#AoIR2024 Industry

Presentation 1
 
Industries of Infrastructural Futures, Automated Cultures, and Algorithmic Dynamics
Tsvetelina Hristova⁽¹⁾, Alexandra Anikina⁽¹⁾, Toja Cinque⁽²⁾, Luke Heemsbergen⁽²⁾, Allan Jones⁽²⁾, Fan Yang⁽⁴⁾, Robbie Fordyce⁽³⁾
1: Southampton University, United Kingdom; 2: Deakin University, Australia; 3: Monash University, Australia; 4: University of Melbourne, Australia
 
We approach the conference topic of industry through four studies that explore a new media landscape where value and power are increasingly produced through the operalisation of machinic and affective relations and subjectivities. We explore technologies of automation, artificial intelligence and algorithmic regimes and the new possibilities for enacting and imagining political futures that they afford. The papers focus on four case studies: WeChat posts related to the Australian referendum for Indigenous voice to Parliament; perceptions of bias in texts generated by ChatGPT; TikTok videos of affective time management through curated playlists, and time synchronisation protocols used in industrial warehouses. These four cases reveal the ways in which automated media technologies enable complex interactions between humans and machines that impact practices of political subjectification, trust and notions of truth, and weave a particular relationship between affect, aesthetics and temporalities of labour.
The panel analyses the role of networks and algorithms in shaping the parameters of emerging forms of expression and participation that are enacted through the interrelation between users and digital platforms. The four papers adopt a platform- and infrastructure-specific research approach, building on research into the infrastructural turn in media studies (Plantin and Punathambekar 2019). Seeing media infrastructures as a complex arrangement of digital platforms, databases, algorithms and protocols, we look at the political effects produced by these infrastructures. These effects are analysed in their material situatedness in the logic of the particular digital platform.
In their paper, Toija Cinque and Allan Jones illuminate the interplay between AI agency, human cognition, and digital media platforms, thereby contributing to discourse on ethical AI use, sociotechnical systems, and information integrity in the digital age. Their paper explores the interconnections between generative AI, digital platforms, and cognitive biases, striving to deepen our understanding of technology’s capacity to engender a truth-centric, empathetic digital society. By delineating ethical pathways for the coexistence of humans and machines within the information realm, the study aims to contribute significantly to the ongoing discourse surrounding ethical AI use, the development of sociotechnical systems, and the maintenance of information integrity in the digital era. Through its findings, it aspires to influence future technological developments, regulatory frameworks, and policy formulations, thus paving the way for a more balanced and equitable digital future.
Fan Yang, Robbie Fordyce and Luke Heemsbergen analyse messages related to the recent referendum for political representation of Indigenous Australians posted on the Chinese-owned platform WeChat. The authors argue that, while posts largely follow the rhetoric of mainstream Australian media in their sentiments, the cases in which they divert, indicate the catalyzation of diaspora affects which influence the position towards race and Indigenous issues.
Tsvetelina Hristova explores the technopolitical implications of network time synchronisation protocols in warehouse automation. The logic of digital infrastructures imposes a notion and practice of time that is radically different from the universalising time synchronisation of industrial capitalism. Instead, network time protocols rely on the exchange of messages and data packages through which a measure and notion of time is negotiated and agreed upon in a networked environment. This imposes a particular technopolitical context of technological interpellation where structures of time are constituted through the participation of nodes in the network. This technological context of temporality has important implications for how hierarchies and enclosures are enacted in industrial networks and, importantly, for the role of cloud computing platforms in organising new forms of privatised time.
Alexandra Anikina analyses the assembly line aesthetics in videos that promote personal productivity and time management on Tik Tok, YouTube and Twitch.
This panel is proposed by members of two research groups on critical infrastructure studies across the Atlantic that explore how new digital, automated and intelligent media technologies are impacting social and political life. Trying to understand criticality as both an analytical approach and a characteristic of the objects we research, we interrogate the aspects of digital media infrastructures that add new layers to how datafication acquires subtle cultural and technopolical inflections. Through the focus on affect in the panel, understood as both social emotional charge (Ahmed 2013) and as the potential for connection and interaction (Massumi 2002) in the network, we try to see the infrastructure of data systems and automated platforms as the product of different cultural, political and technological drives. These drives give rise to situated and embodied logics of automation that are platform-dependent but also dependent on cultural and social affects imbued through their provenance, producers and users. The panel blends different disciplinary perspectives and approaches, seeking a dialogue between media and communication studies, cultural studies and critical art research.
References
Ahmed, S., 2013. The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.
Massumi, B., 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press.
Plantin, J.C. and Punathambekar, A., 2019. Digital media infrastructures: pipes, platforms, and politics. Media, culture & society, 41(2), pp.163-174.