Digital Media Culture Blog

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The Aestethics and Politics of Viral Videos

What makes a video viral? We can find our answers discussing the works of Jean Burgess in Video Vortex Reader, and Christian Fuchs in Social Media: a Critical Introduction.

The video above is the type of videos that make fun of songs using animals’ noises. This video in particular is a remix of Taylor Swift’s “Trouble” with a goat. The video counts 4,8 million of views, and its “virality” relies on the fact that the song is a recognizable text, but with a totally different humorous tone. 

The rise of viral videos is associated with grassroots dynamics peculiar of participatory culture, in which people have the power, and Web 2.0. Henry Jenkins argues that consumers play an important role in spreading content, and that spreadability is the engine on which social media are based – which Jenkins defines as spreadable media. Moreover, Jenkins argues that YouTube is “a site for the production and distribution of grassroots media, on which participation occurs at 3 levels: production, selection, and distribution”

Fuchs, however, problematizes the grassroots and spontaneity narrative arguing that we need to take into account YouTube’s political economy. Internet culture cannot be separated from its political economy, which is organized, controlled, and owned by companies. Social media culture, in this sense, is a culture industry.

Burgess considers YouTube not simply a broadcasting yourself platform, but a conversational social platform. YouTube engages people in cultural conversations in which videos are the primary medium of social connection between participants. She identifies the most spreadable videos as performance-based and music related ones. The domestic setting enhances spreadability – flawed texts make viral videos. She analyzes Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” as an example of virality.

Burgess suggests several reasons on why the video became extremely viral:

it has an extremely simple and repetitive melody that gets stuck in people’s heads

the low pitch of his voice, often compared with Barry White, which is at odds with his boyish look

the repetitive lyrics, if analyzed, deal with themes of racial prejudices, injustices, and discrimination against black people.

being part of 4chan.org, a very popular image board and source of Internet memes.

funny elements of the video such as Zonday moving strangely: “I move away from the mic to breath in” appears as a text during the song.

Burgess concludes by saying that the dynamics of a viral video can be understood as involving the spread of replicable ideas expressed in performances and practices.

The goat remix of Taylor Swift’s song has been replicated several times with other songs. Here is a goat remix playlist: 

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Cultural (Re)production: Memes in Digital Culture

via Reddit 

Memes are an integral part of the Internet culture and Limor Shifman, in various chapters of Memes in Digital Cultures, explores the various characteristics of memes.

What is a meme? Shifman starts the second chapter of the book by saying that the term “meme” was introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, in which he applies evolutionary theory to cultural change. Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission that spread from person to person by copying or imitation and, like genes, they undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention since this cultural (re)production favors the strongest. Only the strongest ideas survive. Memes can be compared also to viruses since they quickly spread by a viral automatic contagion.

Internet memes can be treated as (post)modern folklore, in which shared norms and values are constructed through cultural artifacts such as Photoshopped images or urban legends (15). Shifman defines memes as a group of digital items sharing common characteristics:

 Content – the ideas that are conveyed

 Form – the way in which the ideas are conveyed

 Stance – the attitude. Tone and style of communication

 Created with awareness

 Circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via Internet by many users

An important controversy and debate in scholarship is “who’s the boss” that is the question of agency in the process of meme diffusion. Shifman contends that the undermining of human agency is inherent not to the meme concept itself, but only to one strain of its interpretation.

How memes spread? According to Dawkins, memes that spread successfully incorporate three characteristics: longevity (storage), fecundity (the number of copies made in a time unit) and copy fidelity (accuracy) which are all enhanced by the Internet.  

Shifman, instead, conceives spreadability with three main attributes:

Gradual propagation from individual to society. It starts from a “micro” domain (a person) and propagate to a “macro” domain (society).

 Reproduction via copying and imitation – digital repackaging of material

Diffusion through competition and selection – the meme’s degree of adaptability to the sociocultural environment in which it propagates.

Why so many people are driven to make memes? The answer can be found in:

 The economy-driven logic relates to the notion that contemporary society is based on attention economy. The most valuable resource in the information era is the attention people pay.

 The social logic of participation “networked individualism” – individuality and affiliation. The meme responds to the, especially Western, need to feel unique but also the need of being part of a community.

 The cultural and aesthetic logic of participation – the ways in which practices of re-creating images/videos blur the lines between private and public, professional and amateur, market and non-market driven activities.

It is important to note the difference between two different forms and levels of engagement: viral and mimetic. Viral refers to the singular cultural unit whereas mimetic refers to a collection of texts based on intertextuality.

“Stonks” is an intentional misspelling of the word “stocks” which is often associated with a surreal meme featuring the Meme Man standing in front of the picture representing the stock market. Initially, it has been used as a reaction image online in jokes about making poor financial decisions and, afterwards, re-composed with other elements to create new ideas.

via Know Your Meme

Last year, I created a meme during the first lockdown, based on the meme “Stocks”. Since the industrial revolution, the planet has faced centuries of pollution; however, due to the lockdown halt to spread the coronavirus, most of industries were closed, road traffic incredibly declined, and the result was the reduction, at least for that period, of air pollution. Therefore, during these difficult times the planet is metaphorically taking a breath, which can be considered a goal for the eco system.

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Platform Cooperativism

via Pinterest

Trebor Scholz in “Platform Cooperativism: Challenging Corporate Sharing Economy” explores the way in which it is possible to challenge the corporate sharing economy, which is not about sharing and was not supposed to be in this way. It is, instead, an on-demand service economy that continuously spreads market relations into our lives. Platform Cooperativism is a weapon to challenge this kind of economy since it is about changing patterns of ownership and governance. The extraction processes inserted in the social interactions are heavily pervasive, which  can create anti-social behaviors and sentiments of competition, anxiety and, also, mental health issues.

The digitalized work is an integral component of the corporate sharing economy, yet workers in digitalized work are losing rights in the process. Legal scholar Frank Pasquale compared traditional employment to marriage, with both parties committed to a long-term mutual project. With digitalized work, this project is reversed, and its workforce seeks a series of hookups. The digitalized work creates illusions of flexibility, autonomy, and choice. In reality, however, the worker does not have any type of security. Moreover, Scholtz argues that illegality is a method of the sharing economy. The “nullification of federal law” can be identified in firms that do not pay taxes in sharing economy, and the lack of dignity, rights, and democratic values for workers. Uber is an example of violation of laws since it pays drivers less that the minimum wage. Scholz advocates for a solidarity economy, and for the creation of a cooperative created by people voluntarily united with specific needs and who are willing to operate together and organize a company to fulfill social and cultural needs, rather than just economic interests.

Platform cooperativism is based on:

Copying the existing technology of platforms but adopting a different model of ownership.

Enhancing values and not only profits – solidarity

Reframing the concepts of innovation and efficiency in order to make everyone benefit from the system and not just a few.

The 10 principles of platform cooperativism are:

 Collective ownership

 Decent pay and income security for workers

 Transparency and data portability

 Appreciation and acknowledgement

 Co-programming

 Protective legal framework

 Portable workers protections and benefits

 Protection against arbitrary behavior

 Rejection of workplace surveillance

 The right to log-off

via Eva website

An example of an alternative to platforms of the corporate sharing economy is Eva, a cooperative alternative to Uber. Eva emerged in 2017 in Quebec which was involved in an intense debate on regulations for the ride-hailing sector. Eva’s appeal is attributed to the fact that income and taxes generated are circulated within the Quebec economy and, most importantly, to how it respects its drivers compared to other ride-hailing businesses.

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Platform Capitalism

via The Next Web

Nick Srnicek in the second chapter of Platform Capitalism explores the characteristics of the platforms of the digital world through the lens of capitalism and its economic dynamics. 

Capitalism, as an economic system, reinvents itself when a crisis hits. For example, at the end 1990s the end of the ban on commercial activities on the Internet was accompanied by a great enthusiasm. Everyone was investing in this market until it crashed because it was a giant market to sustain. Therefore, a few powerful players remained which adopted the data-centered business model like Google. The changes and technological development translate themselves in informational, or cognitive, or knowledge, or immaterial economy. The powerful players of the digital media world gain ownership over information rather than ownership over the means of production. Indeed, there is a shift toward a more immaterial production: cultural content, knowledge, and services. The richness of Internet-based companies relies on users’ data extraction. Data are the new oil; however, they are not completely immaterial. Data are stored into physical data centers and the global internet traffic requires an immense amount of energy to be sustained. Therefore, the product of work is immaterial, yet the infrastructure is material.

The business model for an effective data extraction revolves around the platform. But, what is a platform?

Srnicek explains that platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact. They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users (30). They provide the environment that enables the users to interact. Nevertheless, they do not constitute the environment solely since they are taking over the entirety of life becoming entities. Another characteristic of platforms is that they rely on the “network effect”: the more users are on the platform, the more the platform gains value. Platforms fight for attention economy and find ways to keep users on the platform as much time as possible.

Platforms are a new type of monopoly, employing cross-subsidisation for which one side of the platform reduces the cost of a service, while the other side raises the cost in order to make up for the losses. Platforms have control and governs all interactions possible in the game and they embody politics. The ownership of platforms is of both software and hardware, and who owns the entire unity holds code, data centers, and servers.

There are 5 types of platforms:

• Advertising Platform – the business model is based on extracting data from users, analyzing it, and transforming it in personalized data for targeted advertisements. Google and Facebook adopt this business model. For example, yesterday I searched on Google for the website of a shoes brand. Immediately after I closed the site, on my Facebook page (and on other social media), appeared several advertisements of shoes from that brand.

• Cloud Platform – the business model based on owning software and hardware and renting them out. Amazon is the largest cloud platform provided.

• Industrial Platform – it builds the hardware and software to transform traditional manufacturing into internet-connected processes and transforms goods into services.

• Product Platform – it transforms a traditional good into a service by collecting subscription fees. The example of this business model is Spotify for music industry.

• Lean Platform – it makes profit by cutting down the ownership of assets cost: it is based on outsourcing. For instance, Uber does not own a single car but it provides the taxi service and Airbnb, which is an accommodation provider, owns no property.

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Data Colonialism

via Dreamstime

Dan M. Kotliar in “Data Orientalism: on the algorithmic construction of the non-Western other”, explores the concept of data colonialism and the algorithmic gaze along with the ways in which algorithms are programmed to see, depict, and understand the Other.

Scholars Couldry and Mejas compare the appropriation of territory, resources, and people for profit that characterized historic colonialism to data relations and the exploitation of human beings through the extraction of their data that defines data colonialism. According to Couldry and Mejas, what makes the collection of data colonial is its tendency for expansion, both geographic and social. “Data colonialism simultaneously seeks new territories to set its algorithmic eyes on, as well as new aspects of sociality that have previously been missing from its purview” (4). Personal data, in this sense, represent the new oil and currency in the digital media world. Data are continuously extracted offering opportunities for behavioral influence on users. Historic colonialism and data colonialism are based on the same principle of “cheap nature”. Historic colonizers used this principle to justify their actions since, in the place they appropriated, there was an abundance of natural resources and raw materials, whose appropriation was considered unproblematic from the colonizers’ point of view. The same principle is applied to personal data, that are abundantly produced by users and can be used. Moreover, the concept of social rationality gives a justification to this process of data extraction treating the users labor, which makes the data collection possible, as “just sharing”.  

Kotliar emphasizes the idea that colonialism was not only about military force or processes of modernization, but it was also about knowledge creation - the way in which colonizers categorized indigenous into racial, ethnic, and cultural categories which sustained and justified colonial power. This cultural differentiation is what Edward Said described as Orientalism – the process about the creation and the distinction between Oriental and Westerns. “Said predominantly saw Orientalism as a discourse … that systematically devalues the Oriental Others, depicting them as backward, primitive, or weak” (6).

Kotliar bases his article on an empirical study on Extractive, an Israeli start-up company that provides user profiling algorithms to the East Asian market. It gains access to users’ Facebook account and makes the users transfer their credentials and their data into the companies’ hands. These profiles can be later used to create a market segmentation and approach costumers with personalized offers, contest, or services. Therefore, the Extractive algorithms transform anonymous users into accessible costumers. Moreover, Extractive works with Deep Pocket Inspection (DPI) which allows companies to gain access to users’ smartphones and their location, text messages, apps and many other features. Extractive argues that their work does not have cultural or linguistic barriers and have, thus, a universalizing perspective. Instead of categorizing people based on their racial, cultural, and ethnic identity Extractive divides them basing on personal preferences. They have a set of just 30 categories thar can describe people in the entire world. The categories it offers to its clients include names like “techie”, hipster”, “globetrotter”, “artsy” or “sporty”. Therefore, while they claim their algorithms can disregard language and universally categorize people, the categories they created are from a very culture-specific perspective – a Western point of view. Data colonialism, indeed, is deeply connected with capitalism and maximization of profit.

The implications of data colonized subject can be:

 -    Tethered of data judgment: algorithmic discrimination. For example, the face recognition technology perpetuates the racial bias. The algorithm decides, like in the HP case, whether a human face is recognizable or not.

-       Dispossession through data: colonial appropriation. For example, Facebook can decide for a person of color to show the job positions that are more adequate based on who he/she. And, generally, are the job positions that are less prestigious compared to the white counterpart.

-       Integrity of the self-evaluated by artificial intelligence. For example, the software Proctorio has been increasingly used to take exams to make sure students do not cheat taking their exams online during the pandemic. Most of the tools of artificial intelligence inside the software do not recognize black students, or anxiety symptoms like tics or spams.

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Algorithmic Culture

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

In our days in the dominant digital media world, we often hear the word algorithm as a mysterious quasi-magical mechanism that, in a way, governs the cyberspace. But what is an algorithm?

Researcher Tarleton Gillespie, in the second chapter of Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, provides an explanation of what algorithms are and their functions in the digital world. First of all, it is important to make a distinction between data and algorithms. Data can be defined as factual information and used as a basis for calculation and reasoning. Algorithm, instead, is a step-by-step procedure for organizing and acting on a body of data to achieve a desired outcome (19). It is, therefore, a procedure for solving a math problem to collect information and involves a series of steps to accomplish a specific goal which usually means maximize profit. From an algorithm designer’s point of view, an algorithm is a model – the formalization of a problem and its goal, which implies also that there are many algorithms inside a given model.

For example, the YouTube algorithm’s goals are to find the right video for each viewer and get the viewers keep watching. Indeed, YouTube provides users several recommended videos based on past researches, interests, location and, in general, collected data from users’ usage of the platform. The YouTube algorithm decides what people watch on the platform 70% of the time, and 81% of American users say that they regularly watch videos recommended by the algorithm.

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Algorithms can be trained on a basis of existing material and data, certified either by designers or by past users’ practices. The algorithm is then run on these data so that it may learn to pair queries. An example of this use of algorithm is the face recognition technology, but it can contain bias. The tech company HP has been protagonist of a problematic issue regarding the face-tracking technology that does not recognize black faces. If the algorithm is trained to recognize just white faces, it is not going to recognize a black face as a human face, and this becomes really problematic.

Algorithm is usually seen as a talisman, as a separate entity that enjoys a cultural authority. This is what Thrift calls the “technological unconscious”, as reported in David Beer’s article “Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious”, which is the tendency that we have to think that technology does not have a bias and, consequently, we do not question it. “Software has come to intervene in nearly all aspects of everyday life and has begun to sink into its taken-for-granted background’ (988). In this context software act in an unnoticed way and structure and sort people, places, and things. Technology, therefore, actively shapes human behavior and environments.

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Convergence and Participatory Culture

via Saatchi Art

Media scholar Henry Jenkins in the introduction and fourth chapter of “Convergence culture: where old and new media collide”, explores the concepts of convergence and participatory culture. But what convergence means? Convergence can be defined as:

A technological process – different technological fields that convert together.

 A media industries phenomenon – when a company merges with another media industry.

 A set of policies to regulate the media industries phenomenon – laws which limit the converging process

A social practice – the rise of user-generated content.

Jenkins emphasizes the idea that convergence is not only a technological process, but it is about a cultural shift. This is what he calls the “Black Box Fallacy” for which, he argues, media change cannot be reduced to a technological development solely. It is the illusion that technology provokes changes, but it just accelerates the process. The cultural logic of convergence is a process that invests everything including relationships, desires, memories. Therefore, it is not just a black box where different tools converge together, but there is more.

Participatory culture: in participatory culture people are empowered by technology. It is when users become users and producers, who change, manipulate, and create the content. It is important, nonetheless, to make the distinction between participation and interactivity.

Interactivity refers to the ways in which technology has been designed to give an answer to the user. For example, in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the technology makes the users able to interact with it for the way it was designed.

via RedCapes

Participation is a social cultural phenomenon enhanced by technology for which users are able to change media content. It alters the logic by which media industries operate and by which people consume media products.

Participatory culture, however, was not born with the Internet – it just helped make it more evident. Folk culture is a pre-Internet participatory culture and the domain of gift economy. With the Internet, and billions of people involved, this gift economy clashes. Jenkins gives the example of the fandom world behind Star Wars and the grassroots production. The creativity of the fans’ universe is evident and people make something out of products, like in fan fictions.

One example of successful books originated by fan fiction is The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare. She wrote the Draco Trilogy, which went really viral in the fan fiction world, and was a sexy re-adaptation of Harry Potter’s character Draco Malfoy. This character inspired one of the main character of the series Jace. The fan fiction was then removed from the Internet and the author faced many controversies; nevertheless, the 6 books series, the film, and the TV series originated from a fan fiction. 

via Tumblr

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Copyright - Physical vs Digital Laws

via Freepik

This is the case where two different personalities discuss about the same issue: copyright laws. Programmer Richard Stallman in “Why Software Should Not Have Owners” and scholar Lawrence Lessig in “Remix: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law” explore the issue of copyright and the question around the difference between digital property and physical property. Both authors recognize that the laws of physical property cannot be applied to the digital sphere, however, with two different perspectives.

Stallman is one of the early hackers. The hacker culture in the 1960s was a community developed and composed of enthusiast computer programmers and system designers. Therefore, is not to be thought with the negative connotation of hackers and issues about privacy we have today.

In 1976 the US Copyright Act was released for which software started to be protected and licensed under copyright laws.

In 1983, Stallman launches the GNU Project – a free software system, which principles were based on the conception of freedom. “… free software is a matter of freedom, not price”. Software should be freed, but along the lines of freedom of speech. Following this path, in 1985 Stallman created the Free Software Foundation in order to enable users to access the source code, use and redistribute the program, modify, improve it and give it back to the community.

In response to these principles of users’ rights, in 1989 he created the General Public License (GPL). It is a copyleft license for which work can only be distributed only under the same license terms. This condition would prevent people from taking something from the public domain and exploit it.

In his essay Stallman, in his radical perspective, emphasizes the importance of freedom linked to software, and why software shouldn’t be under copyright with major points:

• Name calling: Owners create a vocabulary that compares physical domain and the damage of the digital domain – the use of words like “piracy” or “theft” that cannot belong to the digital domain.

• Exaggeration: Owners incorrectly say that they suffer “economic loss” when users copy programs themselves, yet the copying doesn’t affect the owner.

• The law: Owners describe the current state of laws, but laws don’t decide right and wrong.

• Natural rights: Authors claim a special connection with the programs they created, and their interests and desires outweigh those of anyone else, but the assumption that the authors is more important than users is wrong.

• Economics: Owners of software leads to production of more software, which is a legitimate approach; however, this is not what society needs. What society needs is information that is truly available to its citizens.

Lessing, with a moderate perspective, explores copyright acknowledging that it needs an update. The author points the distinction between the culture of the 20th century and the culture of the 21st century:

• the culture of the 20th century can be defined as a read/only culture – a metaphor to express the kind of culture of that period in which creativity is only consumed. There is no possibility to create content for that industry and it was a matter of being privileged and professional.

• the culture of the 21st century can be defined as a read/write culture in which users became also content creators. This metaphor refers to a massive social change where the users become consumer and producer.

The need for a new economy:

• Sharing economy and commercial economy can coexist becoming a hybrid economy that shares the characteristics of both.

• both amateurs and professionals need to be involved.

Lessig proposes a copyright reform to navigate the digital domain with two solutions:

• distinguish between copies and remixes with the context, which will help to distinguish between the professional and the amateur. In this way, professionals can control copies of their work available commercially, and amateurs can remix work with free use.

• stop suing kids for peer-to-peer piracy and start suing for peace. Making a war is ineffective, therefore, there is the need to compromise.

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Twitter and Democracy: A New Public Sphere?

via Medium

Sociologist Christian Fuchs, in the eighth chapter of Social Media: A Critical Introduction, questions the idea that Twitter constitutes a new public sphere.

But what is a public sphere?  

The structural transformation of the public sphere is a theory developed by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, which was not intended to give a notion of the Internet, but scholars have later associated this theory to the raise of the internet and its potentials. Habermas considers the public sphere an ideal place with some components:

Formation of public opinion

Equal access to all citizens

No restrictions (freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom to expression and publication of opinions) about matters of general interest

Public debate over the general rules governing relations

Two main aspects are constructive for the public sphere: political communication and political economy.

The proper task for the public sphere is that society is engaged in critical and healthy public debate (political communication). But the public sphere is also a question of economic resources (political economy).

Political communication is concerned with how information spreads and influences political patters, new media and citizens – the creation of ideas and opinions between citizens and related entities.

Political economy is concerned with the study of power relations that constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources.

Fuchs explains that for discussing whether Internet platforms constitute a public sphere, it is important to take into account both political communication and political economy including important aspects such as:

  Ownership

  Censorship

  Inclusion/exclusion

Fuchs analyzes Twitter through the lens of Habermas’s theory.

Is Twitter a new public sphere? 

Political communication on Twitter:

Who is the average Twitter user? Data show that, in 2013, the average user was between 18 and 34 years old, white, held a university degree and had no children. The stratification patterns are created by age, ethnicity and class and contribute to information inequality.

Who determines the trending topic on Twitter? This is the concept of the asymmetrical power of visibility for which those who a have a lot of reputation, fame, money, or power tend to have many more followers than everyday people.

Twitter allows mutual interaction or is it just about spread of information? This is concept of degree of interactivity and Fuchs explains that interaction is rare on Twitter and communication on the platforms mostly consists of one-way comment.

Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, can be identified as a Twitter revolution? The common ideology is that the revolution was made possible by social media. However, data show that face-to-face interaction (93%) was the most important form of activists’ communication. Therefore, the role of social media for the Arab Spring is overestimated.

Political Economy on Twitter:

Twitter’s business model is based on targeted advertising, and uses three mechanisms: promoted tweets, promoted trends, and promoted accounts – trends and hashtags are financed by companies to buy attention. Users on Twitter constitute an audience commodity since they are also content producers. There are two ways to gain profit from a platform both directly and indirectly: advertising and data mining.

Moreover, Twitter is a place predominantly for entertainment-related content and not about politics, which contrasts with one of the characteristics of the public sphere that is about enhancing democracy.

Now, these final lines bring us back to the question: is Twitter a new public sphere? Fuchs answers is no, it cannot be a public sphere.

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Ignore or Delete?

“The Cleaners” 2018

“The Cleaners”, a 2018 documentary directed by filmmakers Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, reports the undercover life of a group that constitutes the infrastructure of the platforms we use daily, even though they operate anonymously under strict non-disclosure agreements. 

The cleaners are content moderators who in the Philippines, hired by Silicon Valley leaders, review and moderate all the content that is shared in the cyberspace, eliminating what does not meet the guidelines of the company. 

They have two options: ignore or delete – they have to religiously examine each content and decide whether it should be deleted or not. For example, one of the moderators shows a picture of a painting that portrays former president Donald Trump naked with a small “size”. The painting was made by an artist in Los Angeles, and it went really viral to the point that Donald Trump talked about his “size” on a debate. The content moderator in this context explains that the photo should be deleted since it undermines Trump’s personality. That’s the kind of the decision they have to make for each type of content. Content moderators have a heavy workload, considering that they have to review about 25,000 contents per day. They are paid, a really low salary that gives them the means just to survive, to continually watch sexual, terrorist, self-harm, violent and any other kind of content. And they cannot make mistakes. Not only because they are allowed to 3 mistakes a month (also skipping a video/photo counts as an error), but also because the thinking of the user depends on their work. 

Tech companies have an immense impact on the user’s experience of the platform, and they play an important role in political terms. Data are politically polarized, and platforms like Facebook amplifies this feature. Citizens that had their opinions now have their own reality, truth, and set of facts which is amplified by the fact that Facebook shows you what you want to hear, and what is closer to you own vision, not the whole picture on the issue.

Tristan Harris, former Google Design Ethicist, in the documentary, rejects the belief that human nature is separated from technology, considered a neutral tool. Technology has a bias, and an ultimate goal. The goal is to keep users more and more engaged, and what tends to work in this sense is outrage. Platforms like Facebook benefit from sharing outrageous content. Content moderators confront themselves every day with violent and outrageous content; indeed, the documentary reports that many content moderators have committed suicide and that, the majority of them, experiences the consequences of being exposed to such contents. It has been heavily debated, throughout the years, the immense influence that social media platforms have on human behavior and, without the intervention of content moderators, users’ experience of platform might be really different.

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The Californian Ideology

  via Pinterest

What is ideology?

Ideology is a set of norms and rules in a negative connotation. It becomes, in fact, an illusion and creates a reality that obfuscates critical thinking. This concept is linked to false needs and to the illusion of choice and freedom. Ideologies of computer culture, for example, identify the Internet as a liberating technology which enhances progressive values, democracy, and individuality.

   Apple 1984 commercial 

English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote in 1995 “The Californian Ideology”, an essay that aims at exposing the inconsistencies in the ideology of West Coast Neoliberals and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.  

What the two scholars do is an ideology critique: they critically analyze the historical events and meanings behind the ideology.

At the end of the 20th century, media, computing, and telecommunications are converting into hypermedia. The ability to receive and produce virtually an unlimited amount of information when combined with the reach of global telephone networks, many forms of work and leisure can dramatically change. In this process an alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age: the Californian Ideology. This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.

Indeed, Californian Ideology combines the spirit of the hippies (counterculture) and the entrepreneurial mentality of the yuppies (businessmen).

This amalgamation of the opposites has been achieved through a faith in the potential faith of the new information technologies. “In the digital utopia everyone is hip and rich” (12), and this optimistic vision of the future has been embraced by different types of personalities. The two opposites gather together around the beliefs in technological determinism and freedom.

Technological determinism: the assumption that technology determines society – technological developments create and shape society. This concept is connected with cyber-optimism, for which technology is inherently connected with progress and has only positive effects.

Freedom: in two different understandings – the hippies advocated for freedom of expression, whereas the yuppies advocated for freedom of market.

These two groups found their ground in common in the shared desire to not make the government to interfere of use regulations within the cyberspace.

On the one hand, the hippies believed that technological progress would turn their ideals into facts. And, influenced by the father of media studies Marshall McLuhan, they thought that the convergence of new technologies would create the electronic agora – a space where everyone would be able to express their opinions without the fear of censorship. On the other hand, the other side of the group believed that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications will produce an electronic marketplace - ‘In cyberspace (...) market after market is being transformed by technological progress from a “natural monopoly” to one in which competition is the rule’(17).

Alternatives Despite its contradictions, Californian Ideology is still believed to express the only way forward the future. However, Barbrook and Cameron stress in the final part of their essay that the Californian Ideology was developed by specific group, in a specific country with a particular mix of socio-economic and technological choices. The alternative to the elitism of Californian Ideology, can be found in the European artist-engineers who can construct a cyberspace which is inclusive and universal.

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The Evolution of the Internet

Tim O’Reilly and James Curran, in both their pieces, explore the evolution of the Internet from its origins to the cyberspace we know today.

The dot-com bubble is how Tim O’Reilly, in his article “What is Web 2.0”, defines the turning point in the infrastructure of the Internet. Before the 1990s, commercial activities on the Internet were banned and, up to that point, the Internet was a free space that nobody owned.

The end of the ban on commercial activities in the 1990s constitutes a massive change, which was accompanied by a great enthusiasm. Everyone was investing in this market until it crashed because it was a giant market to sustain.

The Internet, at this point, needs to be upgraded in order to survive – from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Before the crash, the business model was mainly about selling content; it shifted to a new one: collection of data from users. For example, Netscape had a browser-centered strategy in order to establish a market for high-priced server products. Google, on the contrary, had a data-centered strategy for which the content was given for free and they collected data from users.

Web 2.0 is based upon some principles:

1)    Exploiting collective intelligence – Wikipedia vs. Britannica. On the one hand, Britannica is an online encyclopedia based upon the principle that only experts are able to write articles. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is an online collaborative encyclopedia which is able to crowd a collective of people. In fact, “wiki” is the name for an open document where many people can work on it together.

2)    Context instead of content – What is important is the environment in which the content appears, not content per se anymore.

3)    Folksonomy instead of taxonomy – the crowd counts. Folksonomy is a classification made by people whereas taxonomy is a classification made by experts.

4)    Data management – in the new business model of Web 2.0 a person’s identity is important since data are key in this market.

by Aaron Fernandez, Pinterest

James Curran, in the second chapter of his book Misunderstanding the Internet, narrates the history of Internet from its roots that we can find in the US military environment of the Cold War. Indeed, the Internet was born as a military system capable of withstanding attacks from the Soviet Union. The key aspect of this system was the fact that it had not a center; therefore, it was both difficult to destroy and to control. The objects of the military were subsequently mediated by scientists which created a strong relationship between the two. The contribution of academic science is really important in the development of the early Internet; however, it took the form of expert-access rather than opening up to mass consumption.

What influences a following development of the Internet was the American counterculture during the 1980s like the hippies. The hippy sub-culture was based on the fact that individuals needed self-realization by breaking free from repressive conventions. During the early 1990s, a cult was created around text-based adventure games in which participants could take on assumed identities and interact with others, freed from the visual markers of age, gender, ethnicity, class and disability. A space in which people could explore their real selves and build empathy with others.” [The counterculture] transformed the internet from being a tool of a techno-elite into becoming the creator of virtual communities, a sub-cultural playground and agency of democracy” (40)

Another influence on the development of the Internet is the European tradition of public welfare. The world wide web (www) was created by Tim Berners-Lee, English computer scientist, who was inspired by two ideas: making possible an access to public good and bringing people in communion with each other. He was inspired, indeed, by the idea of serving society rather than self.

A turning point of the Internet is the end of the ban on commercial activities in 1991 which encouraged the launch of browsers that made web user-friendly. The commercialization of the Internet seemed to extend the benefits of the cyberspace to more and more people and, as a consequence, it created a new way of making money, expressing individuality, and communicating.

However, it had side effects. Before the commercialization, the Internet was space with freely distributed content but, at that moment, it was transformed in a space where selling and advertising were a dominant part of it. It also ended its collaborative tradition: in 1976, in fact, the Copyright Act was extended also to software.

The commercialization of the Internet created forms of control based on surveillance technology and market power. Surveillance technology collects, with different methods, data from users. It was at the beginning for marketing purposes only, but it soon started to be used in other ways. For example, firms were controlling their workforce’s use of the internet and autocratic governments used this technology to monitor and censor the Internet.

Market power: by 2011 Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle had a dominant position in various sectors of the Internet which made them able to be restrictive in many ways.

by Francesco Ciccolella, Pinterest

 The commercialization of the Internet opened the doors of the cyberspace to a global community, however, the control of data and surveillance technology reduce freedom of its users.

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Editors for a “tech company”

 The Internet, the virtual space we all know, used to be really different at its origin. It started as a military tool used by the US during the Cold War. A device that could help defeat the enemies and that it could be very difficult to attack and destroy. Today, the Internet plays an important role in our routine for shopping, social media interactions, music, academic research and many other functions. When Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, created the platform several years ago he generated a whole new way of communicating, working, selling products, and creating communities. Throughout the years, many issued emerged from the early days of the social media platform in particular: data and privacy related issues.

Zuckerberg in 2018 faced the US Congress because of a data sharing scandal. He sold Facebook users’ data to Cambridge Analytica, which were sold to third parties for political and commercial purposes. During the long trial, an important distinction emerged in the definition of what type of company Facebook is. Zuckerberg claims that they are not a media company since people produce the content, they are not editors; therefore, they are just a tech company and they are not responsible for the content on the platform. They make just the environment. Nevertheless, at the time a user subscribes to Facebook signs a contract, there is the like button, the possibility of being banned if the user does not follow a set of guidelines. Therefore, there is an activity of selection, filtering, and mediation which is what distinguishes a media company from a tech company. In addition, Facebook (as other social media platforms), is heavily manipulated to make sure that users keep scrolling up and down.