Internet Technologies

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Noemi Festic, whose focus is on algorithmic content selection processes by automated systems. This includes search applications, recommendation systems, and a broad range of other automated tools; these govern user behaviour by limiting and shaping activities but thereby also provide a space for new forms of engagement.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Aram Sinnreich, whose interest is in the continuing consequences of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – and in particular its anti-circumvention elements that criminalise the bypassing of copyright protection mechanisms such as encryption, even in contexts where ‘fair use’ exceptions apply.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Andrea Alarcon, whose focus is on Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org project. Its aim was to provide free basic Internet service around the world, especially for people who were within the Web’s reach but remained unconnected with it; access to Facebook itself was deeply baked into this initiative, and this generated significant accusations of building a walled garden.

The next AoIR 2018 speaker is Nathalie Maréchal, who focusses on digital rights technology: any kind of hardware or software that improves users’ privacy, access to information, and freedom of expression. This threatens government and corporate control of information flows in an age of surveillance capitalism, and is therefore also controversial; it challenges the networked authoritarianism that is beginning to take hold in many countries around the world.

The next session at AoIR 2018 starts with Efrat Daskal, who begins with a brief review of the development of the digital rights discourse since the original UN Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights in the digital age have developed especially since 2000, and especially the Internet Rights and Principles Charter of 2014 has made an important contribution. This enshrined the rights to access to information and technology, privacy and safety, and freedom of speech.

Well, we’re finally here: AoIR 2018 in Montréal has begun. We start with the keynote by Jason Lewis, who addresses the continuing rise of white supremacy in recent years. He begins by referencing the novel Riding the Trail of Tears, which discusses a retracing of the removal of the Cherokee from their traditional lands through virtual technology, and the possibility of Indigeneity in a digital earth.

But such a perspective clashes with white supremacy, which is well established in societal power structures even without further action to entrench it more deeply. Jason compares this with the multi-layer hardware and software stack that digital interfaces operate on; we are subject to the regimes that the stack places upon us and have no meaningful way to escape them. In much the same way, white biases are a feature, not a bug of contemporary society at every level; in software, biases beget biases because new data and new systems are built on old data and old systems, and perpetuate their built-in assumptions, and the same is true in societal protocols. This is a millennia-long process or epistemological inertia.

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 panel is Lene Pettersen, who begins by highlighting the rise of the sharing economy. In this economy, the key stakeholders are service providers, users, and intermediaries, and these may not necessarily represent traditional commercial actors. Professionals and small firms are now emerging that use sharing economy platforms to provide professional services.

The final speaker in this session at ICA 2018 is Di Zhu, who explores the effects of personal news customisation on user enjoyment. Customisation here is seen as different from personalisation, which is algorithmically driven: customisation involves active, deliberate user choices, for example by choosing specific topics or indicating their interest in the stories they encounter.

I’m not seeing quite as many ICA 2018 sessions as I might like, because of other meetings, but this Sunday morning I’m in a session on ‘fake news’, whatever we mean by that term. Mo Jang is starting us off. He begins by noting that the knowledge production and publication system has diversified with the increasing role of online publication, and this has undermined gatekeeping processes. This has also led to the increasing spread of unverified information, rumours, hoaxes, and other forms of ‘fake news’.

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Zane Cooper, whose interest is in the material constitution of big data. Big data make use of earth and labour that do not easily track with its digital manifestations: they generate a long supply chain of physical hardware that supports the big data cloud. There is therefore a need to distinguish between what big data infrastructures are (their constitutional logic) and what they do (their operational logic).