While I’ m busy writing my master thesis I also take some time to work on projects, such as e150. Basicly this is just a portfolio website for my brother which I also hope to offer to other (art)students and professionals. During the development of this project, I’ m not only busy writing code, but I’ m also developing theoretical insights. Since I have chosen not to make use of some pre-existing content management system, or for that matter, building my own, but to integrate content from social network sites such as flickr through their API’ s, I encountered some theoretical obstacles .

While I was already struggling to cope with flickr’ s (api) terms of use, I visited two events that directed my attention to potential issues accompanying social network sites. At the Society of the Query conference Steve Pemberton mentioned the “walled garden” issue and at versions I noticed that flickr’ s funding by Yahoo was troublesome for the creators of fflickr (fuck flickr). The first issue is about the walls that are build around the “seemingly public spaces” of social network sites. Although sites such as flickr provide you the opportunity to upload, manage and share your content, the use of these services come at a cost. The cost is that you give away a part of the control you have over your own content. Though flickr allows you to add creative commons licenses to your pictures and videos, it also grants itself permission to “pre-screen, refuse, or remove any Content [...]. Without limiting the foregoing, Yahoo! and its designees shall have the right to remove any Content that violates the TOS or is otherwise objectionable” (Yahoo! Terms of Service, visited on january 26, 2010). This perhaps might seem a reasonable limitation to prevent the distribution of evils such as childpornography, but the boundaries drawn by the TOS are extremely blurry, and even more importantly, completely subjected to the fancy of Yahoo! Inc. You violate the TOS for example as soon as you provide content that is “unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another’ s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or” (here comes the most worrying part) “otherwise objectionable;”

So when the photographer Maarten Dors posted an image on flickr of “an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth” (Jesdanun), two months later he received the following message:

Images of children under the age of 18 who are smoking
tobacco is prohibited across all of Yahoo’ s properties.
I’ ve gone ahead and deleted the image “The Romanian Way”
from your photostream.
We appreciate your understanding.

The rest of the discussion concerning this particular case can be read at the previous two links. It’ s mentioned here to illustrate the point that the social, public (web)space provided by flickr isn’ t a space without compromises, because it is a space governed and ruled by the (commercial) service provider, which in this case is Yahoo! Inc.

The second issue which crossed my way extends this argument. It revolves around the case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist which was arrested by the Chinese government and sentenced to ten years of prison, after Yahoo provided information about a message sent from his email account (BBC news 2005). Probably concerning Yahoo! Shi Toa violated their terms of use when he used his Yahoo! email to send “foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message.” Indeed, the Yahoo! Terms of Service also state that you agree not to “intentionally or unintentionally violate any applicable local, state, national or international law.” It can be argued that even the Chinese laws, although they differ significantly from our Western ones, are there to serve the people. Arguably censorship not only functions to suppress freedom of speech and retain power at the disposal of the ruling few, but also to provide a stable, coherent environment which is not hunted by disquiet voices spreading fear based on rumors. However ‘laws’ should never become ‘truths,’ because that’ s when they become truly oppressive. There should always be room to disagree, to react against, to paradoy or play with them. Whenever you got imprisoned for ten years after disagreeing with a Communist Party message I think there’ s something painstakingly wrong, and Yahoo! shouldn’ t had to let it happen.

Now, returning to flickr again, some people at the Free Art and Technology lab (F.A.T.) saw Yahoo! as a narc (slang for police informant) and created the application fflickr, which by their description “is open-source image gallery software that won’ t narc you out. We created it as an alternative to hosting your photos on a certain Yahoo-owned photo sharing site.” Fflickr, in its technical semblance is “a lightweight php program” which allows you to upload images to a certain ftp directory, which then is transformed into a picture gallery webpage. This approach reminded me of Steve Pemberton’ s talk (and Floriam Cramers criticism) at Society of the Query again. He suggested that instead of playing within the walled gardens of web2.0 services, which is dividing the web up into numerous ’ sub webs’ , we should all have a personal website that’ s completely ours*. By promoting fflickr as “software that won’ t narc you out,” the same approach is taken up by F.A.T. Having your own website means having control over it and taking up the possibility to ‘opt-out’ of the walls of commercial service providers.

Though I do definitely sympathize with this stance, I do also think it’ s (partially) flawed. This is because services such as flickr, as mentioned before, offer the opportunity to upload, manage and share your content from easily accessible interfaces for free (to a certain extent). In this sense they are liberating, because they do not require the technical knowledge to install your own image software, or to maintain your own site. The technical side of the internet can sometimes be very daunting, and is eagerly annexed by so-called ‘professionals’ which offer their skills in change for a fee. So instead of becoming dependent on commercial service providers, you’ ll become dependent on money and the people or institutions whom you pay. Hosting and a domain-name will also cost money, even if you are technically skilled. Although the costs do not rise beyond reasonable proportions, it is a different thing to decide to buy your own site and begin from scratch, or to try out one of the smooth social services already out there.

Because I like the things you can do with flickr, and it will take me ages to build something similar, with the e150 project I started tapping into the flickr network through their API. This allows me to make use of their neat features for managing and hosting content, letting my users play online with their content while I’ m still developing the final application. Of course the big BUT is the dependency on flickr for reasons partially discussed above. But what if flickr would have a big ‘opt-out’ button, allowing flickr users to extract their data in a re-usable form, and go play with it somewhere else? Wouldn’ t that be a good way to penetrate the walls that are build around the seemingly public spaces of web2.0 services and networks, and still make use of their potential? This wouldn’ t resolve all problems mentioned above, but at least would create the opportunity to develop a hypocritical stance, where one leg is standing within and the other leg is standing outside the restricted social flickrspace. Since I don’ t expect flickr to create an opt-out feature, I think I’ m going to develop my own.

---

* I’ m transforming Steve Pemberton’ s main point about the walled gardens of web2.0 services and the ’ sub webs’ they create by putting it into the context of this article. Since he was advocating RDFa, he was more concerned about how some social network sites like Facebook shield of information from a bigger audience and only make it available within networks of friends, that again is most-often only available within the ‘walls’ of that specific network. This makes it hard to take the surplus value created by social networks, outside the network.