Internet Technologies

The post-lunch session on this last day of IAMCR 2019 starts with Ibrahim Subeh, whose interest is in how Blockchain technologies are being framed in the Arabic Press (specifically Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE).

Blockchain is not a very intuitive technology, but it is also not necessary to understand everything about it. Much of the present research focusses on its financial applications or on the technical aspects, but the social implications of this technology should also be understood more closely. The technology is socially disruptive, and some suggest that it could eventually decentralise and replace the World Wide …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Irene Neverla, who introduces the concept of communicative sustainability. This may be a research perspective as well as an analytical tool for the study of mediatised societies.

Society is currently undergoing substantial transformative processes, driven by technological factors (digitalisation and artificial intelligence); economic factors (globalisation, turbo-capitalism, and neo-liberalism); political factors (the return of authoritarianism); sociological factors (especially the acceleration of change); and ecological factors (the overexploitation of naturals resources).

This might be understood as humanity reaching its limits, which generates a substantial amount of dystopia narratives to explain the present moment …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Andrew Iliadis, whose focus is on the role of metadata. Metadata and related terms such as ontology have rocketed to broader attention in recent years; here, philosophical concepts related to ontology have come to be translated to computationally accessible relationship constructs between data entities.

This renewed interest in ontologies is related to the growth in available data from a wide variety of sources; we are now at an advanced point in the hype cycle for computational analysis for such data, and further advances require better tools for connecting these disparate and …

The next speaker at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Theodora Sutton, who has studied a digital detox event in the San Francisco Bay area, Camp Grounded. This takes place in nature and bans digital technology, real names, work talk, watches, and drugs and alcohol.

Theodora used this event as a starting-point for an ethnographic exploration both of the Camp Grounded experience itself and of the participants’ technology usage practices back in the everyday world. After the Camp Grounded experience, there was a flurry of Facebook friending between participants even in spite of the ‘no real names’ policy, which involved …

The second keynote speaker in this opening evening at ECREA 2018 is Lina Dencik, whose keynote at last weekend’s iCS Symposium I covered a few days ago; here, her focus is on resistance in the datafied society. Such resistance is important in the present moment, and scholars have an increasingly important and more and more politicised role in this context.

There has been an overall, ongoing shift towards data-driven governance in recent years, leading to the emergence of a genuinely – but far from universally beneficially – datafied society. We have already seen a long history of digital surveillance, exemplified …

At the conclusion of my travels in Canada and Europe, I’ve made my way to Lugano for ECREA2018. We start with the first of two keynotes, by Eszter Hargittai, whose focus is on the digital divide in online participation. The fundamental question here is who benefits the most from Internet participation, and who does not: do participation divides facilitate social mobility or reproduce social divides?

The key point here is that digital divides cannot be solved by mere connectivity: getting online does not equate to using the Internet effectively and efficiently. Rather, such uses continue to be moderated by …

The second day at the iCS Symposium at IT University Copenhagen starts with a keynote by Lina Dencik. She explores the difficulties in researching the datafied society, building on several of the projects currently underway at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University. This work must involve researchers, but also civil society actors, practitioners, journalists, and others.

The datafied society represents an immensely fast-moving space; there are constant updates on development projects, company initiatives, government actions, data scandals, etc. As researchers, it is important to introduce a sense of slowness into this environment from time to time, in order to …

The final speakers in this AoIR 2018 session are Willian Fernandez Araújo and João Carlos Magalhães; they are interested in how ordinary people comprehend algorithms, and captured Portuguese-language tweets that used relevant terms to explore this.

User mentioned the algorithms’ actions (80%); the consequences of algorithms; user actions in response to algorithms; the qualities of the algorithms; emotional responses to algorithms; sources of user perceptions of algorithms; and the user’s own positioning towards algorithms. They mainly talked about acts by ‘the algorithm’, including the prioritisation of specific content, content and connection suggestions, and content distribution.

Accounts of algorithms were mainly …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Martina Mahnke, who is approaching algorithms from a human rather than technical perspective. Indeed, the term algorithm is often used to avoid explaining exactly how automated systems function, and what logics them embed; the study of algorithms from the user’s or programmer’s view has a considerably shorter history to date.

From this perspective, the, algorithms are communicative constructs; the narratives of algorithms influence directly how people engage with them. But this also implies that there is the narrative of algorithms that is created by the programmers, as well as a potential …

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Noemi Festic, whose focus is on algorithmic content selection processes by automated systems. This includes search applications, recommendation systems, and a broad range of other automated tools; these govern user behaviour by limiting and shaping activities but thereby also provide a space for new forms of engagement.

Such applications have an effect on the social order in human societies at the macro-level, but the extent of that effect is debatable and needs to be tested by empirical research. Part of the question here is how aware users are of the agency of these …