Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious

Beer, David

doi:10.1177/1461444809336551

Cited by 582 publications

(383 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Commodifying audience labor on social media requires highly sophisticated techniques of collecting, analyzing and manipulating these kinds of data (Beer, 2009;Kang & McAllister, 2011;McStay, 2011), but the audience plays a key role in producing them. We argue that the value generated by users is based on two further types of labor: the 'self' of users, who are mobilized as 'celebrity' avatars to advertise a brand, and the construction and maintenance of networks or media channels through which ads are disseminated.…”

Section: Results and Discussion "Bayu Skak": A Case Study For Self-fmentioning

confidence: 99%

Let’s Start Your Own Vlog Promoting Indonesian Digital Entrepreneur Using Youtube Channel

Sujoko

Fatanti

2017

JAM

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This research uses interpretive approach through visual semiotics method. Visual semiotics method is done by purposive sampling the most popular five videos that have been produced and uploaded by Bayu SKAK on his YouTube channel. The researcher also gathers some data from second resources to find out its impact on economic site. The result of the research shows that YouTube as a public communication channel and entrepreneurship. Bayu SKAK's video blogging consists of creative ideas and also a media for digital entrepreneurship. Digital entrepreneurship is able to create a new environment for evolutionary creative industries that are based on ideas, networking, and self-creativity. The culture and communication pattern is developed between the Vlogger as the creative producer and the audience as the consumer of vlogs. On one side, YouTube channels have been an open commercial public space for people of the age of information, has more than one role by being the audio-visual consumer and also the producer, on the other side there have been problems, such as institutional problems, copyright protection, and advertisement management. However, socializing the use of video blogging through YouTube channels can be an alternative way to improve and develop digital entrepreneurship in Indonesia. Educating the society through social media can promote the various types of new businesses based on digital entrepreneurship through the creativity and the contribution of teenagers to digital native. This research does not reveal the Vlogger's strategy to attract large viewers, and it becomes an important issue to explore the benefits of social media.Keywords: Social Media, Youth Participant, Digital Native, Video Blogging, Digital Entrepreneurship Cyberspace -in this case, social media provides a new communication style which contrasts with conventional mass media. Social media offers ease of access, user fees humility and extensive reach of the audience, making it easier for someone to roleplay as a message pro-579 ducer/communicator. As presented by Castells (2009), that the presence of the Internet and social media can provide the opportunity for individuals to possess power and control over the information. It could be stated that the individual has a dual role, as producers and consumers of information. Our research based on Castells's concept of the information society. In his work, he always emphasized how the power possessed by netizens in disseminating information to a broader audience. Dis-JAM 15, 4

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Section: Results and Discussion "Bayu Skak": A Case Study For Self-fmentioning

confidence: 99%

Let’s Start Your Own Vlog Promoting Indonesian Digital Entrepreneur Using Youtube Channel

Sujoko

Fatanti

2017

JAM

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“…The determining challenge that digital technologies pose is not whether they liberate or subjugate the individual more or less than other technologies, but to develop a critical understanding of the relations and interactions programed in their functioning. Nonetheless, as digital networks expand and intensify, as data production and handling reach new levels, and as statistical models defy old models of control and modulation by moving away from populations and towards what Gilles Deleuze called dividuals (1990), a pervasive shadow of information is growing like a digital unconscious (Beer 2009) withholding unprecedented secrets and insights into subjects and objects. Indeed, Big Data's vaunted prospect is to unearth and discover what has never been observed by abandoning the rigid hypothetico-deductive methods of reasoning and embracing new inductive tools that rely on vast expanses of arable data.…”

Section: Technology and Subjectificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why data is not enough: Digital traces as control of self and self-control

Reigeluth

2014

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As an alternative to the seemingly natural objectivity and self-evidence of "data," this paper builds on recent francophone literature by developing a critical conceptualization of "digital traces." Underlining the materiality and discursiveness of traces allows us to understand and articulate both the technical and sociopolitical implications of digital technology. The philosophies of Gilbert Simondon and Michel Foucault give strong ontological and epistemological groundings for interpreting the relationships between technology and processes of subjectification. In this light, digital traces are framed as objects and products of heteronomous interventions, the logics of which can be traced through the programs and algorithms deployed. Through the empirical examples of "Predictive Policing" and "Quantified Self" digital traces are contrasted with the premises and dreams of Big Data. While the later claims to algorithmically correlative, predict and preempt the future by reducing it to a "what-is-tocome," the digital trace paradigm offers a new perspective on how forms of self-control and control of the self are interdependent facets of "algorithmic governmentality." Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?T.S. Eliot, in Choruses from 'The Rock' (1934) IntroductionElemental and given, data in the digital age appears to be knowledge's natural resource, its fundamental building block and its universal unit of measure. Digital technologies have opened unprecedented horizons for the production and flow of "information," increasing both their speed and volume. More and more data is left behind in our digital wake and, as its management claims dominion over information and knowledge as forms of abstraction, little of what we do in our everyday lives seems to escape the territory of digital data. With the proliferation of digital technologies and the rise of Big Data, this tendency towards a naturalization of data, endowed with inherently "objective" qualities and capable of "speaking the truth," has compressed qualitative and epistemological differences between data, information and knowledge to such a degree that we might prolong T.S. Eliot's cascade of questions by asking: "Where is the information we have lost in data?" 1 Big Data's bigger promise is that the mass aggregation of data, its infinitesimal dimensions and its inductive correlations, bring us closer than ever to the "real." This new self-evidence of "objectivity" should not disguise the discursive and technological processes that scaffold its construction. As the tenants of Big Data seek ever further to subsume life into data, the space and time for understanding how the latter is programed, algorithmically computed, visually represented and discursively modeled is shrinking.Building on francophone research on the subject of "digital traces," this paper will outline the technological and discursive dimensions of this construct that make it partic...

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“…Recent attention to algorithmic power (Beer, 2009;Gillespie, 2014), the values encoded in them, and the outcomes they produce, is central to identifying how racial inequality might get produced online. However, I argue that racial formation theory provides a broader, and more appropriate framework for understanding how race works on the web.…”

Section: Racial Formation and Web Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Racial formation, inequality and the political economy of web traffic

McIlwain

2016

Information, Communication & Society

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Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious

Cited by 582 publications

References 21 publications

Let’s Start Your Own Vlog Promoting Indonesian Digital Entrepreneur Using Youtube Channel

Let’s Start Your Own Vlog Promoting Indonesian Digital Entrepreneur Using Youtube Channel

Why data is not enough: Digital traces as control of self and self-control

Racial formation, inequality and the political economy of web traffic

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