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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).

The metaphor of contamination might be valuable here. Contamination is collaboration in the service of ‘precarious survival’; it is a building and a working …

The next ICA 2018 session is on algorithmic culture and starts with Stina Bengtsson, whose focus is on the ethics of algorithmic culture. Apple’s AI assistant Siri is an example for this: it has been made to swear and say inappropriate things, and there are real questions about the ethics of subverting algorithmic culture in this way.

This can be understood through the lens of actor-network theory, which suggests that non-human actors have their own ethics as well: it proposes that technologies are not simply free for humans to use as they see fit; that technologies are not simply tools …

The final speaker in our ICA 2018 panel is Neil Thurman. He notes that beyond the platform studies we must also look at the intersections between different social networks and platforms, and at the broader societal debate about echo chambers and filter bubbles. His work builds on the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Survey (covering 26 countries), and explores how aware and concerned users are of and about the algorithmic and editorial selection of the news content they engage with.

Some 57% of respondents are worried about missing out on challenging viewpoints and important information as a result of such …

The next speaker in our ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, who focusses on how people tailor their social network connections through friending, unfriending, and blocking. This again draws on the Quello Search Project study, a survey of 14,000 search users across seven nations.

First, Internet users consult an average of 4.5 different types of media to find information about politics; more than 50% use search engines to check information (very) often, and 80% do it from time to time (how they do so is limited by their search skills, however). There are also some national variations in these patterns …

The next paper in this ICA 2018 session is mine. The slides are below, and there’s also a full paper on this topic (from last year’s Future of Journalism conference):

The second ICA 2018 session this morning is the one I have a paper in as well – we’re discussing the (scant) empirical evidence for echo chambers and filter bubbles. We start, though, with a paper by Anja Bechmann that is working with a broad sample of newsfeed data from Danish Facebook users.

The newsfeed potentially acts as a shared public news platform where people meet around shared news content. ‘News’ here might mean many things – journalistic, political news in a narrow sense, but also user-oriented relation news and the user updates of many kinds that newsfeed algorithms treat …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Elizabeth Dubois, who again highlights the moral panics about the effect of ‘the Internet’ on information flows. But there are many different media and platforms, where users exercise different media use choices. There is a need to better measure media habits, therefore, including their specific diversity, timing, and tactics.

On average, users across the countries surveyed by the Quello Search Project accessed between seven and nine sources for broadly political information (this is per day, I think?). Legacy offline media are still in wide use, alongside search and online news …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Laleah Fernandez, who begins by highlighting the moral panics around echo chambers, filter bubbles, and ‘fake news’. There is limited evidence that these issues are major concerns, but to the extent that these are genuine problems, key users might be useful in addressing these problems, by nudging vulnerable users towards more sensible behaviours.

Who are the vulnerable, however? They include those who are interested in politics but not skilled in search, and this population could be identified from their responses to the Quello Search Project. (The most vulnerable group ranged from …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, whose focus is on the role of algorithms in shaping information flows, and on users’ understandings of the impact of such algorithms. Algorithmic literacy is not yet well researched; it extends beyond digital literacy and is specific to different platforms, too.

The present study examined algorithmic literacy in the U.S. and Germany, to capture user attitudes and practices across very different media and political systems. It captured a range of personal and behavioural variables, and it seems that algorithmic knowledge, amount of use, and search skills strongly affect users’ …

The second day at ICA 2018 starts for me with a panel on the personalisation of search, and the first presenter is Grant Blank. He begins by noting the importance of free-flowing information for society, but of course the media through which such information flows have changed over time, and this has affected media biases. Contemporary media now form a diverse media ecology.

Do online media in their diversity empower citizens to make better-informed decisions, then, or does the personalisation of online media distort the information that citizens encounter? Much of the present discussion is severely undertheorised. There is a …