EECS 4461 Test 1 Practice

Interactive computational media:

computational technologies and arrangements concerned with the creation, organization, connection, presentation, traversal, transformation, or interaction of textual and multimedia content

Platformed media system:

a media system in which media activity is organized through computational platforms that provide infrastructures, interfaces, rules, and mechanisms for creating, distributing, encountering, and interacting with media content

The useful unit of analysis is often a _________, not the platform in general.

concrete situation

List the platform media situation for the platforms TikTok, Spotify, and ChatGPT

Platform → Platformed media situation

TikTok → TikTok recommending a video in the For You feed

Spotify → Spotify generating Discover Weekly recommendations

ChatGPT → ChatGPT rewriting a passage of text

Mediation

the participation of technologies in shaping the conditions, possibilities, forms, and consequences of human interaction and meaningmaking

Mediation - Technologies do not merely transmit information through a _________

neutral channel

They participate in shaping what can be expressed, encountered, interpreted, connected, and acted upon.

1. Which statement best describes a sociotechnical arrangement?

B. The relationships among a platform's technical systems, users, policies, organizational decisions, and infrastructures.

Computational artefact

A technology considered in terms of how it is technically constituted and how it operates.

Sociotechnical arrangement

A technology considered in terms of relationships among technical systems, people, practices, organizations, institutions, rules, norms, infrastructures, and other social conditions.

A website presents articles in categories and also lets readers search for a topic. Which statement is most accurate?

B. Categories can organize material, while search provides one way to traverse it.

A video can be viewed by anyone with its direct URL, but it does not appear in a viewer's home feed. What does this show?

C. Availability and visibility are different; platform arrangements can shape what becomes visible.

Hypertext

Linked textual, symbolic, or language-like organization

Hypermedia

Linkage and traversal across different media forms

Multimedia

The combination of multiple media forms

Algorithmic mediation

the shaping of media visibility, circulation, interaction, or interpretation through algorithmic processes such as ranking, recommendation, classification, filtering, search, moderation, or personalization

Generative mediation

the shaping of media expression, circulation, interaction, or interpretation through systems that generate, transform, synthesize, or modify media content

Abstraction

only certain things get represented. A model represents only certain aspects of the phenomenon being investigated; it does not reproduce the phenomenon in all its detail.

Selection

those things which get included. Decisions about what to represent (and what not to represent) are part of modelling.

Formalization

what becomes explicit. Selected assumptions, mechanisms, and relations get specified explicitly in a form that can be implemented computationally.

Investigation and Manipulation:

what gets systematically varied and examined

Simulation

exploring possible consequences. Running the model allows us to explore the possible consequences of the assumptions, mechanisms, and relations we have specified, including patterns that may emerge from their interaction

Fixed traversal

Movement through material follows a prescribed order.

Selectable traversal

a user chooses among available paths or links.

Branching traversal

movement proceeds through decision points that lead to different paths

Search-based traversal

movement begins from a query or retrieval process

Recommendation-based traversal

movement is shaped by system-generated suggestions, rankings, or feeds.

Inheritance

the earlier issue remains recognizable and still has to be addressed

Transformation

the issue still matters, but it is raised differently because technical, institutional, cultural, or economic conditions have changed.

Obviation

the issue becomes less central because later arrangements solve it, bypass it, or make it less relevant.

Displacement

the issue is pushed aside or replaced by a different issue, even if it has not been fully resolved

History as analytic resource

using selected historical cases to understand present arrangements, recurring problems, and possible alternatives

Contingency

the idea that what exists depends on conditions and events that could have been different.

Lineage

a relation of influence, inheritance, or recurring concern across systems, without assuming a simple linear path of progress.

Alternative architecture

a different arrangement of components, relations, pathways, constraints, and possibilities for action.

Technological inevitability

the mistaken assumption that current systems had to develop in the way they did.

System

an organized set of components and relations that work together for some purpose.

Prototype

an experimental or partial implementation that demonstrates a possible system, even if it is not widely adopted.

Infrastructure

underlying technical, organizational, material, or institutional support that enables activity.

Knowledge organization

methods for arranging, classifying, linking, retrieving, or navigating information

Retrieval

finding and accessing stored information or media.

Authorship

the production, organization, linking, annotation, or modification of media material

Institutional context

the organizations, funding structures, political circumstances, and social conditions that shape whether a system can be developed, maintained, or adopted.

Transclusion

The ability to include parts of documents within other documents without copying, maintaining a link to the original source.

Bi-directional links

Links whose relationships could be known and traversed from both endpoints, rather than existing only as a pointer from a source document to a destination (e.g., a link that can be followed from both endpoints).

Universal addressing

A system where every byte in every document has a unique, permanent address, allowing them to remain identifiable across documents and versions.

Fat links

also known as "one-to-many" links, extended links, or multi-tailed links, allow a single hyperlink to lead to multiple endpoints rather than to a single destination. The idea of fat links predates the World Wide Web; in modern browsers, if this were to exist, this could be implemented as a single link opening multiple tabs.

Possibility

something a system makes available, imaginable, or actionable.

Constraint

a limit or condition that shapes what can be done.

Design decision

a choice about how a system is arranged, including what it supports, excludes, foregrounds, or makes difficult

Dominant arrangement

a system form or practice that becomes normalized, widely adopted, or infrastructural.

Alternative path

a different possible development that was tried, imagined, abandoned, marginalized, or never fully realized.

Adoption / disappearance

whether and how a system becomes used, maintained, institutionalized, forgotten, or replaced.

Historical evidence

material that can support claims about the past, such as documents, demonstrations, screenshots, manuals, software, records, or accounts

Trace

a surviving mark or record of a past system, practice, event, or idea.

Source

a document, artefact, account, dataset, or other item used as evidence.

Reconstruction

an interpretation that pieces together what a historical system was, how it worked, or why it mattered

Interpretation

the process of giving meaning to evidence and connecting it to a claim

Preservation / loss

the fact that some evidence survives while other evidence disappears, shaping what can be known.

Claim

a statement about what happened, what a system did, why it mattered, or how it relates to later systems.

point of comparison

the particular issue, function, practice, feature, or relation being followed across systems.

A useful point of comparison identifies

Something produced, organized, maintained, constrained, or made possible by those arrangements.

Case

a system or arrangement selected for analysis

Actor

a person, group, organization, or technical system involved in the relevant activity or relationship.

Tracing

The analytic process of following that point of comparison from an earlier arrangement to a later one.

Trajectory

The pattern of continuity or change identified through that comparison.

Trajectory classification

a conclusion that the point of comparison was inherited, transformed, obviated, or displaced.

Historical trace

a surviving document, artefact, record, demonstration, or account used as evidence. A historical trace is evidence for the analysis; it is not the trajectory itself

Evidence

observations, documents, artefacts, records, or accounts used to describe the point of comparison in each case

Continuity

Means we can identify the same underlying issue, function, practice, or concern in both a historical system and a contemporary

four dimensions of platformed media activity

Participation: Who can create media on this platform? Who can comment, respond, or otherwise interact with it? What rules govern these activities, and who can enforce them or resolve conflicts?

Visibility: What media can people encounter, and what remains hidden or difficult to find? How do search, ranking, recommendation, and moderation shape what gets attention? How does categorizing users influence what they are shown?

Circulation: Who (or what, in the case of algorithms) can distribute or share media, through which channels, and to which audiences? How does the platform amplify, restrict, or redirect its movement?

Value: Who can earn money or gain other benefits from media activity? How are content, attention, and user data used to produce value, and how is that value distributed among creators, the platform, and other actors?

To describe a platformed media system, identify:

What is organized: participation, visibility, circulation, and value.

Who or what is involved: participants, institutional actors, and technical systems.

Through what arrangements: infrastructures, interfaces, rules, and mechanisms.

Under whose authority: the actors that establish objectives, allocate resources, make rules, enforce decisions, or provide avenues for contesting them.

Platforming

The process through which media activity becomes organized through computational platforms whose infrastructures, interfaces, rules, data practices, and mechanisms are provided and governed by one or more organizations

Governance

the ways in which actors establish and enforce the rules, permissions, constraints, and procedures through which a system and its participants operate.

Mechanism

a process or arrangement through which a platform produces particular effects, such as ranking content, recommending videos, moderating comments, or matching advertisers with audiences.

Interaction

the ways users act within or on a system and the ways the system responds or structures possible action.

Link

a relation connecting one media unit to another.

Path

a route through media material.

Trail

a path that may be created, followed, saved, reconstructed, or shared.

Traversal

Movement through an information or media structure

Media organization

The arrangement of media units, relations, categories, interfaces, and access mechanisms.