The article compares two key events that marked the narratives around the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in two different time frames: the game series between the Russian world champion Garry Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue held in New York in 1997, and the Go game series between the South Korean champion Lee Sedol and DeepMind’s AI AlphaGo held in Seoul in 2016. Relying on a corpus of primary and secondary sources such as newspapers and specialized magazines, biographic books, the live broadcasts and the main documentaries reporting the challenges, the article investigates the way in which IBM and Google DeepMind used the human–machine competition to narrate the emergence of a new, deeper, form of AI. On the one hand, the Kasparov–Deep Blue match was presented by broadcasting media and IBM itself as a conflictual and competitive form of struggle between human kind and a hardware-based, obscure and humanlike player. While on the other hand, the social and symbolic message promoted by DeepMind and the media conveyed a cooperative and fruitful interaction with a new software-based, transparent and un-humanlike form of AI. The analysis of the case studies reveals how AI companies mix narrative tropes, gaming and spectacle in order to promote the newness and the main features of their products. In particular, recent narratives of AI based on human feelings and values such as beauty and trust can shape the way in which the presence of intelligent systems is accepted and integrated in everyday life.
This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing sociotechnical change. It aims to unveil how digital media corporations employ such narratives to reinterpret the past of digital media, to underline their leading role in present societies, and to show their ability in predicting and shaping the future. Drawing on examples of digital media corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, we argue that corporational determinism helps companies to market more effectively their products and to build stronger claims in support of their right to inform debates and decisions about the governance of digital technologies. Critical media scholarship should counteract the narratives of corporational determinism with more sophisticated approaches that underline the role of a wider range of actors in media change.
Biography of the Web as a Myth-Building Narrative 2.2 Questioning the Myth of the Web: Media Imaginaries and Web History 2.2.1 Hypertext: The Forgotten Hero Ted Nelson 2.2.2 Retracing Old Media in the World Wide Web 2.2.3 The Web and the Network 2.3 Rethinking Web History 3. Lost Networks: The Socrate and Iperbole Projects in Italy 3.1 The Web Was Not Alone 3.2 The Italian Networking Landscape in the 1990s 3.3 Rise and Fall of Socrate 3.3.1 The Uncertain Reasons for the Failure viii Contents 3.4 The Other Network: The Internet in Italy 3.4.1 Iperbole: The Pioneering Italian Civic Network Project 3.5 Conflicting Imaginaries: Socrate vs. Iperbole 3.6 The Ruins of Socrate 3.7 Legacy Systems 4. Challenging the Network Ideologies 4.1 Imaginary Networks 4.2 The Transitory Propriety of Network Imaginaries 4.3 The Power of Limits 4.4 Beyond Networks References List of Acronyms Index Preface xiii Internet. The 1990s was the decade when, to quote Umberto Eco, this integrated vision of the network emerged, while more recently a turn towards the apocalyptic vision occurred with key authors such as Morozov, Lyon, Zuboff, Fuchs and others. But, in the contemporary 'network imaginaries' , the two visions still co-exist. The one studied in this book is already in place and has limited the possibilities to imagine other forms of network. This is a relevant aspect, underlined by Paolo Bory in the final pages: the power of limits. Consequently, this book is also an inquiry in the limits of imagining the Internet and the technologies we live by in general. Internet imaginaries, ideologies, narratives, and myths (all terms used and explained by Paolo in his book) take time to be built, spread, accepted, and maybe then killed by society. They all have effects in the long term, they need long periods to be metabolized, and their effects are persistent even if often unnoticed. This book uses history, one of the few disciplines able to grasp longterm changes and continuities, in order to understand crucial issues in the relationships between contemporary societies and the Internet. It is an attempt to retrace how the digital culture today is based on forgotten ideas, to revitalize the powerful and persistent narratives behind failed projects, and to understand how the Internet was built with a mix of mythologies, human needs and limits. Every technology of communication is a by-product of the society that created it. And in every society, imaginaries, ideologies, narratives, and myths play a crucial role in establishing a taken-for-granted and yet powerful system of looking at the world. This book ultimately aims to study the habitus where the Internet was created and, in the end, to better understand the ways in which contemporary societies decide to imagine, show, and limit themselves.
This article contributes to the literature on WeChat, providing a historical perspective on the long-lasting culture of its mother company, Tencent. Through a corpus of primary and secondary sources, the article retraces four constitutive choices which characterized Tencent’s culture from 1998, when the company was founded, to 2011, when the first version of WeChat was launched. We argue that Tencent’s market strategy has always been based on four principles: mobility, media convergence, gaming/youth culture and Sinicization. The article concludes by highlighting that these constitutive choices paved the way to the creation of WeChat, thus contributing to its current success.
The essay investigates the evolution of the “narratives of invention” used by the founding fathers of the World Wide Web in a selected corpus of papers written by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from 1989 up to 1993 and later in the books of James Gillies and Robert Cailliau and of Berners-Lee himself in 2000. Thanks to a textual analysis that cross these sources, we identify three main sets of common keywords that did not change and three couples of conflicting keywords that depict the evolution of the narratives over time. Change and continuity, intertwined with conservation and innovation, emerge as the key strategies of the Web’s founding fathers in narrating their idea.
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