What Role for Users in a More Social Peer-to-Peer?

* Paper. What role for users in a more social peer-to-peer?. Francesca Musiani. (July 12th, 2010). Communication presented at the 6th International Graduate Conference, UFR Communication, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, Paris: France.

Francesca Musiani, a p2p-oriented Italian-French researcher listed in our directory (Association of Peer to Peer Researchers), is doing an interesting thesis on p2p-oriented social networks, which she presented in the above conference. The full text of her intervention is here.

Francesca Musiani:

“Recent years have witnessed the birth and development of a number of projects and applications proposing alternatives to Internet-based services and tools that are increasingly relevant in our daily lives, as through them we are able to search for information, connect and share content with friends, manage and preserve our data. These alternatives have one thing in common: they are built, or are on their way to do so, on peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.

Indeed, the overwhelming majority of P2P networks destined to file sharing – a use that is the primary reason of this technology’s celebrity, but by no means its only possible one – treat their users as anonymous, non-interlinked entities, even if, de facto, “groups” are created and relationships established on and in them. We can however observe, in these “alternative” projects, more and more cases where P2P tools are conceptualized and shaped taking into account – in many of their developers’ own words – a “social-based paradigm” that aims at reproducing more accurately social phenomena such as friend requests, affinity-based community aggregation, trust attribution.

By drawing on three empirical terrains currently under way, this presentation elaborates a working response to the following questions: how is this “social paradigm” being fleshed out within alternative P2P tools? In what respects a “more social” P2P has implications for users? In what respects this attribution of priority to the user as an actor in one or more groups has an effect on P2P tools, and in return, these tools on the place and relevance of the user in processes of content creation, sharing, and distribution?

The main conclusion of this paper is that innovators in P2P are currently operating a major modification in their very priorities of research and development: indeed, what guides them is an attribution of priority to the user, both as an individual and as actor in a group, rather than to a number of other factors and phenomena – anonymity first and foremost – that law, politics, or additional technical constraints have led them to privilege in turn.

Currently being deployed within these innovation projects would therefore be the union of this priority and of P2P technology, considered as better adapted to the needs of a user-within- a-network, and more effective and appropriate from a technical point of view. The founding elements (reciprocal availability of resources, voluntary collaboration, identification of specificities and affinities) in the portraits of users and collectives of users coming out of the analysed projects and devices suggest a possible repositioning of users vis-à-vis other actors in the socio-technical environment of Internet-based services: not only as producers, but also as managers and hosts of digital contents they create and modify.”

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