Category: Platforms

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.

Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence – Annotation & Notes

This paper looks at advances in artificial intelligence through the lens of critical science, post-colonial, and decolonial theory. The authors acknowledge the positive potential for AI technologies, but use this paper to highlight its considerable risks, especially for vulnerable populations. They call for a proactive approach to be adopted by AI communities using decolonial theories that use historical hindsight to identify patterns of power that remain relevant – perhaps more than ever – in the rapid advance of AI technologies. 

Information and Communication Technology and Society – Annotation & Notes

In this article Fuchs introduces “Critical Internet Theory” as a foundation for analyzing the Internet and society based on a Marxian critique. He illustrates Critical Internet Theory (hereinafter CIT for brevity) using the emergence of the so-called Web 2.0 as an Internet gift commodity strategy, wherein users produce content on free platforms, which commodify the content to increase their advertising revenues. Fuchs introduces the concept of the “Internet prosumer commodity” to describe this “free” exchange of labor and value. This strategy, he writes, “functions as a legitimizing ideology.”

The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, by Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. – Book Review

graphic of a human eye surrounded by digital data

The academic field of surveillance studies has (thankfully in my view) become more crowded during the past few years in response to the increasing use of data technologies for social control. In the early 1990s, when some of us (e.g. me) were naively celebrating the liberating potential of the internet, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. was critically examining earlier incarnations of data systems and practices that contributed to the entrenchment of existing systems of domination and social injustice. First published in 1993, his book The Panoptic Sort was a groundbreaking account of the history and rationalization of surveillance in service of institutional control and corporate profit at the expense of individual privacy and autonomy. In the a second edition, published by Oxford University press in 2021, Gandy updates his original book for the context of today’s increasingly ubiquitous technologies that collect, process, and commodify personal information for instrumental use by corporate interests.

The Application of Artificial Intelligence to Journalism: An Analysis of Academic Production – Annotation & Notes

This paper presents a summary of academic research on AI use in journalism, based on the authors’ review of 358 texts published between 2010 and January 2021. The materials they reviewed were found through academic databases including Scopus and Web of Science, in addition to Google Scholar. Most of the articles were published in English, and the majority was from the United States. Given significant developments with AI, and AI in journalism, since 2021, this paper is really a snapshot of research published for the period covered. The authors do note a rapid increase in research until 2019, with a dropoff in 2020 presumably from disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Platformisation, by Thomas Poell, David Nieborg & José van Dick – Annotation & Notes

In this paper, published in the journal Internet Policy Review, the authors define and contextualize the concept of platformisation from four distinct scholarly perspectives: business studies, software studies research, critical political economy, and cultural studies. They suggest a research agenda making use of these four dimensions, so as to provide insight into “ever-evolving dynamics of platformisation” as sites of both benefits and harms to individuals and society. And they offer ways to operationalize the concept of platformisation in critical research on the emergence and concentration of power among a small number of platform companies, and how they are transforming social relationships and key societal sectors. 

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.

Going Web-First at The Christian Science Monitor: A Three-Part Study of Change, by Nikki Usher – Annotation & Notes

In 2009 the Christian Science Monitor was among the daily newspapers ceasing print publication in favor of web-only distribution. This paper presents ethnographic research on that transition by former journalist and current associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of San Diego Nikki Usher. Usher observed editorial operations and interviewed news staff at the Monitor during three periods between February 2009 and February 2010: before the transition to web-only, after the transition but before adopting a new content management system, and after CMS implementation. Their goal was to understand the meaning of the change to Monitor’s journalists and its impact on their organizational and journalistic values.