This post is the first of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

To start with, let us have a look at this AP’s picture (click for higher resolution). :

Most people will not recognize this as a picture of Barack Obama addressing Berlin on 26 July 2008. The same picture in a newspaper would give the viewer more context in spite of the lack of geographical features and the fact that Obama’s picture is taken from behind. The point is that the medium photography is completely different from say a newspaper where a picture can get context, or a radio or a video report about the same event. Each medium has a different format which allows for different information to be represented.

Interesting about this picture are the incredible number of (consumer) cameras pointed at Obama. It makes you wonder what those cameras ’see’. So many camera’s, so many stories.

Lets query Flickr, a popular photo sharing service, for ‘obama berlin july’: http://flickr.com/search/?q=obama+berlin+july&z=t Sorting the pictures on relevance immediately gives you a lot of pictures taken at the same place and the same time, but from a different perspective . Clicking on any of those pictures will show you more pictures of the same day at the same place, telling stories from the users who took and uploaded the picture. Flickr, as a service, changed the medium of photography. It is now possible to upload your photo to the web immediately after shooting it, compared to the long development time of photography on film. Flickr also made it possible to tag, rate, rank, geotag and comment on pictures. Moreover, Flickr enables you to easily search pictures, not on the basis of visual features (yet), but of the previously mentioned metadata.

This example shows clearly that society is embedded in the web. This is exactly the premise of our research with the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI). Working with the web as a reflection from the off-line is in stark contrast with previous theories about the web as cyberspace – some sort of a separate space. The internet these days augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it. Instead of becoming a separate cyberspace, our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life. If the web thus reflects the off-line to a great extent the question becomes: ‘how can the Internet be made to show what is happening in society?’

In what follows I will give a couple of examples of how the internet can be used to investigate politics. Firstly I will look for the political in the web, then I will describe the politics of engines and the politics of tools. Finally I will show how the web may be used as an anticipatory medium.

Lets start of with the political in the web.