Digital Platforms: Algorithmic Personalisation, Agency, New and Old Intermediaries

This event brings together three leading analysts working in internet studies, to present and discuss research on key issues and problems surrounding digital media in the twenty-first century

Location: HELIX - Classroom (7.14)

The event is open to everyone, at the University of Leeds and beyond, but we ask you to register for the event so that we can arrange the room and refreshments accordingly.

Organisers and session Chairs: David Hesmondhalgh and Ludmila Lupinacci, School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds

Enquiries: mediaresearchsupport@leeds.ac.uk

Link for registration: https://forms.office.com/e/W9vLmFaVXC

Schedule (abstracts below)

2pm Arrival

2.15-3.00 Making it Impersonal? Algorithmic personalisation in the age of AI impersonation - Tanya Kant, University of Sussex, UK

3.00-3.15 Tea and coffee

3.15-4.00 Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture - Ignacio Siles, University of Costa Rica

4.00-4.45 Platform Analogies: How Bookstores, Libraries, and Supermarkets Can Inform Thinking on Social Media - Caitlin Petre, Rutgers University, USA

Making it Impersonal? Algorithmic personalisation in the age of AI impersonation

Tanya Kant, University of Sussex, UK

This paper critically interrogates the algorithmic personalisation of web users' experiences in a digital milieu increasingly populated by so-called 'AI' actors, agents and assemblages.  I consider what appears to be a tension in communicative flows of capitalism between the exchange value of 'authentic' human attention and the increasing 'infoglut' (Andrejevic, 2013) produced by generative AI systems. This paper takes a critical political economy approach to emerging forms of generative AI - from ChatGPT to AI journalists, actors and stand-ins - to critically situate their place in what can be considered a wider history of computational impersonation. I argue that AI's overlooked co-conspirator - the humble web-crawler 'bot' - presents a critical site of investigation in understanding the socio-technical implications of AI and their generative content for the 'human' web users that coinhabit the contemporary digital landscape. 

Tanya Kant is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies (Digital Media) at the University of Sussex. She is author of Making It Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity and Everyday Life (2020, Oxford University Press) and has published work on AI and identity, creative methods for algorithmic literacy, critical political economy of the web, personalization and broadcasting, and bots. 

Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture

Ignacio Siles, University of Costa Rica

What does it mean to live in a “datafied” society? Life in media-saturated contexts implies the increasing transformation of people’s experiences, relations, and identities into data. To make sense of this process, scholars have focused mostly on how algorithms give rise to new forms of power and control. Alternatively, in this talk I ask not what algorithms are doing to society but rather what people are doing with algorithms. I present research on the use of such algorithmic platforms as Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok in an understudied region of the global south (Costa Rica). I develop the framework of “mutual domestication” by examining the personal relationships that have formed between users and algorithms as Latin Americans have integrated these systems into the structures of everyday life, enacted them ritually, participated in public with and through them, and thwarted them. In this way, I provide a new perspective on the commonalities and differences among users within a global ecology of technologies. 

Ignacio Siles (PhD, Northwestern University) is a professor of media and technology studies in the School of Communication and researcher in the Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM) at Universidad de Costa Rica.

Platform Analogies: How Bookstores, Libraries, and Supermarkets Can Inform Thinking on Social Media

Caitlin Petre, Rutgers University, USA

Conversations about social media platforms (SMPs) tend to focus on what’s new and unprecedented about these complex sociotechnical systems (their size and scale, use of algorithms, etc). This talk will take a different tack: I claim that to understand platforms’ influence on public information, we need to talk more about what’s old about them. Via a historical examination of analogue information intermediaries such as brick-and-mortar booksellers, public libraries, and supermarkets that sell periodicals, I argue that information intermediaries have long shaped the cultural and political landscape via three key mechanisms that also apply to contemporary SMPs: strategically directing human attention, moderating objectionable content, and intervening in the production of third-party content. By taking the political and normative dimensions inherent in information intermediation seriously, the talk will enrich contextual understandings of SMPs and suggest future avenues for platform change.

Caitlin Petre is an Associate Professor of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her work uses qualitative methods examine to the social processes behind the digital datasets and algorithms that increasingly govern the contemporary world. Her scholarly articles have been published in journals such as the International Journal of Communication, Digital Journalism, Social Media & Society, and the American Journal of Sociology; her book, All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics are Transforming the Work of Journalists, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.