IRC is not dead: Maxigas argues for a shift towards use-centric media and communication studies

Maxigas, who is currently a post-doctoral fellow at CMDS presented his work on the social history of Internet Relay Chat on March 10, arguing how looking at its affordances today opens the way for a critique of social media monopolies and contributes to a new perspective in media and communication studies, drawing attention to the contemporary significance of the “old new media”.

According to Maxigas, the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), an open source application layer protocol conceived in 1988, in many ways functions as a Communication Commons and the way its contact channels are organized served as inspiration for Twitter’s hashtag. Its use is particularly prevalent among hacktivists who began to gain ground in 2008 and among the members of computational subcultures such as Anonymous, hackerspace members, Wikipedians or Free Software programmers.   

While Internet studies and contemporary social theory prefer to focus on new social media, rejecting the “old communication tool” by giving into the belief that technological progress equals social progress and old technologies stand for backwards values, IRC is nevertheless still widely employed by technological innovators and peer production communities. In order to overcome the bias in existing literature, Maxigas proposes a turn from innovation-centric accounts to use-centered accounts. This would allow for a media ecological and archaeological perspective, and could also be more specific geographically and historically.

Recalling that in the 1980s all the technologies used were open software and it was a radically different social background, Maxigas outlined how the ensuing technological developments eventually led to the exploitation and social control of communication tools. These developments created the space for today’s gigantic social media monopolies and the lucrative business model of data mining, which effectively paved the way for new surveillance technologies. He also mentioned that as IRC doesn't save the logs and there's no archiving, people can have a more spontaneous relationship with each other, and in this sense, it has a higher resemblance to real life conversations.  

Maxigas argues that past technologies such as IRC could provide an alternative to the current social media climate, and research into this communication tool could not only serve as basis for the critique of social media monopolies and its resistance, but it would also acknowledge its significance and wide use. He nevertheless drew attention to the limitations of its mass adoption, and with regard to this, he asked whether the objective is to democratize technology or expertise. 

More on Maxigas’ research can be read on his website, and his presentation is available here, along with the audio recording of the lecture in OGG format here, and in mp3 here.

Maxigas defended a doctoral dissertation on the peer production of open hardware in hackerspaces ("Unfinished Artefacts and Architectures") at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalunya. His research interests include the sociology of technology users; critiques of liberalism, capitalism and modernity; as well as the role of (classical) cybernetics in the intellectual trajectory and everyday practices of the human and natural sciences. He developed the twin concepts of unfinished artifacts and architectures in order to challenge ideological discourses around open technologies and collaborative production. He uses qualitative and quantiative methods such as historically informed ethnography, object biographies, and technical interrogation to investigate technoscientific and technopolitical controversies. His work on hacking addresses critique and recuperation in technological cycles; generations of shared machine shops; the contemporary significance of "old new media".