Internet Technologies

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Paula Helm, presenting on data colonialism. She begins by contextualising this work as emerging from a computer science project designed to build a new social media platform called WeNet that sought to encourage the diversity of user networks in order to combat the (myth of) ‘filter bubbles’. But in order to encourage diversity, such a platform actually needs substantial amounts of data about its users.

The next session at AoIR 2022 is on data infrastructures, and begins with Jonas Breuer, whose interest is in data protection in smart cities. Smart cities collect a substantial volume of often personal data all of the time, and the implementation of these data technologies needs to be thought through carefully; this project explored these issues through data walks in Belgian cities.

The next presenter in this AoIR 2022 session is my current University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, who shifts our focus to the users of social media platforms. They need political knowledge to make rational decisions, but this is difficult in today’s high-choice informational environments; one key source for such information, of course, are search engines, but research on their role with regard to political issues and referenda remains very limited.

Up next in this AoIR 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Daniela Mahl, whose focus is on conspiracy theories. The culture of such conspiracy theories has changed recently: they are more visible and circulate more quickly now, and new and unique subcultures have emerged that engage with them. The logics and connectivity of digital platforms are important drivers of these developments.

It’s the first day proper of the first proper in-person AoIR conference since Brisbane 2019, and I’m starting with a session on hate speech. It starts with Robert Gehl, who points out how all alternative social media is being reduced to right-wing social media – this ignores other forms of alternative, citizens’ social media, and even studies by reputable centres like the Pew Research Center are guilty of such oversimplification. Alternative social media is much bigger than just a handful of fascist sites.

It’s Wednesday, I think, so I’m in Dublin for the first face-to-face AoIR conference since AoIR 2019 in Brisbane. It’s genuinely delightful to be amongst this wonderful community again at last. As usual, the conference starts with the conference keynote by Nanjala Nyabola, addressing the conference theme of Decolonising the Internet. She begins by noting that the vast majority of people experience the Internet in a foreign tongue; and it is appropriate to address this issue in Ireland, which has had its own history of having its national identity and language suppressed for so long.

Nanjala’s keynote is based on research which worked to translate keywords from Internet research into Kisuaheli, and the assumption from others has always been that this was an AI and natural language processing project; but it was not, and the real question is what it means to be human in the digital age. This was also her first academic paper in Kisuaheli; it was a project in decolonisation. How does this even happen? Ultimately, as so often, the story begins with the arrival of the British: the colonisers. And too many people in the world still don’t know what it means to be colonised – the damaging, scarring disruption of history and culture; one of the darkest and bloodiest chapters in human history that reorganised societies for the economic benefits of imperial power, and a form of bureaucratised murder, systematised rape, and legitimised robbery.

In Kenya this lasted less than a century, but in the last decade of colonisation alone tens of thousands were killed, often simply for speaking out against oppression. In addition, lives were disrupted by introduced pests and diseases. This form of structural violence was documented in the files of the occupiers, but the larger loss of culture is less measurable, and the patterns of colonial administration often still continue. And the intention of the violence was to reorganise society to make money; to create ideal labourers – including by rooting out local languages by force in schools. That legacy still endures, and the trophies of this violence still remain in British museums, while culture is still being reclaimed and relearned.

It’s a very foggy Friday morning at ECREA 2022, and I’m chairing a morning session on protests, politics, and the digital that begins with a paper by Roman Horbyk, on mobile communication on the frontline in Eastern Ukraine. This is a project that was launched well before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, also covering the ongoing hostilities predating it.

Up next in this ECREA 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, whose focus is on news recommender systems. Such systems are algorithms that provide users with personalised recommendations for news content based on past interactions by them or similar users, overall popularity metrics, and other features.

The sessions at this Norwegian Media Researcher Conference are organised in the form of particularly constructive feedback on work-in-progress papers – which is great as a format, but doesn’t lend itself particularly well to liveblogging. So, I’ll skip forward right to the next keynote by Raul Ferrer-Conill, whose focus is on the datafication of everyday life. This is something of a departure from his previous work on the gamification of the news.

He begins by outlining the datafication of the mundane: the way people’s social action – as well as non-human action, in fact – is being transformed into quantifiable data, especially online, and that such data therefore become a resource that can be utilised, operationalised, and exploited. Indeed, the sense in the industry is now that ‘everything starts with data’, which reveals a particular, peculiar kind of mindset. Over the past years, the Internet of Things has moved from an idea to a reality, and this has fuelled the “smart” delusion: the belief that more datapoints mean smarter decision-making processes (they usually don’t).