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One of Amazon’s many revenue streams is a virtual labor marketplace called MTurk. It’s a platform for businesses to hire inexpensive, on-demand labor for simple ‘microtasks’ that resist automation for one reason or another. If a company needs data double-checked, images labeled, or surveys filled out, they can use the marketplace to offer per-task work to anyone willing to accept it. MTurk is short for Mechanical Turk, a reference to a famous hoax: an automaton which played chess but concealed a human making the moves.

The name is thus tongue-in-cheek, and in a telling way; MTurk is a much-celebrated innovation that relies on human work taking place out of sight and out of mind. Businesses taking advantage of its extremely low costs are perhaps encouraged to forget or ignore the fact that humans are doing these rote tasks, often for pennies.

Jeff Bezos has described the microtasks of MTurk workers as “artificial artificial intelligence;” the norm being imitated is therefore that of machinery: efficient, cheap, standing in reserve, silent and obedient. MTurk calls its job offerings “Human Intelligence Tasks” as additional indication that simple, repetitive tasks requiring human intelligence are unusual in today’s workflows. The suggestion is that machines should be able to do these things, that it is only a matter of time until they can. In some cases, the MTurk workers are in fact labelling data for machine learning, and thus enabling the automation of their own work. more...

Drew Harwell (@DrewHarwell) wrote a balanced article in the Washington Post about the ways universities are using wifi, bluetooth, and mobile phones to enact systematic monitoring of student populations. The article offers multiple perspectives that variously support and critique the technologies at play and their institutional implementation. I’m here to lay out in clear terms why these systems should be categorically resisted.

The article focuses on the SpotterEDU app which advertises itself as an “automated attendance monitoring and early alerting platform.” The idea is that students download the app and then universities can easily keep track of who’s coming to class and also, identify students who may be in, or on the brink of, crisis (e.g., a student only leaves her room to eat and therefore may be experiencing mental health issues). As university faculty, I would find these data useful. They are not worth the social costs. more...

As technology expands its footprint across nearly every domain of contemporary life, some spheres raise particularly acute issues that illuminate larger trends at hand. The criminal justice system is one such area, with automated systems being adopted widely and rapidly—and with activists and advocates beginning to push back with alternate politics that seek to ameliorate existing inequalities rather than instantiate and exacerbate them. The criminal justice system (and its well-known subsidiary, the prison-industrial complex) is a space often cited for its dehumanizing tendencies and outcomes; technologizing this realm may feed into these patterns, despite proponents pitching this as an “alternative to incarceration” that will promote more humane treatment through rehabilitation and employment opportunities.

As such, calls to modernize and reform criminal justice often manifest as a rapid move toward automated processes throughout many penal systems. Numerous jurisdictions are adopting digital tools at all levels, from policing to parole, in order to promote efficiency and (it is claimed) fairness. However, critics argue that mechanized systems—driven by Big Data, artificial intelligence, and human-coded algorithms—are ushering in an era of expansive policing, digital profiling, and punitive methods that can intensify structural inequalities. In this view, the embedded biases in algorithms can serve to deepen inequities, via automated systems built on platforms that are opaque and unregulated; likewise, emerging policing and surveillance technologies are often deployed disproportionately toward vulnerable segments of the population. In an era of digital saturation and rapidly shifting societal norms, these contrasting views of efficiency and inequality are playing out in quintessential ways throughout the realm of criminal justice. more...

A series of studies was just published showing that White Liberals present themselves as less competent when interacting with Black people than when interacting with other White people. This pattern does not emerge among White Conservatives. The authors of the studies, Cynthia H. Dupree (Yale University) and Susan T.  Fiske (Princeton University), refer to this as the “competence downshift” and explain that reliance on racial stereotypes result in patronizing patterns of speech when Liberal Whites engage with a racial outgroup. The original article appears in the journal Personality and Social Psychology. I make the case that these human-based findings have something to tell us about AI and its continued struggle with bigotry.  more...

In late September the social news networking site ‘Reddit’ announced a revamp of their ‘quarantine’ function. A policy that has been in place for almost three years now, quarantines were designed to stop casual Redditors from accessing offensive and gruesome subreddits (topic based communities within the site), without banning these channels outright. In doing so the function impacted a small number of small subreddits and received little attention. The revamp of the quarantine function however has led to the policy applying to much larger subreddits, creating significant controversy. As an attempt to shape the affordances of the site, the revamped quarantine function highlights many of political and architectural issues that Reddit is facing in today’s current political climate.

As a platform, Reddit sits in a frequently uncomfortable position. Reddit was initially established as a haven for free speech, a place in which anything and everything could and should be discussed. When, for example, discussion about #gamergate, the controversy in 2014 over the ethics of the gaming industry that resulted in a number of high-profile women game designers and journalists being publicly harassed, was banned on the often more insidious 4chan, it was Reddit where discussion continued to flourish. However, in recent years, Reddit has come under increasing pressure due to this free for all policy. Reddit has been blamed for fueling misogyny, facilitating online abuse, and even leading to the misidentification of suspects in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombings.

Reddit announced the revamp of its quarantining policy via a long post on the subreddit r/announcements. In doing so, one of Reddit’s moderators u/landoflobsters highlighted the bind that Reddit faces. They said: more...

The following argument is as an elaboration upon and the second part of “The Ineluctable Politics of Doctor Who: Part 1.” In that piece, I present the television series Doctor Who as an artefact with ineluctable social-material significance and political implications. In so doing, I illustrate that the ostensibly playful, inconsequential spaces that celebrate beloved objects of fan entertainment never actually enact neutral positions. The text and fan pronouncements about the text exist, incontrovertibly, as partisan acts—even when enacting an ostensibly innocuous posture that seeks to avoid or negate polemical effects.

Here, in Part 2, I address the ways in which the show may and should take responsibility for its social-material effects—which, while demonstrating relevance for a general viewing audience, hold particular import for a diverse fan community. It is on this point of fan diversity that the present discussion locates sociological significance. Surely Doctor Who fans, as a group, constitute a wide range of varying demographic orientations. Such a pronouncement seems rather evident considering the fanbase spans cross-cultural contexts. more...

An analysis of how human beings engage with a given artefact likely draws from a fundamental premise: human creations demonstrate social-material consequences. This observation does not purport to indicate a probable condition, but rather an ineluctable one—and it holds relevance, always and everywhere, for all types of artefacts. This is true of artefacts demonstrating utilitarian salience—like a spear, scythe, wrench, pencil, microwave, motor vehicle, computer, etc.—and those ostensibly centring on more aesthetic functions—like a painting, sonnet, concert, novel, play or even a television programme.

For the following argument, I discuss how a particular television series, Doctor Who, demonstrates social-material consequences for a community of fans, the Whovians. Following the recent premier of Season Eleven, many excited Whovians took to Twitter in collective celebration of Jodie Whittaker, the first woman to play the show’s leading character, The Doctor.  After 55 years of men in the role, Whittaker’ casting had clear symbolic importance. But it had social-material significance, too. One Twitter comment comes to my mind as an exemplary indication of such significance.

A father tweets, “My daughter (6) told me they were playing  #DoctorWho… in the playground today and she was the Doctor – that’s why last night was brilliant.” Recognizing that the child’s pretending to be the Doctor is to envision herself as the hero, we may acknowledge that she not only enacted a role of social importance, but also felt it was appropriate and desirable to do so. In other words, we confront the affective (and thereby material) implications of her having a woman role model to serve as fodder for her imagined (and real life) ambitions. Pretending to be the Doctor, this child may envision herself as not only competent, but exceptional. While playing, she perhaps recited that now iconic line from The Woman Who Fell to Earth, “When people need help, I never refuse!”   more...

I’ll start by stating the obvious: power manifests in myriad forms. In this piece I’ll be focusing on the normalizing power of discourse. Normalizing discourse refers to the way language – talk, text, and body – reinforces the status quo and crystalizes social structures, including our own place within those structures. I will draw on my own research about religion online to make the case that the internet fosters normalizing discourse, while at the same time, leaving room for subversion.

I suggest conceptualizing digital media as a Foucauldian Discourse, or, for a lack of a better analog: the street, the marketplace. What I mean by Foucauldian discourse is the systematic ways in which communication shapes our social norms. This happens online because, while we use digital media individually, we are taking part in a social space. Online media includes the multiplicity of opinions experienced through an individual’s lenses. We use digital media in personalized ways: to create a ‘personal’ profile, to do your own banking, travel, shopping, etc. There are shopify business websites, a direct product of ecommerce, which again is by extension is born out of digital media. But the experience in not fully individualized: the ‘street’ or ‘tribe’ is always at the background of online activities. Friends and family (‘the tribe’) react to personal profiles in social media; reviewers and commenters (‘the street’) “shout” their opinions about the latest gadget you just purchased, or the news you are reading; and always, the watchful eye of a big company – Google, Microsoft, Apple – is present. Therefore, online communication is never done in a vacuum. Even if I am watching cat videos by myself at 3 AM, I am surrounded by society. Online, the individual user is communicating with ‘the masses.’ They are out in the street, or at the marketplace, or at school, or at church, even if they are physically alone in bed. Online, you converse with “everyone.” And these online ‘conversations,’ I argue, are the essence of conceptualizing online media as Foucauldian discourse.

Understanding digital media as discourse means theorizing digital communication as a set of systematic statements and online practices that create, construct, and negotiate social norms: as spaces of power and resistance. And, while the internet allows for multiple voices and counter-spheres, there are policing and regulating processes that make online media a normalizing force. I’d like to share two example from my own work on religion online that reflect how digital media can be conceptualized as a site for power and resistance. more...

Algorithms are something of a hot topic.  Interest in these computational directives has taken hold in public discourse and emerged as a subject of public concern. While computer scientists were the original algorithm experts, social scientists now equally stake a claim in this space. In the past 12 months, several excellent books on the social science of algorithms have hit the shelves. Three in particular stand out: Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality, and Taina Bucher’s If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Rather than a full review of each text, I offer a quick summary of what they offer together, while drawing out what makes each distinct.

I selected these texts because of what they represent: a culmination of shorter and more hastily penned contentions about automation and algorithmic governance, and an exemplary standard for critical technology studies. I review them here as a state of the field and an analytical grounding for subsequent thought.

There is no shortage of social scientists commenting on algorithms in everyday life. Twitter threads, blog posts, op-eds, and peer-review articles take on the topic with varying degrees of urgency and rigor. Algorithms of Oppression, Automating Inequality, and If…Then encapsulate these lines of thought and give them full expression in monograph form. more...

Humor is central to internet culture. Through imagery, text, snark and stickers, funny content holds strong cultural currency.  In a competitive attention economy, LOLs are a hot commodity. But just because internet culture values a laugh it doesn’t preclude serious forms of digitally mediated communication nor consideration of consequential subject matter. In contrast, the silly and serious can—and do—imbricate in a single utterance.

The merging of serious and silly becomes abundantly evident in recent big data analyses of political communication on social media. Studies show that parody accounts, memes, gifs and other funny content garner disproportionate attention during political news events. John Hartley refers to this phenomenon as ‘silly citizenship’ while Tim Highfield evokes an ‘irreverent internet’. This silliness and irreverence in digitally mediated politics means that contemporary political discourse employs humor as a participatory norm. What remains unclear, however, is what people are doing with their political humor.  Is humor a vehicle for meaningful political communication, or are politics just raw material for funny content?  My co-authors and I (Tony Love (@tonyplove) and Gemma Killen (@gemkillen)) addressed this question in a paper published last week in New Media & Society. more...