Alessandro Caliandro

This paper summarizes three years of ethnographic work on Commons Based Peer Production communities within the research project P2PValue, funded by the European Commission. Key insights are:
• CBPP is part of a broader transformation in the information economy whereby collaboration and common knowledge have come to play an ever more important part in value creation. This development has roots that go back to the industrial revolution in the 19th century and it has been greatly accelerated by the diffusion of digital media. CBPP or CBPP like modes of production have become a core component to the contemporary information economy as a whole.
• CBPP occurs in highly particular kinds of communities. They are not kept together by frequent interaction or a tight web of social relations. Instead they are kept together by sharing a common imaginary that posits a transformative potential on the part of the particular practice to which these communities are dedicated.
• Contributions to this potential through technical skills and/or virtuous conduct is rewarded with reputation. Reputation is the form of that exchange value takes in CBPP communities, it is the 'fictious commodity' typical to CBPP.
• Reputation is also the most important value form that structures transactions between CBPP and other institutional logics, such as that of markets, capitalism and the state.
• The value of reputation lies in its ability to give a proximate measure to risk.
• The fact that value is principally related to risk means that CBPP communities operate a value logic that mirror that of financial markets.
• Most CBPP communities envision commons based markets as alternatives to capitalism. Such commons-based markets build on the construction of imaginaries that are able to transform insecurity into risk in ways that mirror communitarian principles.

Radio audiences are today a mix of traditional radio broadcasting audiences and networked publics (boyd, d. [2007]. Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingha (Ed.), MacArthur foundation series on digital learning–youth, identity, and digital media volume (pp. 119–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Ito, M. [2008]. Introduction. In K. Varnelis (Ed.), Networked publics (pp. 1–14). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Varnelis, K. (Ed.). [2008]. Networked publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Varnelis, K. (Ed.). [2008]. Networked publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; boyd, d. [2011]. Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). London: Routledge). This not only means that new media is changing the nature of listeners/viewers, transforming them into interactive users, but also that radio publics, once organized into networks, may have different properties, different behaviours and different values. In this paper, we have employed Digital Methods (DM) (Rogers, R. [2009]. The end of the virtual. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press) and social network analysis to understand the Twitter activity and the communicative dynamics of the audiences of two Italian national radio stations: Radio3 Rai (public service station) and Radio Deejay (private commercial station). This work also aims to respond to a question asked by Rogers when defining DM: ‘Could the information contained in profiles on social networking sites provide different insights into the composition and characteristics of publics?’ (Rogers, R. [2009]. The end of the virtual. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press). Based on the results that have emerged from this study, we believe that the answer can be affirmative: the analysis of the social connections and the interaction models of the networked listeners highlights new features of these audiences, and allows us to reevaluate and understand them from new points of view. This work shows that the digital audiences related to the two radio stations clearly distinguish themselves for their distinctive online behaviour and a different display of social networks, cultural capital and affect. We therefore hypothesize the presence of three different types of capital within the two different audiences analysed: social, cultural and affective capital.

So far the democratic function of social media has been framed through two opposite paradigms: a cyber-utopian one and a cyber-dystopian one. The former conceives of the Internet as a new Haberamsian public sphere, that is an open space in which people can freely discuss and deliberate about political issues. The latter deems the Internet as a fragmented and individualized space, which, by definition, destroys any possibility of collective deliberation and discussion. However few scholars have systematically examined the empirical relation between politics and social media. Through a quantitative-qualitative analysis, grounded on the digital methods paradigms and based on a dataset of 181085 tweets collected during the Primarie of Centro Sinistra 2012, we would like to show how Twitter can be conceived of as a "civic device" that permits a specific political discourse and new forms of political association to be materialized - both entities that would remain unseen otherwise. In the end we suggest that it is possible to construct a new theory of the digital public sphere starting from the Tardian notion of "public".

This paper develops the concept of “brand public” as an alternative way to conceptualize how
consumers create value around brands on social media. Based on an analysis of Twitter traffic
around the French luxury brand Louis Vuitton we develop an empirically grounded model of brand
publics. We discuss how publics differ from communities as social forms, how consumers
participate and how value is created.