Tag: Research

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. 

An Overabundance of Research, Data, and Tools

social network, communication in the global computer networks. silhouette of a human head with an interface icons

We've arrived at the inevitable point of imperfection. I started out looking for authoritative resources on how social media data is harvested, processed, and used in commercial and political communication campaigns, and I sure did find them. The problem is this realm is changing so fast, many of these sources are out of date. Regardless, this research project must come to an end on May 11th when I turn in my IS 452 final project. My proposed annotated bibliography has become a series of marginal blog posts. But the fight continues.

Social Media Data Collection, Processing, and Use in Research, Marketing, and Political Communication

I've been spending time learning Python since January, and it's creating new problems. For example, suddenly I want to do things with Python. I want to write a program to process titles and filenames of media archives records from an Excel spreadsheet, and find the matching media files which are stored on a network drive. I need to read a few thousand PBCore XML records and convert them to JSON. I want to take the JSON output from Google Speech-to-Text transcripts, and convert it to WebVTT files. But I can take on just one project right now, and here it is.