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Week 7 Reading – APIs

In this week’s reading, “Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API,” by Taina Bucher, it mainly discussed about the growing movement of APIs. From how the social networking phenomenon started to how it changed the culture, politics, and business of applying this “tools” online.

To start off, Bucher introduced how social media became more than online services for entertainment, communication and productivity. Bucher reflected on how communities and individuals rely on Facebook and Twitter as an everyday source. As she stated we “live and breathe” with these services. She even stated how these services expanded from household names to actual spaces where people occupy and socialize.

“We live and breathe social media, as services like Facebook and Twitter have not only become household names, but something like actual households themselves – places people choose to live and socialize.”

However, these “places” contained various data that could either be beneficial or harmful to the public to obtain or know. According to Bucher, social media can also be tools that can be utilized by the use of APIs (application programming interfaces).

To move onto the movement on how Twitter APIs became popular in the technology world, it gave growth to how programming became a form of art where communities exchanged codes rather than keeping the tools for themselves. When Bucher discussed about how Twitter was freely given to the public; mostly third party developers, she emphasized on how these individuals or business can build products around their main tweeting system. Though it was a simple offer by Twitter, the social network was taking a risky on giving out interfaces that would lead to collect data being either be used for good or be abused.

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The developers that Bucher interviewed gave an inside perspective on how these API’s were providing those who were very fluent and not so fluent in coding a chance to work on services that wouldn’t be possible without the API. It gave people a chance to just ‘open up’ what was given to them, play around with what it could do and create something entirely different from what Twitter gave them access too.

Though it became a fun way for some people to make better services for Twitter, even one that utilized a better search engine that lead to Twitter buying the company and hiring the programmers, Twitter still has the upper hand no matter who is using the API. It was very open and free when Twitter initially launched their API. But, by 2011 they had a much stricter rule set for developers using the API. Bucher mentions Jacob’s case as being one that results from the developers not being able to continue developing with Twitter because features they need access to were being denied.

“I’m no longer interested in contributing anything to Twitter’s API. Their hostile stance toward developers like me has been very discouraging, not to mention costly – they killed my business; it has cost me many thousands of dollars.”

APIs continued to have a focus on being future oriented and a part of the Silicon Valley ‘entrepreneurial mindset,’ while the companies that own these APIs have the final say on how they can be used and how they can be used for the companies’ advantage. By looking at the API as a quasi-object there is a lot of power it has over how we navigate websites and applications in the future. At her conclusion, Bucher says we should look at the API as a governing technique in the current state of the social web.

“While there is nothing wrong with using APIs to collect data, of course, researchers should be wary about letting any current obsessions with big data overshadow the fact that APIs are far from neutral tools.”

According to Bucher there seems to be protocols, which APIs follow or are designed by in order to fulfill its main purpose. Their main purpose is to share content and data online from one computer or device to another. Like from Jer Thorp’s blog post, “Art and the API,” he reflected how APIs are like bridges for letting computers communicate with one another, regardless of what operating system they have.

As recalled, APIs contributed to a cultural phenomenon that would affect society’s political and business spectrum when using APIs for collecting data. What kind of data or information? In a political example, from Thorp’s post, he acknowledged Josh Begley; a data artist, who developed an API that allowed access to information on every US drone strike from using data from The Bureau for Investigative Journalism. As a result, Begley used these data to develop “Dronestream,” an app with a Twitter API that streamed every US drone attack. Overall, journalists can utilize this app for feeding off stories relating to this controversial topic.

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By expanding on Josh Begley’s app, beside collected data, there would be the possibility of a list of drone strikes that can give out personal information about those who were killed. Thorp reflected how a single information can evolve into something else that wasn’t expected.

Looking at the examples presented by Thorp it shows the many ways in which artists are exploring APIs. The ways in which they are used can help us think about the projects we’re working on in this class and beyond it by taking advantage of the technical use and creating a conceptual meaning out of it.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Have you ever created or used an API? If so, what was it and why? If not, would you consider in developing one and what will it be?
  2. Do you think its right for companies to use API as a source for free labor?
  3. Would you consider using an API if you know one day the company that owns the API may make it impossible for you to continue using it?
  4. Should the rules regarding API follow an open source mentality and be more in favor of the developers using APIs?
  5. Do you think social media will change if developers aren’t too restricted in the rules for using the API?
  6. If an API policy changes, would you alter your project to fit those parameters or let your project remain a part of the past?
  7. Where do you see API usage a decade from now?

 

Week 3 reading

Critical Engineering Manifesto
Summary:
  • -Engineering is a transformative and influential language that shapes our communications, mobility and thought.
  • Critical Engineers are people who are aware of engineering’s influence and are therefore suspicious of technologies that push dependency or rich user experience and seek to deconstruct and expose their inner workings
  •  Critical Engineers recognize that dependency on a piece of engineering in turn engineers its users.  They expose these spaces between production and consumption of technology to showcase their imbalances and deceptions
  • Critical Engineers consider the term “machine” to encompass devices, bodies, agents, forces and networks.  They understand that written code can regulate behavior between people and machines, and seek to use this to reconstruct user-constraints and social action
  • Critical Engineers look for historical examples of Critical Engineering withing the realms of art, architecture, activism, philosophy and invention and utilize concepts, strategies and goals from those works
  •  Exploiting a system is the most desirable form of exposure
Critical Engineers examine systems to find how a new technology could change the way we think or interact in potentially undesirable ways. They then look for ways to exploit the technology so it can expose its own flaws
Protocol

Summary:

  • Sovereign society – Hierarchy, with one central individual or group holding the most power, with lesser powers branching off from the center.  Enforcement of control usually relied on violence or coercion
  • Disciplinary society – Bureaucracy, decentralized control with several individuals or groups with equal power and smaller powers spreading off of each node.  Control enforced by bureaucratic guidelines and wage control
  • Control society – Protocol, distributed power with set rules determines how power flows.  Control exercised by limiting the permissions and access of a user within the network
How the internet works:
TCP/IP – Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol Suite, digital rules for transmitting lots of octets (8 bits) between programs or servers on a computer or the World Wide Web.
TCP/IP treats each computer as equal in a network, enabling any computer to communicate with any other without hierarchy
DNS – Domain Name System, a decentralized, hierarchical system for associating a plain-text web address (www.hackpad.com) with an IP address, which is a set of 4 numbers that the computer can actually recognize as where it needs to connect.  (Try typing 192.168.1.1 into your browser, it is the default address for many types of router)  The addresses are found by starting at a root server, which directs the request down the line to a specific domain, ie “.org”, this repeats until all parts of the address are located (.org -> rhizome -> www.)
Since DNS is a decentralized hierarchy, parts of it can be turned on or off to deny or allow access to certain blocks of IP addresses, making servers and webpages unreachable even if there are no other connection issues.
HTML/HTTP – Hyper Text Markup Language, and Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.  On the server of a webpage, HTTP encapsulates the individual HTML objects and follows the TCP to deliver the information to the computer that requested the page
Disciplinary society tied power to the location of the machinery through factories, plants and offices.  The control society will distribute the power across the network, but control comes from the strict requirement to follow the protocols within the network.  If two nodes wish to communicate, its not an issue of who as more or less influence, its a matter of if they are speaking the same language.  However, the Internets reliance on DNS forms a weak point in its distributive model, allowing a government or similarly powered body to deny access to whatever web domains they want, making the equality provided by TCP/IP meaningless
Discussion:
  1. Have you stopped using any technology after an exploit showed you its ugly side?  Or have you simply changed the way you use that technology?
  2. Are there any Futurist or Science Fiction technologies you would really like to see realized?  Are there any that would creep you out, scare you, or challenge your moral beliefs?  Are there any that are both?
    (IE – cryogenics, genetic manipulation, androids, smart devices, or anything you’ve seen or can think of?)
  3. Is it unusual to consider and try to act upon the potential negative aspects of a technology that hasn’t been fully realized yet?
  4. Do members of your family work in an office or factory?  Do you see yourself working in that same environment after college?  Have you seen a shift in friends/family/yourself towards working outside of traditional work spaces on personal computers?  Is that something you want going forward in life?
  5. Internet Censorship in the Arab World
    How would you react to your government shutting down internet access and even text messaging services in order to exert control?
  6. Do you have an opinion on “The internet of things”?  If so, does the concept of DNS servers blocking access to entire domains of addresses change that opinion?  Should we base a system of embedded smart devices and automation on protocols that are subject to hierarchy?

Week 1 Reading: Summary and Discussion Questions

The readings can be found below:

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Points touched on in readings/ Brief summary: 

“Here comes everybody” – Clay Shirky:

Collective action, group function and the affect on society, viral growth, social visibility, judgment, public scrutiny, online power, transfer of capabilities formerly only found by professionals to the hands of the public, global publishing cost. These are some of the points Shirky hit on in the first chapter of “Here Comes Everybody”. In the first chapter, Shirky explains how we are all now a large connected entity. The power of the collective now lies in the hands of the public, never further than a click away. The ability to reach out and touch the lives of thousands, offer advice, seek help, and share upon the interests of others are all things that every one of us now has access to thanks to the World Wide Web. Shirky demonstrates that we hold a new power in the palms of our hands, the ability to connect and tap into the minds of many.

 

“Backspace to the future: The Dislike Club Part 1” – Benjamin Walker:

One night while sitting at home, drinking beers on the couch and browsing twitter, Benjamin Walker decided to create the website “tilde.club”. He posted a tweet that offering people shell accounts upon request, shortly to find out that the whole idea was going viral. Many people made “tilde” sites and posted things from ASCII art to retro web code. Benjamin wanted people to “Not feel like they were under siege when they were expressing themselves”. Walker goes on to point out that inhabitants of the 21st century have a newfound focus… “The screen in my hand”, which makes it “impossible to get lost” in todays world. Modern social media has created a vicious social media loop, where people are constantly browsing between various social media pages instead of enjoying their real lives. It’s been “15 years of signing up!” and “staring at screens” says Walker in his blog. At the end of the blog, Walker thinks about creating incentives to help people “like the disliking”.

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Discussion Questions:

1. How has socialization changed since the assimilation of social media/ the internet into our daily lives?

2. What are the pros and cons of this “new” way of socializing?

3. How do you think modern methods of socializing will affect the youth of the twenty first century?

4. Does social media change how we interact offline? How?

5. How has being connected helped give power to groups?

6. Clay Shirky hinted that the internet could behave as a sort of pseudo army. What do you think?

7. Has the internet created an “I want everything, and I want it now” society? How does this influence social interactions?

8. Do you agree or disagree on the points touched on in the readings? Why or why not?