Francis Hunger on Sat, 23 Mar 2019 14:34:48 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Fwd: are you on nettime?


Hey Luke,

below a few more comments,

>> This kind of description ascribes a lot of power/agency to the technical
>> medium and does in my opinion not fully grasp the agency of individuals
>> who have to actively seek this content
> I wouldn't go so far as to say the user is the victim - and certainly
> wouldn't want to be misread as saying that T was a victim. But I do
> stand by the idea of the dark social web incrementally nudging users
> towards a more extremist position. I've been recommended some pretty
> disturbing (politically) videos on YT, based on some seemingly banal
> choices. And this is what Tufekci also picked up on last year - which
> I stumbled across at the tail end of this essay.
>
> So I don't want to nix agency, choice, freedom altogether. But it
> seems to me that the incessant quest of digital architectures through
> UX/UI/coding etc to eliminate the "pain points" of interaction is
> precisely the attempt to reduce that threshold of the decision. The
> auto-recommended feed negates the search bar and its manual typing,
> infinite scroll kills off pagination and makes it effortless to keep
> going, autocomplete steers us towards a preselected query etc. We
> actively consume content, but increasingly that content is not chosen
> from some unconstrained totality, but preselected and privileged in
> platform-specific ways.
>
> This content, and indeed the whole process of a user moving along a
> trajectory of the dark social web towards a more extremist position I
> see as political, so maybe we're using the word depoliticizes in
> different ways.

Agree. So a political reaction to this would be to address the designers
and project managers as well as shareholders to keep them responsible
for a business model which leads to bespoke UI decisions. We may be able
to learn from ecological groups who (e.g. in Germany) have worked since
the 1980s to get rid of a risky technology. So the project at hand might
is looking into, how recommendation systems and other pattern
recognition technologies can be labeled risk technology. (YT only became
profitable after 2012 when they replaced their own search engine with
Google's technology and the pattern recognition based recommendation
system).

>> The decision for instance to actively engage within let's say the KKK or
>> Blood and Honor and similar groups to me seems similar to the decision
>> of engaging in todays online hate-groups, which may be spread more
>> globally, but nethertheless these are not "algorithms" acting by
>> themselves (what motivation should they have?) but humans who interact
>> with each other trough global communication platforms.
> I guess what's interesting to me, again, is how the former "leap" to a
> hate-group becomes diminished to a set of slow, incremental steps.

The point might be, that today these small steps get supported through
algorithmic agency whereas for earlier generations one would describe
radicalization as a process that happened within peer groups. My point
was just - since we are joined on this list by the very idea of media or
computation – to make sure, we would not privilege by profession the
algorithmic agency over the social agency of peers.

Because methodically: The look into the platforms or algorithmic agency
leads to easy assumptions, because it appears to be systematic and it
appears to have cause and effect. Especially to the digital scholar.
This might have been balanced with a deeper look into theories of
radicalization or if you want in this particular case toxic masculinity,
which need to be in place to interact with the nudging.

All the best

Francis

-- 

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