Agenda / Ärende
My thesis will be a study of how authority works in the new social. My intial prejudice is that authority structures are currently undergoing substantial changes. The purpose of my stories is to increase or decrease this prejudice and hopefully lead to some further insights of what these reconstructed authoritie structures will ledad to in forms of social change.

Thesis Structure

• Nessecary introduction chapters
• Theoretical Location
• Methodological Location
• The New Social – Case Stories
• Conceptual, Thematic Essays
• End Discussion: Participation Literacy, Part II
• Appendix I: What is Web 2.0 – A few pages from my Lic
• Appendix II: Participation Literacy, Part I – The end chapter from my lic
• Nessecary ending chapters

Theoretical Location
A theoretical location is not the same as “a theory”. A theoretical location is my own view of a theoretical perspective. Though the traditional view of theory works in some academic discourse, it works more or less badly in technoscience discourse. The techno-part in the concept compund destabilizes the reductive underpinnings of a “Theory”. The theoretical location is not about reductive processes. It is about setting the stage for, or the world view of, the reserach process. In this case, the theoretical location could roughly be described as a personal variant of poststructuralism. To set a conceptual location of this poststructural variant, we could call it conversational theory. The easiest way to describe it is perhaps to contrast it with Jürgen Habermas communication theory. Habermas whant to change the way we communicate, create communication rules that neutralizes descructive properties like power. While I admire his project to some degree, I do not believe there is a social foundation for it. I do not think the system can rationalize people, because I do not think reason is the main property in the human situation. Though I believe in reason, I think it is so entangeled in emotions, it cannot be separated from them. When we force this divide, the result becomes inhuman and cannot properly be used on humans. My take is that human properties as knowlege and values is formed in conversations. Both knowledge and values are situational, conversational, relational. The driving force in knowledge and value processes is power-relations in the complex manner as told by Nietzsche and Foucault, rather than the big easy described forces as told by Marx, though the small, complex forces can join and behave like the stories told by marxism.

Methodological Location
Sometimes methodology within science and reserch is acted as “The Scientific Method”. I view this assertion as belonging to simplistic, reductive sciences – or hard sciences, as Sven Eric Liedman calls them. Sciences dealing with complex questions, or soft sciences after Liedman, has to work from the mode 2 perspective of situational approach. When I create a methodology for this particular thesis, it must take this special reserach situation into account, and this reserch situation is based on the fact of who I am, the researcher, as well as the particulities of the Internet communities researched. Then who am I? I am a person rooted in the new digital technology, as well as intellectual history, litterature and art. Another important fact is that I am a professional librarian, a profession I once was drawn to because I am a researching kind of person. Most things I chose to do is about learning, researching, expressing. I am using a kind of data I once heard someone call natural data (in contrast to controlled data).

I have been thinking about using controlled data in some of the common forms, but that does just not work for me. I have to pick up things there they are located in its natural form, which in this case is conversations on the Internet, as well as conversations in history books.

The photography metaphor
To get a visual picture of the strucuture of the thesis, I use the art of photography as a metaphor.
The motif – The new social
The camera lens & other hardware – Authority
Camera Software and Post processing software – Thematic concepts
The person behind the camera – Well, that’s me of course…

The New Social – Case Stories
This stories tries to summarize the experience of the first phase in the new social. This experience has its location in the person I call I, but

Media Driven Communites
Story based studie about communities as Flickr & Youtube, communities with a center in media as photos, videos, books or music.

Knowledge Driven Communites
Story based studie about knowlege communities. The main role here will be a health community dealing low carb food, but I will also be about other knowledge communites.

Conceptual, Thematic Essays
The history of theory is long and filled by concepts carrying a wide net of discource reaching back to Plato or further. Many of these concepts was born in the tradition of philosophy, and now integrated in something we could call intellectual history, or the history of citical theory. Many of these concepts were born in paradigm shifts, when new words is neccesary to describe new phenomena. Some of them are general, while others are quite specific. The essays I have chosed as travelling companions is born in different epoques. These concept is weaved into the the treads of authority and the new social.

My initial concern when writing these essays is that we are currently undergoing a transition from one time to another in some sense. Earlier I was reluctant to call this a paradim shift, and instead described it as a new mindset. But looking backwards, and trying to look forwards, having the Internet as some kind of mind transportation tool, I realize that the birth of the digital age might even be a greater paradim shift than in the transition we call modernity.

The essays below will be like fairly short articles, about 5-10 pages. All of them will start with a research chapter to set the traditional usage of the concept. Having filled the concept, I use it to explore a perspective in the new social. Authority is the main theme, sifting through the other concepts, perhaps something like the Ariadne thread.

Main Thread: Authority
This is the main thematic tread.

Potential / Planned Threads
The Person
Nihilism
Transparency
Simulation
Attention
Agora
Hyperreality
Hope
Nomads
The ProdUser