Internet Technologies

The first full day at the AoIR 2024 conference starts with a panel on climate change, and the first speaker is Emily West, whose interest is in the climate policies of the large digital platform companies – such as Amazon’s ‘Climate Pledge’ initiative. This is supposed to provide an opportunity for involvement by other stakeholders, and some energy transparency measures.

It’s an unseasonably rain-free evening in Sheffield, England, which means that I must be at the opening of the 25th Association of Internet Researchers conference. After warm welcomes from the President of AoIR and the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, we begin the conference with a keynote by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, whose focus is on technological refusal. What have we learnt from past pushbacks against socio-technical developments? How have such refusals evolved over time? Where might we be going, for instance with the coming rise of the quantum Internet?

What comes together here are strands of informed consent and refusal; of counter-publics; of other objections against technological and social developments. There is often also a sense of helplessness and coercion, especially for underprivileged groups and communities – yet also a strong sense of defiance and disobedience against top-down pressures. This can be seen as a new form of civil disobedience, directed no longer simply at the state but – since code is law – at the now power-holders in technology and other institutions and companies.

But in supporting such refusal, are we also aligning with populists and angry mobs – e.g. anti-vaxxer communities, and their disobedient and violent attacks against telecommunications technologies and installations? The key difference here is that populism seeks to create division and assert supremacy; this is not necessarily the case in other forms of technological disobedience. We might therefore consider technological refusal as a normative as well as an empirical concept: it can address individual and collective actions, but need not overfit and include problematic and violent groups that seek to resist the status quo.

I’ve mentioned some of these already in my previous update, but wanted to collect them together again in a single post too: over the past few weeks I’ve had a burst of podcast engagements on a range of topics relating to social media. Some of these are also in connection with the new podcast series Read Them Sideways that my colleagues Sam Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, and Kate FitzGerald in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have now kicked off – and you may want to subscribe to the whole series via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or their RSS feed at Anchor.fm so you don’t miss further updates.

Up first was my appearance in episode five of Read Them Sideways, where I spoke to Sebastian about the recent closure of Meta’s data access platform CrowdTangle. This is a major blow to public-interest critical scrutiny of what happens on Facebook and Instagram, even though Meta has now launched the broadly similar Meta Content Library as a replacement – but while the MCL certainly looks like it will provide similar data to scholarly researchers who manage to gain access to it, it substantially reduces the range of users of these data (especially excluding journalists and other independent watchdogs, at least for now), and so far seems more difficult to work with than CrowdTangle was. We’ll see how things develop from here…

Just a few days later I also spoke to the well-known Australian technology journalist Stilgherrian, as part of his long-running The 9pm Edict podcast. We had a long, wide-ranging, and very enjoyable discussion about a wide range of topics including the current Australian federal government’s energetic if generally ill-informed actionism on social media policy, the decline of Xitter, the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, and various other current issues – just listen to the whole thing already. Stilgherrian has also compiled a list of further background information on his site, to go with the podcast itself.

And the final session at this excellent Social Media & Society 2024 conference starts with Kaspar Beelen, Katherine Ireland, and Tim Samples, presenting a longitudinal analysis of changes to platform Terms of Use. How have such terms changed over time, and how might we quantify and visualise such change? Are such contracts more plastic – mutable – than other types of contract, and are there specific times when they changed substantially?

And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Damien Renard, whose interest is in the power dynamics between platform operators and user communities. The focus here is on StackExchange, where moderators went on strike in protest against the platform’s May 2023 policy change to allow AI-generated content.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is the annual Steve Jones lecture, which this year is presented by my QUT colleague Jean Burgess and is on the impact of the newly emerging generative artificial intelligence technologies. This should not be confused with the substantial hype around artificial general intelligence, a technology which always seems to be just around the corner and has yet to actually eventuate.

Rather, this talk is about the more limited generative AI systems that appear to have invaded all sorts of projects, and seem to be universally indicated now by sparkle (✨) icons and emoji and rainbow gradients in user interface designs in both expert and consumer products. Only Meta has resisted this trend, and uses a ring icon.

Very serious money is now being poured into generative AI, and well beyond conventional venture capital: all of the major tech firms as well as a range of specialist AI Labs and AI ‘community’ developer platforms like Hugging Face have highly capitalised AI divisions now. This has also led to a vast increase in the amount of computing power and energy resources required got drive such AI activities.

How will we pay for all this sparkle, then? Google has already signalled the potential that AI-powered search may be offered under a for-pay model, and Google AI has also introduced a premium subscription plan. This is a significant shift away from advertising-funded free (or at least freemium) Internet services like online search and online document creation. Another development is the insertion of AI technologies into physical devices, from AI laptops to AI iPhones that incorporate specialised AI chips and on-device Large Language Models.

The final session of this very enjoyable Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg begins with our gracious host, Felix Victor Münch, introducing the Social Media Observatory (SMO) project at the Hans-Bredow-Institut and Research Institute Social Cohesion. Felix introduces this as a kind of DIY research infrastructure building effort.

The final panel at this excellent Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Jakob Ohme, whose focus is on digital intermediaries in knowledge processes on digital platforms. Such platforms lead to context collapse, a levelling of epistemically hierarchies, and a disintegration of formerly fixed sequences in the knowledge process; through this, for instance, journalism has lost its gatekeeping function and information monopoly, actors have switched roles in the information process, and the amount of unverified information that is circulating has increased substantially.

The third speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium session is Christian Stöcker, whose interest is in Germans’ perceptions of disinformation. Germans generally see disinformation as a threat to democracy, and are concerned about their own ability to detect disinformation when they come across it. But how do German business and journalism elites detect and verify such online disinformation?

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Cornelius Puschmann, presenting work from the excellent POLTRACK project on polarisation and individualised online information environments, which has been conducting a longitudinal panel study as well as tracking participants’ online activities in Germany over a period of 20 months since March 2023.