New media theory

idealism

view of the internet as a revolutionary tool, representing it as a new world, the internet is detached from matter, space, physics

immateriality

there is no matter on the internet, material privilege doesn’t exist

material reality

the internet has matter: physical cables, human workers, moderators, its not seemless

technological determinism

human society and culture is shaped by technology, media shapes us

Social constructivism

people are not passive recipients of media, people have agency and existing values that shape the way we consume/understand media

User turn

from focusing on media effects such as broadcasting brainwashing citizens, to focusing on humans agency such as fan studies

Medium theory

McLuhan: medium is the message, look at the technology itself rather than the content

• technological determinist

Science and Technology Studies

emphasizes mutual shaping of social and technological

autonomous technology

technology has power and control over politics

• example Langdon Winner’s study on how low bridge clearings segregated poor people from manhattan because busses and public transport could not pass through

technological momentum

technological decisions have momentum and power to change society

• instead a cycle of mutual shaping were these factors have networked relationships

• Cultures of tech grow around tech systems and create momentum 

• Once they gain momentum they can also gain influence 

• one established company continues dominance

• when one system is widely adopted its challenging for people to accept a new one

Actor network theory

materialist understanding that in adopting technology there is no seperation between humans and machines

• networks are formed between human and non human such as google search engines (bruno latour)

Co production

understanding interplay between social and technical, human values and usage map out how technology is created and used

Mediation

(Lievrows theory) mediation can be understood as an ongoing, articulated, and mutually determining relationship among three components and three corresponding processes

Artifacts

objects that can be reconfigured through human use, used in a different way than intended

• technological determinism

• algorithms, affordances, interface

Arrangements

institutions and social networks that can be reformed such as apple or government institutions, always room for pushback

• social constructivism

• youtube premium, advertisements, legal content restrictions, laws, business models  

Practices

communicative actions that can be remediated

• instrumentalism

•  what people do: likes, comments, creating content, subscribe, demonetization, protests, collective action: practices can also be things that were not intended by the platform 

instrumentalism

individuals, people who are strong willed and get what they want

Affordances

• are the range of functions and constraints that an object provides for, and places upon structurally situated objects  

• stairs afford climbing but the height and angle determines speed

• the variable process that mediates between properties of an artifact (features) and what subjects do with an artifact (outcomes).

• Affordance must be a variable, not be a feature, and not an outcome

Productive power

• power is not prohibitive but productive. Not only saying no to something but also allowing or saying yes 

• Actions upon actions: incite, induce, make easy or difficult, to make more or less probable and so on.

• With foucault: we can ask how media and technical products govern (conducting conduct)

Affordances as productive power

•  feature of an artifact that either affords a certain action of the user, or it doesn't. (Stanfil)

• Productive power framework operates that making something common sense is a form of constraint encouraging that outcome 

• Examples: speed bumps, spikes on window sills, hostile design

Theorizing affordances (Davis and Chounard)

• Artifacts afford by requesting, demanding, , encourage discourage how the artifact responds to a subject's desired actions. Refusing is how the artifact responds to a subjects desired actions

• Evaluating an artifact's affordance entails discerning if a subject perceives the function, does that subject have the physical and cognitive dexterity to use it, and is the subject's use of it culturally valid and institutionally supported.

real affordances

the functions attached to a given object 

perceived affordances

Features that are clear to the user 

Social affordances

the way networks of relations enable and constrain technological capacities

imagined affordances

webs of relations among user perceptions, attitudes, and expectations: the materiality of the artifacts as well as the intention of the makers

Mechanisms of affordances

Request: Commands one line of action but workarounds are possible, Invites subjects to engage in a particular way, evoking particular outcomes over another 

Demand: An artifact demands when it used it conditioned on circumstances. Facebook demands you select a gender, you may not proceed with out this. Subjects may rebuff these demands by changing their gender on the profile constantly 

Encourage: Encourage is when artifacts foster a line of action while dissuading others. Social engagement is encouraged on social media platforms 

Discourage: Artifacts discourage when one line of action is only accessible through great effort, Tinder profiles can only have 500 words and a ton of seamless matches, therefore it discourages labored consideration 

Refuse: when certain things are completely unavailable to users 

Allow: Allow is when artifacts remain indifferent to how a feature is used and what the outcome is, No push or pull 

Three conditions of affordances

Perception: An artifacts functions are only accessible to a subject if said subject knows it is available, A phone camera will only produce a video if the person is aware of the phones presence

Dexterity: Subjects must not only know a feature is there but also be capable of using it

Cultural and institutional legitamacy: The push and pull of an artifact relies heavily on the position of the subject. Facebooks age policy requires you to be 13+, certain platforms seek certain audiences therefore history, biography, and culture interplay with the artifacts to shape how they afford 

Functional affordance

what a site can do, technology doesn't always determine use however the affordances produce norms by allowing certain things. 

Cognitive affordance

how users know what a site can do, facilitates processing information which closely ties to the social act of meaning making.

• lets users choose actions: ​​These features define what a user does by selecting that option. 

• They address a certain type of person: when filling out a form there might be only 2 gender options which cognitively reinforces what genders belong 

Sensory affordance

• enables the user in sensing something (seeing, hearing, feeling). The aesthetic choices can give someone assumptions about a site.

• such as a nice looking ad looks professional whereas a colorful flashing banner is annoying/tacky. Some ads are for specific genders, classes, etc which targets the people the site is made for. This reinforces the companies beliefs and what users should care about

• Page design also is a sensory afforadance: espn puts the latest sporting events at the top, assuming and reinforcing their importance 

infrastructural turn in media studies

paying attention to the material and technical aspects of media

• Shifting away focus from the end user and moving towards the conditions and material aspects of media 

Historical materialism (Carl Marx)

Society is a building with two floors: low floor infrastructure and high floor superstructure 

superstructure

all things society views as important: family, art, politics, culture, etc.

infrastructure (Marx)

means of production and relations of production 

• Means of production: artifacts, the tools and machines and technical means we have to create infrastructure 

• Relations of production: arrangements, institutions and organizations who own the means of production. This shapes the artifact and practices 

Media infrastructures

Situated sociotechnical systems that are designed and configured to support the distribution of audiovisual signal traffic. 

• Concentrated in particular locations and spread across vast distances.

• They are highly automated, relying on sensors, remote controls, and human labor for their design, installation, maintenance, and operation.

• Technical infrastructure, environmental, economic, and institutional

invisibility of infrastructures

if technology works seamlessly we don't really notice the systems, only when it fails we do 

• Technological systems such as railroads, cars, electricity etc become so natural to us like trees and nature. We depend on them but notice only when they fail, which they rarely do. 

broken world thinking

to analyze infrastructure you should imagine what happens when it breaks down, then you can understand the scale of it

importance of media infrastructure

seeing the materiality behind the immaterial (physical components like an amazon store in person), The channels of distribution (internet cables),The environmental cost of digital technologies (wasting natural resources, disposing toxic parts)  

• The more these systems grow its harder to separate nature from infrastructure

• The labor required for digital technologies

• The technology doesnt work by itself, there is a lot of labor going into it

Scale in infrastructure

 microlevel: individual technology, individual users 

meso level: the mediators between individuals and large infrastructures such as cell towers 

macro level: huge systems: whole economy large group

relationally in infrastructure

relationship between technical bases and social arrangements

Asymmetry in infrastructure

Infrastructure emerge unevenly. They exist in conditions of difference and uneveness. They are relationships of power 

• They can reinforce or reverse social injustice

Platforms as infrastructure

platforms have become dominant infrastructures regulating social and economic life 

• Platform studies: infrastructure is complemented by a focus on users agency as expressed in the economic and legal characteristics of platforms  

• Platforms are increasingly central to public and private life in journalism, transportation, education, etc 

Platforms

Platforms are corporations with agendas not a neutral thing

• Re programmable digital infrastructures that facilitate and shape personalized interactions among end users and complementors, organized through the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, monetization, and circulation of data 

• They are multi sided markets: it's not just between end users but also advertisers  

• Key component behind a platform is data 

Data

• Data is the new oil: making it seem as if  its a natural resource, problematic view point     

• We should think of data as a process not a thing

Datafication

To datafy a phenomenon is to put it in quantified form so that it can be tabulated and analyzed.

• Data is produced by abstracting the world into categories, measures, and other representational form

elements of datafication

Technical infrastructure: (means of production) (artifacts) tools and machines such as tracking devices, storage and transmission, and algorithms 

Sources of data: (practices) user activities such as likes, posts. Also forms of resistance such as not having social media or using ad blockers

Processes of valorisation: (relations of production) (arrangements) capitalism because data is collected in order to sell products, state power legal regulations about data collection, colonialism 

Decolonial Theory

Datafication is a colonial process that appropirates human life so data can be continuously extracted for particular interests 

• Instead of territories, natural resources, and slave labor, it appropriates social resoruces. 

• It has the same effect as historical colonialism 

Political economy

branch of social science that studies the relationship between individuals and society and between markets and the state.

• It's the study of how a country is managed or governed taking into account both political and economic factors.

• The market is an “invisible hand” that regulates the (fair) distribution of scarce commodities 

Critique of political economy (Marx)

Economic laws are not universal they are specific to each mode of production 

• To understand the economy, we should not focus on the market (consumption) but on the sphere of the production (consumption does not regulate)

• The only truly scarce thing that which determines the value of every commodity is human time (labor) 

the valorization of money

formula for capitalist society  M –> C –> M (money + commodity + valorised money) 

• Money is used to produce more money through production 

• commodity = human labor and means of labor (raw materials and tools and human labor) 

• Infrastructure becomes invisible and this applies to social relations that shape them 

• Amazon echo is a map of human labor, data, and planetary resources

platform capitalism

a form of capitalism in which the platform emerges as the dominant business model. Platforms extract and control significant amounts of data

• Creates monopolistic firms 

Network effects

the more users that use a platform, makes it more valuable to everyone else 

• This creates a cycle of one platform being too powerful and monopolizing 

• Because of network effects, platforms must use a range of tactics to ensure more and more people use it 

Advertising platforms

google, facebook, youtube

process of valorization: Product of highly personalized audiences that are then sold to advertisers

Cloud platforms

amazon web services, microsoft office

process of valorization: renting of digital services (hardware, software)

industrial platforms

GE, siemens

process of valorization: Design and production of highly automated industrial processes

product platforms

spotify

process of valorization: Production of commodities that are then rented to user

lean platforms

uber, airbnb

process of valorization: Reduction of the fixed costs behind commodity production

• operate through a hyper-outsourced model whereby workers are outsourced, fixed capital is outsourced, maintenance costs are outsourced, and training is outsourced. 

• All that remains is a care extractive minimum: control over the platform that enables a monopoly 

• does not exploit users for free labor but it imposes a capital labor relationship upon users facilitating and regulating the direct exchange of labor as a commodity 

• They remediate and datafy the meeting of supply and demand of work to the ultimate aim of subjecting the social relations of production to forms of algorithmic driven organization, control, and surveillance 

digital labor: platforms

users produce the content used to capture the attention of others, the data used to produce personalized profiles, and the attentional labor that producers the main commodity sold by advertising platforms

• the commodity is the attention of users to be sold 

• Argument 2: The commodity is not attention but the promise of matching between a given ad and a given user 

• rather than exploiting free labor, advertising platforms appropriate data as a raw material. 

• exploited workers: users leisure is profited off of by extracting data

Digital economy

refers to business’s that rely on information technology, data, and internet 

• This is present in transportation, manufacturing, services, transportation, mining, and telecommunications: all of which are essential to the economy 

• It seems to be a dynamic sector full of innovation that guides economic growth further 

• It reflects capitalism: as a hegemonic model (cities to become smart, workers must be flexible, and government must be intelligent)

cross subsidization

one part of the firm reduces a price of a service or good and another part raises prices to make up for loss 

• Part of their business is fine tuning the balance between what is paid, not paid, subsided and not subsided which is a far cry from a lean model 

Digital labor: Lean platforms

The subjects are not viewers or users whose leisure activity is exploited. Its actual workers who subject themselves to the activity commissioned by a customer through a platform who is the mediator 

• The laboring activity does not consist of leisure driven consumption of a medium or the unpaid production of content to be shared. But in a clearly agreed upon task “the gig”

Culture

how social life is constructed through ideas that people have about it, and practices that flow from those ideas 

• constructed its nurture not nature 

• It's not so much a set of things, it's a process, a set of practices, concerned with the production and exchange of meanings between members of society or a group.

subculture

• through dress, activities, leisure pursuits and lifestyle, they may project a different cultural response or solution to the problems posed for them by their material and social class position and experience (punk culture etc) 

relations of production (cultures)

• Relations of production is the class structure 

• “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” 

• Class structure implies conflict 

Race in materiality

capitalism‘s class structure is racialized 

• Rather than view cultural categories (such as race) emerging from stable physical/biological essences, we view them as reproduced historically through practices that take place on a conflictual social field

Race online

• in early days of the internet people thought it was a world without privilege or race or matter, meaning its an immaterial space with no prejudice 

• The internet as uneven/unequal: because the internet requires resources, skill sets, as well as devices, marginalized groups are less present (the digital divide) 

• . The internet as oppression (amplifying existing racism, sexism etc): platforms are extensions of their makers and majority of them are white men 

• 4.The internet as a site for (conflictual) cultural practices: the internet develops with our culture and can become a space of awareness and resistance movements which contributes to how we as a society understand them 

black twitter

• Mediation of black cultural identity, expressed through digital practices and informed by cultural discourses about black everyday life (Brock) 

• For twitter the format and device (and other things) frame the ways that twitter users converse but do not wholly determine them. 

• Black twitter makes black discourse and culture more visible to the masses 

• Libidinal relating to impulses toward embodied pleasure: black twitter is centered around leisure and pleasure 

• Vernacular: the language of popular culture and everyday life, in the case of studying black twitter synifyin’

Libidinal

things done for pleasure or leisure

vernacular

the langauge of popular culture and everyday life

Signifyin’

An african american linguistic practice involving the indirect expression of ideas especially through playful gibes and clever put downs. 

• A performance that is meant to rely on style, humor, interpretation, cultural ties, and timing (if your not quick enough it won't land)

• A form of criticism and critique that can travel under the radar of mainstream culture and racist structures 

Fandoms as culture

Fandoms are participatory cultures that display practices independent from source texts and which sometimes spill over into oppositional politics 

• yaoi expresses a type of feminist politics 

• In the context of chinese digital feminism 

• Heavy presence of state censorship and repression, prevailing norms of gender and family in china (confucianist heteropatriarchy)

• Feminism in china differs from western feminism

Yaoi as a subculture

• In an extreme way chinese yaoi fans consciously critique and perform resistance against gender norms and equality in a more discreet way than western feminism due to chinese policies 

• Yaoi functionalists establish a more democratic pattern of romantic sexual relationships and the homosexual scenes indicate a somehow confrontational stance 

• Its libidinal: for pleasure 

materialist view of identity

• practices determine identity 

• practices/Agency: you have to express a certain way, be taught to speak a specific way etc

mediated identites

are shaped with in the realm of the three determining factors (practices, artifacts, arrangements)

• identity is not something inborn, but is something that is performed through practices that are libidinal, vernacular, resistant 

liberal view of the self

• Understands human beings as separated form the rest of existence 

• Humans are an exception, we control nature, we have free will 

Michel Focault (identity)

iindividualism is not something natural, its produced by institutions 

• Practices of the self can be used to cultivate yourself and can be coopted by institutions 

sovereign societies

Pre modern societies: individuality does not exist in the way we know it today

• The only person afforded individuality is the king (all power to him) the rest is autonomous masses 

disciplinary societies

Enlightenment period: rise of certain ideas, progress, democracy, individualism, Start of a more humane society 

• Focualt argues that society did not become more humane, power gets dispersed into different institutions like prisons, factories, hospitals 

disciplinary power

panopticon, a central observer that is always watching and everyone is visible, so they know they are being watched and act better, even if the central room is empty: They start to internalize the norm of good behavior 

• Disciplinary power replaces the anonymous mass with an atomized individual 

• Functions by making each individual permanently visible observable and knowable 

• Uses surveillance and examination to constantly measure each individual against the prescribed norm

• Every institution functions like a prison - Foucault such as schools, and family shape ways you act  

• From the idea the self is not given to us, i think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art 

The care of the self

Work of self disciplining to shape oneself differently and in an empowering way

• Ethical practices that assist their users in developing a critical attitude towards current forms of subjectivity and experimenting with new ways of existence 

technologies of the self

Used by individuals to work on a particular aspect of their self (ethical substance) 

• With a view to give this aspect ultimate form

• Within the framework of denoting which practices are carried out to conform to existing norms or to forge a “new aesthetic of existence”

control society (deleuze)

Free floating control, open spaces, continuous monitoring, and modulating rules

Encouragement of movement and communication

punishment from a distance

ex. airport security facial recognition, datafication classifying our identity

A new algorithmic identity

• By using smart technologies that systems classify us in different groups which becomes our new algorithmic identity 

• Infers categories of identity on otherwise anonymous beings 

• Used to recommend search results, music videos, ads, social media content, social connections 

• Algorithmic operations work to determine the new conditions of possibilities of users lives 

cybernetic notion of identity

• User does something online -> data is collected -> algorithmic identity categories ->  suggestions, search results, ads, etc. 

• Each disciplinary institution wants to shape you a certain way 

• control/modulation: algorithmic operations that influence the user through constant feedback loops

algorithmic technologies of the self

fit bit, sleep app, calm app

recommendation systems as technologies of the self

They prompt you to better yourself in some way such as music taste

dividuals

data that is used to create unified subjects 

• As new data gets created about an individual through tracking of web presence, a users identity becomes more defined with the system in accord with the logic of algorithms 

• This system does not approach identity from a essentialist viewpoint rather algorithms shift to a more flexible definition of the category that de essentializes from society's point of gender and then re essentializes it as a statistically related market research driven category 

soft bio power

comes from biopower which works in the construction of identity through the management of subjects at the level of population 

• Unlike hard biopower which regulates life through the use of categorization, soft biopower regulates how those categories themselves are determined to define life 

soft biopolitics

how biopolitical processes give meaning to the categories that make up populations 

• Example: if you are categorized as a male online you could get medical information catering to men and if some men were not included in those categories they lack the opportunities. Enacting the consequence of software sorting 

technologies of control

algorithms: shaping information flow between users and their environment and guiding the activities and preferences of users

ethical substance

ethical substance something that people care about and need to work on