What is digital activism anyway? Social constructions of the “digital” in contemporary activism

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, digital activism has received a lot of scholarly and journalistic attention. Even so, there remains no firm consensus on its precise definition and scope. This paper addresses this conceptual haziness and contends that there are analytical issues and conceptual implications in the openness of the term and its description as digital, as 'digitality' is neither the sole nor the primary feature along which activism has changed. Drawing on extant practices of digital activism and conceptual approaches to its scope, the paper aims to (1) critically discuss & highlight a range of conceptual obscurities in digital activism scholarship, (2) provide a glimpse into the concept’s evolution, and, through these (3) suggest that the term (incl. synonyms) suffers from myriad conceptual and epistemological fallacies: omissions of the concept’s complexity (e.g. hybridity, rhizomatism, multi- mediality), implications of digital dualism and therefore potentially technological determinism, and the invitation of stigma, luddite sentiment, and other social constructions of the technologies to which the term is attached.

Comparing the victimization impact of cybercrime and traditional crime: Literature review and future research directions

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the importance of building knowledge on the impact of cybercrime victimization. Because the topic is understudied, it is unclear whether the impact of cybercrime differs from that of traditional crime. Our understanding of potential impact differences needs to be improved, considering that society and criminality are digitizing and, consequently, more people are likely to become victims of cybercrime. From a practical perspective, knowledge about the impact of different crimes is important to develop victim policies within law enforcement and other relevant agencies, and to treat victims appropriately. In this paper, a literature review is provided, as well as future research directions to address the current knowledge gap. The future research directions are divided in three topics: (1) distinguishing between cybercrime and traditional crime, (2) classifying cybercrime and traditional crime, and (3) measuring the victimization impact of cybercrime and traditional crime.

Review Essay: Unravelling Democracy’s Anti-Democratic Machine

ABSTRACT

This review of two recent books, with further discussion of a third, addresses questions of the direction of democracy and the impacts of media circulation and data extraction on democratic culture. The reviewed books are Selena Nemorin (2018); Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing: World, Discourse, Representation, and Dipankar Sinha (2018); The Information Game in Democracy, with discussion also of Peter Csigo (2016); The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on “the People” in Late Modern Democracy.

Feature Analysis: A Method for Analyzing the Role of Ideology in App Design

ABSTRACT

Many apps are designed to solve a problem or accomplish a task, such as managing a health condition, creating a to-do-list, or finding work. The solutions that app developers offer reflects how they believe that users and other stakeholders understand the problem. Each individual developer may have different ideas but analyzing many apps together can reveal the average or typical ways that developers in the set think about the problems that their apps are designed to solve. Building on content analysis, interface analysis, the concept of affordances, and speculative design, this article offers a new method that we call “feature analysis” to analyze what a set of apps designed to solve the same problem can tell us about the relationship between app design and ideology. By counting and classifying the features in a set of apps, feature analysis enables researchers to systematically answer questions about how app developers’ design choices reflect existing cultural norms, assumptions, and ideologies.

Does Numeracy in Digital Journalism Increase Story Believability? : Experiments Comparing Audience Perceptions from the US, Zambia, Tanzania

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study contributes to the literature on numeracy in digital journalism studies by theoretically incorporating the audience/news consumers. While most studies have focused on journalists’ perception and role in the use of numeracy, this study examines how audience perceive stories with numerical values. Through an experimental design, and by comparing the United States, Zambia, and Tanzania, the study was able to demonstrate that news stories with numerical values diminished audience/readers’ affective consumption. In other words, news stories with numerical values were negatively associated with audience appeal. However, individuals with a lower understanding of probabilistic and numerical concepts seemed to trust news stories with numbers more than those with a higher level of numeracy. This was especially true in Zambia and Tanzania where most participants recorded lower numeracy levels. The overall sample in all the three countries seemed to favor news stories with less or no numeracy.

Researching Digital Sociality: Using WhatsApp to Study Educational Change

ABSTRACT

Digital technologies have become deeply implicated in and constitutive of contemporary social life. They are reshaping who we are and how we associate with one another, and are profoundly reconfiguring social relations, processes, and practices in a host of social spheres, particularly education. With Covid-19 further entrenching this implication and accelerating those changes, we are forced to rethink what research is and how it is done. This article presents a step towards researching a changing sociality using social media. Drawing on fieldwork on the digital transformation of Egyptian education, it argues that and showcases how WhatsApp can be systematically used as a qualitative data collection instrument to examine educational change. This article also situates WhatsApp research within digital ethnographic traditions, unpacks emergent methodological challenges and ethical quandaries, and presents potential ways to manage them. In so doing, it problematizes extant methodological categories (such as participation), entrenched dichotomies (such as private/public space), and epistemological questions (such as research temporality). Using a unique case from the Global South at an exceptional time of (educational) change, this article can help researchers as they think about their questions, design their research, conduct their fieldwork, and maneuver an elusive digital landscape. It informs broader methodological discussions within digital sociology and anthropology (of education), digital ethnography, and social media research. It also informs research in other domains like healthcare, geographies beyond the Global South, and platforms with similar affordances like Telegram.

The Network Life of Non-biomedical Knowledge: Mapping Vietnamese Traditional Medicine Discourses on Facebook

ABSTRACT

Traditional medicine is hugely popular throughout Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. The development of the internet and online social networks in these contexts has enabled a significant proliferation of non-biomedical knowledge and practices via platforms such as Facebook. People use Facebook to advocate for non- biomedical alternatives to unaffordable biomedicine, share family medical recipes, discuss medicinal properties of indigenous plants, buy and sell these plants, and even crowdsource disease diagnoses. This paper examines the network characteristics of, and discourses present within, three popular Vietnamese non-biomedical knowledge Facebook sites over a period of five years. These large-scale datasets are studied using social network analysis and generative statistical models for topic analysis (Latent Dirichlet allocation). Forty-nine unique topics were quantitatively identified and qualitatively interpreted. Among these topics, themes of religion and philanthropy, critical discussions of traditional medicine, and negotiations involving overseas Vietnamese were particularly notable. Although non-biomedical networks on Facebook are growing both in terms of scale and popularity, sub-network comment activities within these networks exhibit ‘small world’ characteristics. This suggests that social media seem to be replicating existing social dynamics that historically enable the maintenance of traditional forms of medical knowledge, rather than transforming them here.

Intimacy in the Time of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we tell a story with data about how our relationship with technology has transformed our collective notion of intimacy and rituals of connecting with others. Framed by the COVID-19 pandemic, our starting point is that technology is neither good, bad, nor neutral. The goal of this study is to step back and have conversations with people –from all over the United States of various ages, occupations, and relationship statuses– about how they define intimacy and understand these practices in a mediated environment. In this essay, we discuss technology as more than a performative platform. It is an ambient architecture that sets the tone for interactions meant to preserve social ties and sustain social capital potentially depleted through pandemic conditions of seclusion. Through the voices of our participants, we conceptualize how intimacy is experienced and understood, and how this relational quality is amplified in a mediated environment during moments of disruption. In the end, what COVID-19 has revealed as we reflect on our relationship with technology is the fluidity of intimacy in moments of change.

Privacy Attitudes and Behaviors in the Age of Post-Privacy: An Empirical Approach

ABSTRACT

The digital world is a field of information and entertainment for users and a field of extraction of the most valuable good of recent years: personal data. How much of a threat to privacy is the collection and processing of data by third parties and what do people think about it? On the occasion of the extensive methods of surveilling citizens and collecting their data, this study attempts to contribute new empirical data evidence from the international research on the use of the Internet by the World Internet Project on attitudes and behaviors of individuals regarding online privacy and surveillance. The aim is to determine whether and to what extent the recorded concerns about the violation of privacy intersects with a growing acceptance of its very absence.

Data Perversion: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Datafication

ABSTRACT

This article adopts a psychoanalytic perspective and argues that users are in a perverse relationship with contemporary platforms. Following a review of recent critical scholarship on datafication, which places too much emphasis on platforms and situates users as helpless, the psychoanalytic concept of perversion is introduced. Perversion describes a relationship that is characterised by dominance, exploitation and dehumanization as well as care, love, and idealization. While the pervert (the platform and its owners and developers) is the perpetrator, the other (the user) is also actively participating in the perverse relationship. Contemporary relations are thus marked by foregrounding connectivity, convenience and communication which mask the violence of datafication. Such relations are upheld, because users affirmatively reproduce them by using highly attractive platforms which are customized for each individual. Psychoanalysis can thus offer a complex conceptualisation of the interplay between affirmation, attraction and exploitation that is immanent to platforms and users today.

Figuring Digital Cascades: Issue Framing in Digital Media Ecosystems

ABSTRACT

On November 17, 2015, the newly elected Canadian government led by Justin Trudeau made an announcement that became a turning point in the heated debate around the plan to build the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Ottawa. The government’s decision to scale the project down was massively republished and generated a heavy stream of 2,055 publications and interactions. The virality of such phenomena is sometimes described in the literature as an “information cascade” characterized by a complex and expanding series of media content that is republished, shared, and commented upon in digital public spheres, reaching a growing number of people. Our research aim is twofold. From a theoretical point of view, we combine Entman’s cascade model with the perspective of platform studies. From an empirical point of view, we put this model to the test through a case study of the cascading data flows that emerged during this public debate. We found three key factors that constituted and shaped this information cascade: 1) the economic structure of the Canadian media market, and especially the concentration of media ownership, which is notably high in the Canadian media ecosystem; 2) data-exchange mechanisms and algorithmic filtering that drive the process of news aggregation, quickly spreading media content without being a significant source of user engagement; 3) grassroots engagement in diasporic media, which activates micro public spheres around nested interests and political standpoints regarding the public issue.

Imagining the Commoning Library: Alter-Neoliberal Pedagogy in Informational Capitalism

ABSTRACT

The ascent of neoliberalism and informational capitalism has been largely successful in privatizing and re-regulating state-subject-market relations in ways that treat them “as if” they are a market situation. Here, we observe both the increasing commodification of digital forms of knowledge, as well as the commodification of the access to this knowledge. As predominantly non-commercial spaces, libraries serve the vital function of deflecting these developments. In this article, I argue for going one step further and imagining libraries asinstitutionalized and pedagogical spaces that can negotiate and transgress their institutional limits vis-à-vis public and private resources, discourses, policies, and technologies for the purpose of furthering the commons.In so doing, libraries serve as alter-neoliberal pedagogies, which democratize the construction and deconstruction of knowledge, as well as the access to them. Here, alternative literacies, ways of learning, and ways of being can be prefigured in practice. In imagining these conceptual potentialities of academic and public libraries, this article sets forth an initial agenda toward the commoning library.

Dark and Bright Patterns in Cookie Consent Requests

ABSTRACT

Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people’s behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online experiments we investigated the effects of three common design nudges (default, aesthetic manipulation, obstruction) on users’ consent decisions and their perception of control over their personal data in these situations. In the first experiment (N = 228) we explored the effects of design nudges towards the privacy-unfriendly option (dark patterns). The experiment revealed that most participants agreed to all consent requests regardless of dark design nudges. Unexpectedly, despite generally low levels of perceived control, obstructing the privacy-friendly option led to more rather than less perceived control. In the second experiment (N = 255) we reversed the direction of the design nudges towards the privacy-friendly option, which we title “bright patterns”. This time the obstruction and default nudges swayed people effectively towards the privacy-friendly option, while the result regarding perceived control stayed the same compared to Experiment 1. Overall, our findings suggest that many current implementations of cookie consent requests do not enable meaningful choices by internet users, and are thus not in line with the intention of the EU policymakers. We also explore how policymakers could address the problem.

A Social Science Perspective on Artificial Intelligence: Building Blocks for a Research Agenda

ABSTRACT

In this article, we discuss and outline a research agenda for social science research on artificial intelligence. We present four overlapping building blocks that we see as keys for developing a perspective on AI able to unpack the rich complexities of sociotechnical settings. First, the interaction between humans and machines must be studied in its broader societal context. Second, technological and human actors must be seen as social actors on equal terms. Third, we must consider the broader discursive settings in which AI is socially constructed as a phenomenon with related hopes and fears. Fourth, we argue that constant and critical reflection is needed over how AI, algorithms and datafication affect social science research objects and methods. This article serves as the introduction to this JDSR special issue about social science perspectives on AI.

Digital Limit Situations: Anticipatory Media Beyond 'The New AI Era'

ABSTRACT

In the present age AI (artificial intelligence) emerges as both a medium to and message about (or even from) the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects. Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the human horizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the ‘inevitability’ of AI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become living myths, by attending how the technology is embedded in broader appropriations of the future tense. Reclaiming anticipation existentially, by drawing and expanding on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers – and his concept of the limit situation – I offer an invitation beyond the prospects and limits of ‘the new AI Era’ of predictive modelling, exploitation and dataism. I submit that the present moment of technological transformation and of escalating multi-faceted and interrelated global crises, is a digital limit situation in which there are entrenched existential and politico-ethical stakes of anticipatory media. Attending to them as a ‘future present’ (Adam and Groves 2007, 2011), taking responsible action, constitutes our utmost capability and task. The essay concludes that precisely here lies the assignment ahead for pursuing a post-disciplinary, integrative and generative form of Humanities and Social Sciences as a method of hope, that engages AI designers in the pursuit of an inclusive and open future of existential and ecological sustainability.

Coproduction, Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: A Perspective from Cultural Anthropology

ABSTRACT

Over the past five years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been endorsed as the technical underpinning of innovation. Sensationalist representations of AI have also been accompanied by assumptions of technological determinism that distract from the ordinary, sometimes unassuming consequences of interaction with its systems and processes. Drawing on scholarship from cultural anthropology, along with science and technology studies (STS), this paper examines coproduction in a Canadian AI research and development context. Through interview responses and field observations it presents sites of sociotechnical entanglement and ethical discussion to highlight potential spaces of mediation for anthropological practice. Emerging themes from the experiences of AI specialists include the negotiability of technology, an ethics of the everyday and critical collaboration. Together this returns to an initial approach into a situated understanding of artificial intelligence, negotiating with broad, sensationalist perspectives and the more commonplace, backgrounded cases of narrow research.

What is Data and What Can It Be Used For? Key Questions in the Age of Burgeoning Data-Essentialism

ABSTRACT

In this article we describe the rise of a data orthodoxy that we suggest to label ‘data-essentialism’. We question this data-essentialism by problematizing its premises, and unveil its ideological indebtedness to deeper (previous) currents in Western thought and history. Data-essentialism is the assumption that data is the essence of basically everything, and thus provides the ideological underpinnings for the imagination of creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that would transform the human race and our existence. The imagination of data as an essence is in contrast to, while often conflated with, ideas of data as traces we leave behind existing in highly connected societies. This confusion over what data is, and can be used for, underlines the importance to engage in questions of the nature of data, whether everything in the universe can be described in terms of data and the implications of subscribing to such a data-essentialist worldview. We connect data- essentialism to a revival of positivism, critique a belief in the objectivity of data and that predictions based on data correlations can be fully accurate. We end the article with a discussion of how some aspects of AI rely on data- essentialist accounts and how these have a history and roots in Modernity.

Practical AI Transparency: Revealing Datafication and Algorithmic Identities

ABSTRACT

How does one do research on algorithms and their outputs when confronted with the inherent algorithmic opacity and black box-ness as well as with the limitations of API-based research and the data access gaps imposed by platforms’ gate-keeping practices? This article outlines the methodological steps we undertook to manoeuvre around the above-mentioned obstacles. It is a “byproduct” of our investigation into datafication and the way how algorithmic identities are being produced for personalisation, ad delivery and recommendation. Following Paßmann and Boersma’s (2017) suggestion for pursuing “practical transparency” and focusing on particular actors, we experiment with different avenues of research. We develop and employ an approach of letting the platforms speak and making the platforms speak. In doing so, we also use non-traditional research tools, such as transparency and regulatory tools, and repurpose them as objects of/for study. Empirically testing the applicability of this integrated approach, we elaborate on the possibilities it offers for the study of algorithmic systems, while being aware and cognizant of its limitations and shortcomings.