Streaming Media

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

A starting point here may be the covert campaigning by political influencers. This involves …

It’s that time of the year, and I’m in Philadelphia for the 2023 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (continuing my 21-year streak of attending AoIR), which starts in earnest with the keynote by Aymar Jèan ‘AJ’ Escoffery. His focus is on reparative media, and he begins by noting that it feels like our collective harms are intensifying. This is exacerbated to some extent by corporate media, who often distribute the equivalent of fast, globally consumable food rather than slow and locally relevant content. This perpetuates injustices which require a particular approach to repair, including grassroots (re)distribution.

Power in …

The second speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Raul Ferrer-Conill; he begins with pointing to the long-standing discussion of whether digital and social media platforms are publishers or merely carriage services – or more recently, perhaps, tech and infrastructure companies. Such infrastructure is centrally important, of course, as the material basis for mediated communication.

This project began by mapping ownership of such infrastructure in Norway: while unusually, only one sub-sea Internet cable is privately owned, content delivery networks and data centres are overwhelmingly privately owned. This private ownership of content delivery networks (an example is a …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 is E. Brooke Phipps, whose focus is on how TikTok activists in the US fight conservatism and disinformation. This can be seen as a form of trolling directed at disinformation propagators, and thus turning a prominent practice of the far right against it: tactical trolling has now also emerged as a key form of digital resistance by left-wing activists (also in South Korea). This is also a youth practice: nearly half of all TikTok users are understood to be younger than 30 years. TikTok as a place is important here: place is a …

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change. The present project is interested in exploring the role of professional news organisations in covering COP26 on YouTube, which actors were given the opportunity to drive the meaning of specific terms and debates, and what themes emerged in the comments on the YouTube videos.

The project gathered video posts and comments from YouTube that referred to COP26 over …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Arnt Maasø, who shifts our attention to the role of metrics in the music business. Datafication has grown in the music industry as well, with a strong turn to metrics in recent years. Where some decades ago the industry was run by self-taught entrepreneurs who were running their businesses predominantly by gut instinct, now music metrics are everywhere and directly influence decision-making.

Arnt’s project conducted surveys and interviews with professionals in the Norwegian music industry. Almost half of the survey respondents use music metrics in their jobs, but such use is …

The final session at IAMCR 2019 for today starts with George Anghelcev, whose focus is on binge-watching. There has been a major shift over the last decade in how audiences view serialised video content, from being constrained to the regular timeslots for TV series to on-demand viewing of multiple episodes in single sittings. Some three quarters of U.S. TV consumers now binge-watch, and the numbers continue to rise – contrary to earlier news coverage, this is not a minority practice.

This is in part also because media narratives now portray binge-watching as a normal, ordinary, and widespread behaviour; however, differences …

Up next at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Tiziano Bonini and Alessandro Gandini, who are interested in ethnographic research in the age of platforms, even in spite of the black boxing strategies now employed by many platforms to protect themselves from scrutiny.

They apply this principally to the field of music streaming – where they were met with a total denial of access to the inner workings of the platform production and operation teams. In the face of such a rejection of access, how is it possible to conduct ethnographic research into these new places of cultural production?

First …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is William Moner, whose focus is on participatory media systems analysis, especially in relation to the political economy of communication. This is inspired by Vincent Mosco’s call for a bridge between political economics, communication studies, and cultural studies, as well as related fields.

Much of this has to do with how power is configured in certain spaces, and how control flows from such configurations. William points to a number of case studies from the area of digital storytelling across YouTube, blogs, and other platforms; these are variously major commercial, NGO-backed, or …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Ellis Jones, who focusses on the connections between context collapse and the imagined audience. Social media users navigate the challenge of context collapse by imagining an ideal audience for their content, and Ellis is exploring this especially in the context of DIY music content – but context collapse may also lead to the presence of an unimagined audience.

Offline, there has been a broad historical change in the boundary policing by DIY music scenes in the UK; this takes place in cooperatively run independent venues and creates a close-knit community while …