Publicly Sited

Media, Technology & Culture 10 (3rd Edition): Extractive Technologies

As we come to the end of this series, we seem to be circling around an important contemporary theme: the emergent scepticism about digital platforms. This scepticism is not only about the murky decision-making power of digital platforms’ technical systems, discussed in our last episode. It’s also that there is increasing awareness about their operation as private entities. Entities that do not exist for our own individual benefit. Entities which, even if they have some value as mediums of publicity, or have some public utility, are not publicly-owned. Put simply, whatever they say about their mission, digital services and platforms - ranging from Facebook to Google to Amazon to Airbnb to Uber to Open AI - are first and foremost about making money. Making money in a way that relies substantially on extracting data from and about us: what we do, when, where and how we do things, as well as our explicit signals about why. Often, this extraction also enables an approximation of who we might be. It is true that data mining can divulge intimate personal details about us. But what is principally happening in such processes is the construction of user models, a statistical profile which we match, often fairly precisely. A model of a situated user that can be targeted for advertising, or marketing, or triggered in various ways to remain faithful to the platform. And when users are faithful to these platforms, they generate yet more data for extraction. In this episode, we consider how these insights have inspired a revival of sorts amongst political economy and Marxist approaches to media, towards a new critique of digital or platform capitalism. But is this capitalism? Or is it, as suggested speculatively in a number of critical perspectives, something worse.

Thinkers Discussed: Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Tarleton Gillespie (The Politics of Platforms); Jose van Dijck (The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media); Fernando van der Vlist, Anne Helmond and Fabian Ferrari (Big AI: Cloud infrastructure Dependence and the Industrialisation of Artificial Intelligence); Jose van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Wall (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); McKenzie Wark (Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?); Jodi Dean (Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Forclosure of Politics / The Neofeudalising Tendency of Communicative Capitalism); Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism); Joel Kotkin (The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class); Evgeny Morozov (Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason); Maïa Pal and Neal Harris (Capital is Dead. Long Live Capital! A Political Marxist Analysis of Digital Capitalism and Infrastructure); Clive Barnett (The Consolations of ‘Neoliberalism’).

Media, Technology & Culture 09 (3rd Edition): Predictive Technologies

There is now widespread awareness of, suspicion about, and even opposition to the notion that computers seem to think. Or if not think, at least can learn things and then make decisions without our intervention, or indeed without us even knowing about it. Mysterious entities with names like ‘algorithms’, ‘bots’ and increasingly ‘AI’ seem to be making more and more decisions for us around welfare payment claims, the fastest travel route at a given moment, what shopping coupons are made available to you, or the neighbourhoods police patrol. These entities are also pervasive in media and communications. They help inform what movies you watch, the posts you see in your social media feeds, the way a matchmaking website pairs you with others, the overall summary you might draw from a search query, or what your music streaming over the past year reveals about cultural taste. Despite a more recent tendency to label these and other developments as ‘AI’, many scholars – not just in critical media studies, but fields like computer science – are keen to remind us that this is not intelligence, per se. Instead, we are seeing are mimicries of intelligence, which are in fact advanced forms of statistical prediction, based on enormous amounts of collected data, both personal and environmental. These reminders are helpful, though it still leaves murky how all of this happens. All this computational decision making, and its capacities at deep learning: it’s all so hidden; so obscure. In this episode, we think about the growing role of predictive technologies in shaping contemporary media cultures, from the early rise of apps and personalised ‘filter bubbles’ to the rather ordinary recommendation systems we rely on today. We also grapple with growing concerns for how deep structural biases around race, class, gender and sexuality are embedded into and reinforced by the way algorithms – such as those enabling facial recognition technologies – actually work. But we will also ask: is the adequate political response to just roll up our sleeves, pry these predictive black boxes open, reveal their internal biases, and perhaps correct them? Or it is that we instead need to better understand the problematic social and cultural conditions from which these predictive technologies sprout up, get nurtured and grow?

Thinkers Discussed: Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff (The Web is Dead: Long Live the Internet); Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You); Murray Shanahan (Talking about Large Language Models); Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb (Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence); Blake Hallinan and Ted Striphas (Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture); Raymond Williams (Keywords); Daniela Varela Martinez's and Anne Kaun (The Netflix Experience: A User-Focused Approach to the Netflix Recommendation Algorithm); Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism); Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code); Fabio Chiusi (Automating Society); Axel Bruns (Are Filter Bubbles Real?); Frank Pasquale (The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information); Taina Bucher (If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics); Donna Haraway (Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective); Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence).

Media, Technology & Culture 08 (3rd Edition): Participatory Technologies

There seems to be widespread consensus that contemporary media is much more participatory. For some time, this was a point of celebration: anyone could, for example, set up a YouTube account, and with relatively low-cost or even free devices and software, generate and share their experiences or views with minimal censorious intervention. Recently, however, participatory media cultures have become a point of worry. That we now live in a mediated world where nobody seems able to agree on what were once pretty basic facts. And also, where this additional mediated participation is not necessarily all that liberating, but rather, a new avenue of surveillance, manipulation and ultimately power at the hands of governments, corporations and influential individuals. Whether one celebrates or worries about it, there are also different perspectives on where this participatory media culture comes from. Some have explained it with reference to the capacities of new technologies. After all, people can participate more easily when so many communication functions are collapsed into an internet-enabled device like a smartphone. And yet, for others, this technological explanation is flawed, underplaying longer-term cultural shifts, which new technologies might more properly be seen as crystallizing. In this episode, we begin with work by thinkers such as Henry Jenkins, who have notably opposed technological explanations for a participatory media culture, suggesting it is instead a momentous cultural shift towards new and potentially democratising forms of 'collective intelligence' that blur the old distinction between media ‘producers’ and ‘audiences’. We will consider the value of this perspective, while also questioning whether insisting on ‘culture’ bring us back to the same unsustainable technology/culture dichotomy we have challenged in earlier episodes. This includes addressing arguments that today’s so-called post-truth politics should be seen as a peculiar constellation of participatory culture and the technical affordances of social media platforms.

Thinkers Discussed: Tim Dwyer (Media Convergence); Lev Manovich (Software Takes Command); Ithiel de Sola Pool (Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age); Thomas Friedman (Thank you for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations); Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide); Axel Bruns (Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage); Pierre Lévy (Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace); Bernard Stiegler (The Economy of Contribution); Jose Van Dijck (Users Like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content); Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne and Tamar Tembeck (The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age); Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene); Limor Shifman (Memes in Digital Culture); Noam Gal, Limor Shifman and Zohar Kamph (‘It Gets Better’: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective Identity); Jason Hannan (Trolling Ourselves to Death? Social Media and Post-Truth Politics); Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business).

Media, Technology & Culture 07 (3rd Edition): Embodied Technologies

Media technologies today seem to be everywhere. Assisting us in – or invading – each and every corner of our daily existence. We have already discussed how this ubiquity is embedded into a huge range of physical infrastructures; environments where media technologies surround us. And yet, we also increasingly carry media around with us, in our pockets, hands, ears, across our eyes, around our wrists. We wear media like clothes – and we may soon implant media within our bodies. This need not be seen in the guise of science fiction. It is more interesting to see it as really quite ordinary. For a long time, we humans have shared an intimacy with media technologies. They not only affect how we see ourselves, but modulate and help produce who and what we are. In this episode, we will begin our exploration of media as embodied technologies with the humble mobile phone. Through their aestheticisation, practical uses and technological development, mobile phones were an important precursor to the myriad mobile devices we know today. Contemporary embodied technologies however go beyond being portable, or affording wireless access to online content. They are increasingly built into and for our bodies, and modulate our interactions with environments: giving tactile responses through screen interfaces, automatically detecting one’s geographic location and orientation, or one’s bodily temperature and heartrate, or the ambient sound and lighting in a room. Ultimately, we ask why we have such intimate embodied relationships with media: the answer, in part, relates to how media are entangled with our identity.

Thinkers Discussed: Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (Life After New Media); Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordon Frith (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces); Erving Goffman (briefly); Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken (Bodies and Mobile Media); Sherry Turkle (The Second Self / Evocative Objects); Harvey May and Greg Hearn (The Mobile Phone as Media); James Miller (The Fourth Screen: Mediatization and the Smartphone); Ian Bogost (Apple's Airpods Are an Omen); James Gilmore (Everywear: The Quantified Self and Wearable Fitness Technologies); Adam Greenfield (Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing); Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingel and Tero Karppi (Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device); Michel Foucault (Technologies of the Self); Judith Butler (briefly); Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity); Daniel Palmer (iPhone Photography: Mediating Visions of Social Space).

Media, Technology & Culture 06 (3rd Edition): Infrastructural Technologies

We have already discussed the importance of paying attention to how media technologies are powerful when they are ordinary and relatively invisible. When they work like ‘appliances’ in daily life. This was the key message of McLuhan’s ‘medium theory’ as well as theories of media domestication. These perspectives tend to imagine media technologies individually: the television, the radio, the smart home assistant. They rely on an image of artefacts showing up in our home or office as specific ‘things’. As individual, user-friendly objects which extend our contact with others, or provide us with certain experiences. But these media appliances not only depend on us forgetting them as part of our daily tasks and routines. They also depend on various large-scale infrastructures, both physical and non-physical, which make their operation possible, as mediums of communication or experience.These infrastructures are also something we tend to ignore, but not because we treat these infrastructures as appliances. We tend to ignore media infrastructures because they are technical and boring; or often beyond, below, or even above our immediate reach. If we were to push the boundaries, we could point to all kinds of infrastructural dependencies related about by media: electrical power; water networks; or the mining or rare metals. In this episode, we focus on the internet as a technological infrastructure. This is perhaps the only case where it might make sense to refer to ‘the Internet’ as a proper noun, or a specific thing, with the ‘the’ and capitalised ‘I’. Thinking of the internet as an infrastructure takes on obvious importance when we look at its history, from its inception as ARPANET, a cold war project in the wake of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, to its more complicated interweaving with other technologies and ideas in subsequent years. While many still tend to describe the internet as an intangible or ‘virtual’ space, we will show that it in fact material, physical, fragile, environmentally consequential, and the focus of many political and economic struggles.

Thinkers Discussed: Lisa Parks (‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Towards a Theory of Media Infrastructures); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Nicole Starosielski (The Undersea Network); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); Jo Pierson (Digital Platforms as Entangled Infrastructures: Addressing Public Values and Trust in Messaging Apps); John Durham Peters (The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media); Michel Callon (Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay); Susan Leigh-Star (The Ethnography of Infrastructure); Manuel Castells (The Internet Galaxy); Lori Emerson (Other Networks); Laura DeNardis (The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch / Hidden Levers of Internet Control: An Infrastructure-Based Theory of Internet Governance); Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle (The Internet of Things); Joana Moll (CO2GLE); Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell (Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing).

Media, Technology & Culture 05 (3rd Edition): Computational Technologies

Most people know very well that social and cultural transformations are complex. And yet, we often seem prepared to think of individual media as bringing change. We believe that there was a situation before this or that media, and then another situation after. Sometimes there are worries about this subsequent situation; or nostalgia for how things were before. In other instances, people wager hope that novel media might bring positive or empowering changes. When media technologies are seen as transformative, they have often been described as ‘new media’. The term ‘new media’ began to acquire some currency in the 1960s, in the age of television. But its use exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Why? Many used the term around this time to refer to a broad range of emerging media, often without giving its precise meaning. It was used to encompass the internet, interactivity, multimedia, mobile devices, user-generated content, and more. Some scholars observed, however, that all of these various new media had something in common: their relationship with the longer-term and more general development of the computer as a media technology. The computer was not just another individual media technology. Rather, it embodied the emerging backbone for potentially all mediated communication and experience. In this episode, we look at how this argument is exemplified by the work of digital media theorist Lev Manovich, who suggests that what makes new media ‘new’ is its creation, storage, distribution and display via the language (i.e. software code) and hardware of digital computation. On a basic level, computational media all share a basic metabolism of binary code: ultimately describable with nothing more than 1s and 0s. The question, however, is broader than this: beyond previous media formats becoming absorbed into the medium of the computer, are we seeing the rise of a specifically ‘computational’ culture?

Thinkers Discussed: Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media / Software Takes Command); Mark B.N. Hansen (New Philosophy for New Media); Alexander Galloway (The Interface Effect); Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (Remediation: Understanding New Media); Jonathan Sterne (Analog); Gabriele Balbi and Paolo Magaudda (A History of Digital Media: An Intermedia and Global Perspective); Lewis Mumford (Authoritarian and Democratic Technics); Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism); Laine Nooney (The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal); Jennifer Light (When Computers Were Women); Mar Hicks (Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing); Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (Personal Dynamic Media); David Berry (Against Remediation).

Media, Technology & Culture 04 (3rd Edition): Live Technologies

It is often said that media technologies provide us with a window on the world, beyond our own experience. A window not only connecting us to distant or past worlds, beyond our immediate reach, but also to worlds we feel can join into, and share simultaneously. One term for describing how media afford this latter window on the world is ‘liveness’. The word ‘live’ might most immediately bring to mind live news coverage: journalism that is valued because it’s on location, at the event, brought to you the viewer live. But liveness is not just live coverage, whether that be of breaking news, sports or a programme like the Academy Awards. It refers to a more basic quality of mediated experience: that of placing a priority on the value of ‘now’ over later. In this episode, we explore liveness first via a vignette into the experiences of broadcast journalists covering the prison transfer of presumed Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who along with their viewers, abruptly found themselves witnessing a televised murder. From there, we will consider different approaches to liveness. These approaches have in the past been rooted in the study of radio and television. But the streaming comments, images and increasingly video of social media platforms clearly demand we revive and reimagine the concept to understand new kinds of networked real-time-like or live experience.

Thinkers Discussed: Karin Van Es (Liveness Redux: On Media and their Claim to be Live / The Future of Live); Philip Auslander (Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture); Nick Couldry (Liveness, 'Reality', and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone); Annie Van den Oever (The Aesthetics and Viewing Regimes of Cinema and Television, and their Dialectics); Joshua Meyrowitz (No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior); Paddy Scannell (Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation); Ludmilla Lupinacci (Phenomenal Algorhythms: The Sensorial Orchestration of ‘Real Time’ in Social Media); Esther Weltevrede, Anne Helmond and Carolin Gerlitz (The Politics of Real-Time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines).

Media, Technology & Culture 03 (3rd Edition): Domesticated Technologies

By now, you will have noticed we are not spending much if any time trying to understand media technologies in isolation. Instead, we have been and will keep putting media technologies into the settings on which they depend as well as help shape. One prominent academic concept for scholars seeking to understand media technologies in such settings is that of ‘domestication’. This refers to how media technologies – and really technologies in general – become more and more adapted to fit into everyday life. Sure, when media technologies are new, they tend to be seen as disruptive or threatening. But in time, they usually become just another ‘appliance’ used in our everyday existence, something utterly unremarkable, ordinary, even boring. In this episode, we consider this by exploring how the phonograph and early radio were intimately incorporated into social practices, structures and places, in the process shaping the nature of the media technologies themselves. Along the way, we will also consider the more recent arrival of newer digital technologies, such as smart speaker assistants and streaming services based on recommendation systems. Is a concept like domestication fit for purpose when it comes to understanding ubiquitous, algorithmically- and data-driven digital media technologies?

Thinkers Discussed: Martin Heidegger (briefly); Roger Silverstone (Television and Everyday Life / Domesticating Domestication); Jo Helle-Valle and Dag Slettemeås (ICTs, Domestication and Language-games); Lisa Gitelman (Always Already New); Alexander G. Weheliye (Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity); Shaun Moores (Media and Everyday Life in Modern Society); Stuart Hall (Encoding and Decoding); Paddy Scannell (Radio, Television and Modern Life); Michel Foucault (briefly); Saba Rebecca Brause and Grant Blank (Externalized Domestication: Smart Speaker Assistants, Networks and Domestication Theory); Ignacio Siles Johan Espinoza-Rojas, Adrián Naranjo, and María Fernanda Tristán (The Mutual Domestication of Users and Algorithmic Recommendations on Netflix).

Media, Technology and Culture 02 (3rd Edition): Located Technologies

A conventional narrative in many historical accounts about the arrival of new media technologies is that media technologies have oftentimes made possible forms of communication in which physical co-presence is less and less necessary. Early media technologies like print allowed for unprecedented communication across distance, albeit with a time lag. But as time has gone on, mediated communication at a distance has become increasingly instantaneous. These kinds of narratives feed into a popular imaginary of media technologies progressively disconnecting us from localities or places. In this episode, we explore an alternative way to think about this: for sure, media technologies radically alter how we experience time, space and distance. Yet when we look a little closer, we can see that media technologies – in how we encounter them, in their sheer materiality – always depend on local circumstances.

Thinkers discussed: Harold Innis (The Bias of Communication); Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Myth); Doreen Massey and David Harvey (briefly); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); David Morley (Communications and Mobility); John Thompson (The Media and Modernity); Kate Maddalena and Jeremy Packer (The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network); Jonathan Sterne (Thinking with James Carey); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form).

Media, Technology and Culture 01 (3rd Edition): Cultural Technologies

Technological talk is everywhere nowadays. All manner of novel developments, good or ill, are associated with the supposed impact of technology. But when we invoke the term ‘technology’, whether in relation to media or in general, just what do we mean anyway? Do technologies drive human history? Or are technologies just tools, extending deeper social, economic, political or cultural structures? In this introductory episode, we consider different scholarly takes on how we might understand and conceptualise media as technologies. We start with one of the most famous ‘technological’ understandings of media: that of Marshall McLuhan, whose catchphrase ‘the medium is the message’ asserted that the historical or long-term effects of particular mediums were of greater significance than media content. Detractors of this assertion, such as cultural theorist Raymond Williams, argued McLuhan’s brand of ‘technological determinism’ put forward a crude and politically naive way of understanding media culture. As we'll see, though, the most useful position is probably somewhere in-between: of course technologies are cultural; but culture is also inherently technological.

Thinkers discussed: Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media); Raymond Williams (Keywords / Culture is Ordinary / Television: Technology and Cultural Form); David Edgerton (The Shock of the Old); Ursula Franklin (The Real Life of Technology); Stephen Kline (What Is Technology?); Donna Haraway (The Cyborg Manifesto); Bernard Stiegler (Technics and Time 1); N. Katharine Hayles (How We Think); Michael Litwack (Extensions after Man: Race, Counter/Insurgency and the Futures of Media Theory); Sylvia Winter;  Armond Towns (Toward a Black Media Philosophy); and Sarah Sharma, Rianka Singh and Sarah Banet-Weiser (Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan).