Parasitic Platforms and the Crisis in News

The boarded-up building of the McKeesport Daily News near Philadelphia

The viability of news has been in rapid decline since the mid-2000s. This post presents a critical analysis of how news publishers themselves helped precipitate the crisis by enthusiastically adopting Big Tech platform technologies and audience-building strategies. I show how search and social media platforms disrupted publishers’ relationships with audiences and advertisers by appropriating control over news distribution and revenue. I use Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to explore the restructuring of the news industry by the sociotechnical practices and surveillance economics of today’s dominating platforms. Leveraging Michel Serres’ discourse on social parasitism, I present a research framework for assessing symbiotic and parasitic relationships in sociotechnical systems using historical, quantitative, and qualitative methods, and to identify where news publishers still have agency to begin resolving the crisis. And I suggest the urgency of this research framework as publishers rapidly adopt new AI technologies.

Fueling the AdTech Machine: Google Analytics and the Commodification of Personal Data

This paper concerns the role of online analytics in facilitating the rise of today's ubiquitous programmatic advertising, referred to herein as "AdTech." Most criticism of AdTech has focused on online tracking which captures user data, and digital advertising which exploits it for commercial purposes. Almost entirely lost in the discussion is the role of analytics platforms, which process personal data and make it actionable for targeted advertising. I argue that the role of analytics is key to the rise of AdTech, and has not been given the critical attention it deserves. I wrote this paper while pursuing my research as a PhD student at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences. It has not been peer-reviewed or published elsewhere, and I’m posting it here to invite comments, criticism, and suggestions. Please feel free to send me email at jackb at illinois dot edu, or twitter message me @ jackbrighton.

When search engines stopped being human: menu interfaces and the rise of the ideological nature of algorithmic search – Annotation & Notes

Carol Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process with Google Search superimposed

In recent years, some have argued that if you can’t find information on Google, it might as well not exist. This assertion is problematic given that according to various estimates, the scope of Google’s search index range from 4 percent to .004 percent of the total Internet. Neils Kerssens examines these questions in the context of “positivist algorithmic ideology,” a normalizing force that frames certain practices as an established standard exempt from further interrogation.