningham, A., & Williams, P. (1993). De-centring the “Big Picture”: The Origins of  Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science. British journal for the history of science, 26(4), 407–432. Langlois, G., McKelvey, F., Elmer, G., & Werbin. K. (2009). Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis. FibreCulture, 14. Retrieved April 23, 2012 from http://fourteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-095-mapping-commercial-web-2-0-worlds-towards-a-new-critical-ontogenesis/ Olson. H., & Ward, D. B. (1997). Ghettoes and diaspora in classification: Communicating across limits. In B. Frohmann (Ed), Communication and Information in Context: Society, 192 L. GREEN ET AL.  Technology and the Professions (pp. 19-31). Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science. St. Clair, R. (2000). Visual Metaphor, Cultural Knowledge, and the New Rhetoric. In J. Reyhner, J. Martin, L. Lockard, and W. Sakiestewa Gilbert (Eds), Learn in Beauty: Indigenous Education for a New Century (pp. 85-101). Flagstaff, Arizona: Northern Arizona University. van der Velden, M. (2007). Invisibility and the Ethics of Digitalization: Designing so as not to Hurt Others. In S. Hongladarom & C. Ess (Eds), Information Technology Ethics: Cultural Perspectives (pp. 81-93). London: Idea Group Reference. Wellman, B. (2011). Studying the Internet through the ages. In M. Consalvo and C. Ess (Eds), The Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies (pp. 17-23), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. References Cheong, P., Martin, J., & Macfadyen, L. P. (Eds.). (2012). New Media and Intercultural Communication: Identity, Community and Politics. New York: Peter Lang. Wellman, B. (2011). Studying the Internet through the ages. In M. Consalvo & C. Ess (Eds.), The Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies (pp.17–23). Oxford, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell. 

In/Visibility in the Internet’s Third Age

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