Articles by Robert W Gehl

Robert W. Gehl is a Fulbright scholar and award-winning author whose research focuses on contemporary communication technologies. After receiving his PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University in 2010, he joined the faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. There, he published over two dozens articles in journals such as New Media & Society, Communication Theory, Social Media + Society, and Media, Culture and Society. His books include Reverse Engineering Social Media, which won the Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers, and Weaving the Dark Web, published by MIT in 2018. He also has published a co-edited collection of essays, Socialbots and Their Friends. At Utah, he teaches courses on digital ethnography, the history of cultural studies, the communication technology/society relationship, and basic Web design.

Introduction: Years in Cultural Studies

Courtesy of Snapwire.
By Robert W Gehl

This special section is another iteration of cultural studies telling its own story. In our particular iteration, we offer here essays focused on specific years in the history of cultural studies. Our aim is to provide a pedagogical resource, a place for documentation and excavation, and a forum for more storytelling.

Distributed Centralization: Web 2.0 as a Portal into Users’ Lives

By Robert W Gehl

Web 2.0 as a whole is beginning to take a decidedly interconnected shape. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, Twitter and other Web 2.0 sites are linked to one another in a complex and bewildering array of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), user-created applications, links, protocols, and browser extensions. To trace these connections, this paper draws on the intersection between computing, software engineering, and the management of labor in informational capitalism to uncover an architectural model with which to understand this complexity: the portal model. We will see how the interconnections between Web 2.0 sites, built on de facto protocols, is creating the Web as Portal, an architecture built to capture value produced by users, value that was previously hidden as unstructured data. Web 2.0 as a portal is rife with contradictions: on the one hand, the Web (and Internet) remain distributed networks, and Web 2.0 applications could easily be mapped as distributed. On the other hand, extremely popular sites such as Facebook (for social networking) and Google (for search), as well as the increasing interconnection between them, are rendering Web 2.0 to be a centralized network. This distributed centralization is part of the larger portal architecture, wherein heterogeneous sites are articulated into a network of networks.