Digital Media Exam #3

digital citizenship

• refers to the opportunities and resources that a person has to participate online in society and politics

• turning to an increasingly large part of political citizenship altogether

digital divide

• the division between those who have access to the internet and those who don’t, and between those who actually use it and those who don’t.

What are the five dimensions of the digital divide?

• technical means

• autonomy of use

• skill (internet competence)

• social support

• different uses

technical means

• the quality and adequacy of hardware, software, and connections can limit the ways in which people put the internet to use.

  • Users with slow connections and old devices will simply be unable to access certain information and spaces.

autonomy of use

• different people will have different degrees of control over their use of digital social tools and platforms.

  • Whether one accesses the internet at home, at work, in public places, and so on, will affect how autonomous and free the user is to do various things.

social support

• This is related to the degree to which users are able to draw on social support from more experienced users when they have reached the limits of their own skills.

  • whether a user is embedded in a community or network where peers can provide guidance and reinforcement will affect the extent to which they develop their own internet competence.

power law

• a continuously decreasing curve, implying that many small events coexist with a few large events.

  • ex: some sites having extremely low link clicks and others having extremely high

  • overall: people’s linking and clicking on the internet has a tendency towards the most popular things.

preferential attachment

• This means that nodes with more connections have a higher chance of acquiring new connections.

  • ex: a YouTube video with many views is more likely to get even more views

scale-free networks

• demonstrated that many networks may in fact have a set of large hubs that will be crucial to defining the topology of the network

• those who have a large network will have more impact

  • ex: airline hubs

Political economy

• means focusing on how relations of power, grounded in how production and consumption are organised, shape all of its processes and outcomes.

• There is a complex set of power relations between mass media, digital/social media, and – importantly – the broader social, political, and economic structure in which they operate.

Charismatic authority

• a very powerful, yet temporary and unstable, form of authority, which will inevitably become ‘routinised’ and lose its attraction

  • ex: an influencer or celeb

  • vs trad authority: king, legal: president

Digital labour

• labour carried out by all users of the internet and social media.

• everyone who generates clicks and ‘produces’ things such as status updates, blog posts, tweets, Wikipedia entries, and YouTube videos can also be seen as part of an exploited workforce.

Playbour

• users often do these things because they want to, because it is rewarding for them in one way or another, or simply because it’s fun, it can still be seen as work.

• It is fun and work at the same time – a form of play labour

  • People may in fact be happy to freely create and share things, and few would probably see what they do on social media as ‘work’ for which they would expect to be paid.

Gig economy

• the global economy depends on informal, bonded, [and] slave labour, and other forms of shadow work, many of which, we would add, do not occur on digital networks

cybertypes

• cultural stereotypes from pre-digital society, which have been translated into new media.

• they are the result of internet-specific processes but they are no less the product of hegemonic and regulating cultural norms.

  • ex: people still make these that fit into their norms (?)

Public sphere

• a social realm that channels civil society.

• It is an arena for conversations, exchange, and the formation of ideas and views.

Disruptive spaces

• Are emergent online spaces that embody more or less conscious attempts at obstructing or providing an alternative to prevailing power structures.

• building blocks of an alternative public sphere.

• At worst, they are idealised technodeterministic fantasies.

private sphere

• is opening up as an arena for people to express entirely new forms of participation and citizenship.

• more democratic than the public sphere

Cybersalons

• communication happens among people who are linked by their ability to use networked interaction, rather than by proximity or tradition

• features: returned & shared interests, digital tools, more exclusive access to people

  • ex: text groupchat

Citizen Journalism

• about the capacity, largely afforded by digital technology, of ordinary people to bear witness to and comment on things that happen in the world, big or small.

  • It has developed from those occasions when ‘ordinary people’ find themselves in situations that urge them to temporarily enter the role of a journalist, communicating what goes on around them.

• goes back to the online posting of information in relation to the Clinton–Lewinsky sex scandal in 1998, to the breakthrough of web-based journalism during the war in Kosovo in 1999, and to people’s sharing of eyewitness accounts, photographs, and video footage on 9/11 in 2001

Monitorial citizens

• scan (rather than read) the informational environment in a way so that they may be alerted on a very wide variety of issues for a very wide variety of ends and may be mobilized around those issues in a large variety of ways

  • ex: Picture parents watching small children at the community pool.

  • people in digital society can be described as this

networked social movements

• largely ignore political parties, circumvent the mainstream (news) media, do not recognise any traditional forms of leadership, and largely reject formal organisation.

• many of htem started in social networks on the internet

  • ex: Occupy protests against social and economic inequality

personal action frames

• movements are unified by the fact that they use digital media in ways that go far beyond the mere sending and receiving of messages.

• they relied on digital peer-to-peer communication in densely layered networks.

• organised in highly informal ways, they were able to sustain themselves, even gaining some extra strength as time went on

connective action

• an increasingly common form of political engagement in digital society, where many formal organisations are losing their influence over individuals, and where conventional group ties are replaced by networked individualism.

• happens when communication becomes a dominant part of the organisational structure.

• based on people’s personalised sharing of content across media networks.

repertoires of contention

• means that social movements have different sets of tools and methods that are available to them, and through which they can create their actions

• enables movements to be more enduring – lasting longer across space and time – for example, like the green movement, or the women’s movement.

• assumes that movements were politically oriented and focused on what could be seen as ‘important’ issues in society.

datafication

• refers to the fact that different forms of data play an increasingly crucial role in society and culture, and that ever more aspects of the world – including those that were not previously quantified – are rendered into data

  • This includes the increased collection, by companies and governments, of demographic and profiling data, but also social media data drawing on what people do online, and behavioural data based on automatically registered timestamps and GPS-locations of, for example, smartphones

surveillance capitalism

• where data on the lives of humans is increasingly used as free-for-all raw materials to be translated into actionable behavioural data.

  • surveillance assets: actual user data

  • surveillance capital: investments attracted by data

Big data

• refer to the handling and analysis of massively large datasets.

• three Vs: it has volume (enormous quantities of data), velocity (is generated in real-time), and variety (can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured).

• two most important characteristics of big data are velocity and exhaustivity. This means that big data captures entire systems rather than samples (exhaustivity) and that it does so in real-time (velocity).

algorithms

• mathematical procedures that are performed in a controlled fashion on data in order to be able to present an output in the shape of other forms of data.

• used to follow people around online, to manage political campaigns, to monitor health data, to suggest whom we should date, or to target us with advertising are often approached as a form of ‘higher authority’

algorithmic literacy

• means to strengthen people’s involvement in various efforts and initiatives that can lead to algorithms being governed in more democratic ways, that promote the public interest rather than capitalist interests.

• understanding what algorithms do, and why they to it, but importantly also to understand what the consequences mean for society

  • It is about resisting the social power of algorithms

algorithmic power

• derives from the fact that algorithms are active in monitoring us as citizens and because algorithms have become unquestionable while we know nothing or too little about their inner workings.

• There is a need to raise awareness about these issues, and to adopt a more critical approach so that people can develop and employ their critical skills more effectively when interacting with algorithms and their hidden logics.

Calculated publics

• there is a friction in digital society between the – networked – publics that are forged by users through their social interaction with each other and the calculated, somewhat artificial, publics that are generated through algorithms.

Automation

• affects society and democracy in more direct ways, such as through the increasing algorithmic governance of citizens

  • ex: through systems for automated decision-making which are implemented in welfare administration and provision, and in police work through so-called predictive policing

Data Justice

• not only about people being fooled or nudged by algorithms, but about a potential reshaping of social relations that follows from the fact that new things become possible to know, which in turn enables new kinds of social actions.

  • as we become datafied, how do we experience the social and political reasons and consequences of the transformation?

Digital Devices

Hyperconnectivity

Software Studies

• software is becoming a force that structures and enables much of our contemporary world.

• an important task of this is to show that software is a vital object of study, as well as an area of practice, for researchers and thinkers in fields that one would not conventionally associate with ‘software’, in the narrow sense.

like economy

• facilitates a more social web experience, where being liked and seeing what others like enables new forms of engagement.

• means a recentralisation

• an example of a ‘tracking device’, which establishes new markers of relationships online that go beyond the conventional hyperlink between websites.

internet of things

• refers to new applications of the internet where different identification and tracking technologies are used for self-tracking (exercise wristbands, smart watches, etc.), to provide better services (smart refrigerators, weather sensors, etc.), or for automated crowdsourcing (monitoring traffic, sensoring people’s movements in urban space, and so on).

• vision is about the integration of a wide range of technologies and platforms through the internet via largely wireless connections.

approximeetings

• This is a name for the gradually fixed agreements that we make when deciding upon when and where to meet someone.

  • ex: meeting someone for lunch, we no longer have to rely on pre-made arrangements made face-to-face, in writing, or over landline telephones, as mobile telephones make it possible to first decide something roughly, and to decide more details through calling or texting as the event draws closer.

• can also engender a new sense of insecurity. Everything is virtual until the parties, the places and the moments come together to make it real.

  • In this context the person without a phone becomes something of a liability.

A _______ is where communication happens among people who are linked by their ability to use networked interaction, rather than by proximity or tradition.

• email

• cybersalons

• public sphere

• message board

cybersalons

Movements rely on these different sets of tools and methods that are available to them, and through which they can create their actions.

• implantables

• big data

• repertoires of contention

• anonymity

repertoires of contention

A network organized around a number of influential hubs.

• data justice

• scale-free network

• hyperconnectivity

• power law

scale-free network

_____ is the emergence of an alternative to the model of _____. A mode for activism and contention, drawing on people’s co production and co-distribution of ideas.

networked public sphere??? mass communication???

Internet-first thinking that changes in how individuals and groups in society relate to each other and to the world around them. Time and place, as well as the sense of being socially connected and present, assume new forms and meanings in digital society.

• hyperconnectivity

• digital citizenship

• digital divide

• algorithmic literacy

hyperconnectivity

WOTF examples best illustrates the societal impact of digital visibility?

• the replacement of newspapers by digital books

• a company using virtual reality to train employees

• an individual’s online reputation influencing job opportunities

• the adoption of new forms of cloud storage

an individual’s online reputation influencing job opportunities

This is the process when someone online temporarily appropriates identities and experiences different from their own.

• charismatic authority

• hyperconnectivity

• identity tourism

• camp flog gnaw

identity tourism

Which networked social movements emerged around 2010 to protest social and economic equality? (select all that apply)

• March on washington for jobs and freedom

• occupy protests

• #metoo

• indignados

• arab spring

occupy protests, indignados, arab spring