Internet Technologies

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.

Internet.org was subsequently renamed as Free Basics, and continues its activities; it was expelled from India, however. It represents an attempt to establish a socio-technical imaginary informed by a significant level of technological determinism …

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.

Even as the U.S. government is itself sliding towards authoritarian governance, it has also been a major funder of the development of such technologies. Current key technologies in this context include Psiphon …

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.

Several civic campaigns have also contributed to this, driven by various digital activists and civil society organisations around the world. These operate at national …

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 …

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.

Lene’s previous work interviewed platform providers such as Airbnb and Uber as well as smaller platforms, and the consumers and users of these platforms. Most of these platforms stated that they would also include professional service providers on their …

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.

Making choices satisfies a basic human need to be in control of our own lives. But having too many choices can be overwhelming and demotivating, as studies of Website and game customisation options have shown. News customisation could similarly enhance users’ enjoyment of their …

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’.

How may this be combatted, then? Literacy is one approach; enhanced algorithms is another; and …

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 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 …