Instagram is currently the social media platform most associated with online images, but images from other platforms also can be collected and grouped, arrayed by similarity, stacked, matched, stained, labelled, depicted as network, placed side by side and otherwise analytically displayed. In the following, the initial focus is on Instagram, together with certain schools of thought such as Instagramism and Instagrammatics for its aesthetic and visual cultural study. Building on those two approaches, it subsequently focuses on other web and social (...) media platforms, such as Google Image Search, Twitter, Facebook and 4chan. It provides demonstrations of how querying techniques create online image collections, and how these sets are analytically grouped through arrangements collectively referred to as metapictures. (shrink)

This article concerns efforts to see politics in web space. It is a network-topological approach in which the mappings of web space over the past decade have resulted in specific political geometries (roundtables, spheres, lists, etc.). In the web as hyperspace period, random site generators invited surfers to jumpcut through space. Mapping was performed for sites’ backlinks, showing distinctive ‘politics of association’. In the web as public sphere period, circle maps served as virtual roundtables. What if the web were to (...) decide who should sit at the table? As ideas about the shapes the web accommodated shifted from public spheres to networks, the maps displayed ‘issue spaces’ – clusters of actors engaged in the same issue area, but now central or marginal. Finally, in what is dubbed as the revenge of geography, in the current locative period, maps show the distributed geography of engagement. Actors are temporarily ‘based’ and travelling physically from event to event, with tracing and other social software showing their routes. The article treats the shift in focus away from the ‘metaphysics’ of software-enabled spaces online (the ‘virtual’ topologies) to critiques of the new ‘trace routes’ (followed by mobile network actors) now that cyberspace is grounded. (shrink)

With Google marking its 20th year online, the piece provides a retrospective of cultural commentary and select works of Google art that have transformed the search engine into an object of critical interest. Taken up are artistic and cultural responses to Google by independent artists but also by cultural critics and technology writers, including the development of such evocative notions as the deep web, flickering man and filter bubble. Among the critiques that have taken shape in the works to be (...) discussed here are objects and subjects brought into being by Google, Googlization, Google’s information politics, its licensing as well as issues surrounding specific products such as Google Street View, as Google leaves the web, capturing more spaces to search. (shrink)

The ethics of editing have remained largely unexplored despite their far-ranging consequences to careers of individual psychologists. I examine three ethical issues as they relate to the editorial process: welfare of the consumer, dual relationships, and objectivity. I conclude that the current practices do not adequately take into account professional ethics, and I offer detailed recommendations on how these practices could be improved.