Streaming Media

OK, so I skipped the previous session as I got talking about current research projects with a number of colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, but I’m back for the final session this afternoon, on the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, where my colleague Sam Vilkins and I are presenting our own papers. I’m the first presenter in the session, so here are my slides:

And the final speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Setio Budi H. Hutomo, whose interest is in the digitisation of local television in Indonesia, and its impact on democratic processes. This system was affected by the 2002 broadcasting bill, which introduced private, community, and subscription broadcasting in addition to public service media. This has an impact especially also on local media, including local television.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Cindy Fang, whose interest is in the early days of the Clubhouse social media platform – an invite-only audio app that became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and attracted a number of high-profile users (including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk). This userbase can be understood as a networked public, structured by the platform’s affordances – or in this case, networked listeners and active producers of content.

The final speakers in this session at AoIR 2023 are Marcel Alves dos Santos Jr. and, again, Emilie de Keulenaar (and I’m on 2% charge, so let’s see how far we get here). Marcel begins by pointing to Brazil’s unresolved relationship with its past military dictatorships: its Constitution of 1988 was accompanied by an amnesty for members of the military who were implicated in human rights abuses.

The final session on this second full day at AoIR 2023 is on deplatforming, and starts with Richard Rogers and Emilie de Keulenaar. Richard begins by outlining the idea of trace research – using the ‘exhaust’ of the Web to study societal trends unobtrusively, not least also with the help of computational social science methods.

The next speaker in this fascinating AoIR 2023 session is Yvonne Eadon, whose interest is in the subscription-based streaming platform Gaia.com, the self-declared ‘Netflix of consciousness-raising media’. She describes this as a kind of conspirituality capitalism, which is perhaps accidentally encountered by people searching for life advice and spiritual content.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Kyle Moody, who shifts our focus to branding and consumption markets in cultures; much fandom is tied up with such branding activities. In particular, the focus here is on Twitch, where affective labour and fan work collides with the gig economy of media content creation.

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.

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 media and cultural industries is located in their cultural distribution systems (from development through production, distribution, and exhibition, to audiences, and thence repeating the cycle. This is true for all major platforms, including for example Netflix and other streaming services, which are often integrated with the major production studios to create a Hollywood-style streaming studio system (if not yet as well established).

The creators involved in these processes usually have no right of ownership over their creations; this is especially problematic for women and minority groups, and does not tend to produce diverse content. Minorities also remain underrepresented at the executive producer level. This also produces various other harms to them, for instance at personal, physical, and psychological levels; it also results in reductive storytelling that privileges a handful of major and often simplistic narratives.