« Reclaiming the Internet » with distributed architectures: rights, technologies, practices, innovation
The research program ADAM (Distributed Architectures and Multimedia Applications, adam.hypotheses.org) studies the technical, political, social, socio-cultural and legal implications of distributed network architectures.
The final symposium of the ADAM project, open to disciplines as varied as science and technology studies, information and communication sciences, economics, law and network engineering, aims at investigating these implications in terms of a central issue.
The event took place at Mines ParisTech the 2-3 october 2014. More info here.
Papers presented at the symposium focused on one or more of the following four axes:
• “Back to the origins”? Past and present of distributed architectures
• “(Re-) decentralisation, a sustainable alternative for the Internet ‘ecology’?
• Decentralisation and distribution of skills, rights, control.
• What are the communicational models at stake in decentralised infrastructures and architectures?
Annie Gentès & François Huguet presented a paper entitled “MESH networks as transitive media: users, coders and mediators“.
This article explores, from a media studies perspective, some aspects of the Community Wireless Networks, these organizations that attempt to take a grassroots approach to provide a viable alternative to classic Internet Service Providers (ISP) or municipal wireless networks for consumers.
The papers addresses questions such as “what is the social and political significance of community WiFi projects? How might they contribute to more democratic communications?”. It was presented during the session #3 of the symposium “Futures of decentralization” (with Paris Chrysos [ISC Paris, Mines ParisTech], Christian Sandvig [University of Michigan], Jeffrey Andreoni [Nottingham Trent University] and Valérie Schafer [ISCC- CNRS]).
