News & Events
Richard Rogers, Post-Truth Spaces
Public Lecture
Post-Truth Spaces: Studying Authenticity and Influence on the Internet
Richard Rogers
This talk seeks to contribute to the study of authenticity and influence on the internet by exploring a series of techniques for the examination of online spaces where actors and information are either difficult to authenticate and verify or are known to verification specialists and fact checkers as problematic. Such online realms we refer to as post-truth spaces, which references the rise of the discourse of ‘alternative facts’, especially as part of a counter-program for ‘asserting political dominance’ and influence. The contribution is methodological as well as conceptual. In the technique I locate and discuss clutches of actors and websites as well as social media posts grouped together on the basis of their dense inter-referencing and their verification assessment based on digital investigation techniques. Their influence is gauged by the extent to which they penetrate or overlap onto mainstream spaces online. Conceptually, the post-truth space is among other spaces where ‘problematic information’ holds sway and information circulation, campaigning and operations are undertaken. Among these are the ‘alternative influence network’, ‘fake news’ engagement spaces, coordinated inauthentic behaviour campaigns as well as participatory propaganda circulation. As with a post-truth space, which as I discuss is a broader term, each of these is mapped through techniques that demarcate, chart or otherwise render them as spaces of interest online.
Date: Monday, 11/03/2024; Time: 17:00-19:00; Room: OC1.09.
Media and Creative Industries Seminar Series @ the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies (Spring Term)
Warwick’s Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies (CMPS) invites you to its Media and Creative Industries Research Seminar Series for Spring Term, curated in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Inquiry (CDI). All welcome. Details below.
Nudging the Internet - Elif Buse Doyuran (University of Edinburgh)
How do platforms make us click, like, book, or buy? The popularised view has it that they deploy small and subtle suggestions to shape our actions in powerful and predictable ways. These ‘nudges’ target universal cognitive and behavioural biases and are refined through proprietary data analytics and experimentation systems. As such, they are based on insights from behavioural sciences. Or, rather, they represent a mode of platform governance. Or are they routine business practice? This talk aims to clarify what nudging is, how it works, and why it is so prevalent. Drawing on interviews with people whose job is to nudge users and consumers online, it explores how the work of designing interactions and prompting actions is organised. It finds that nudging is not a set of specialised techniques that moved into the field from outside, nor can it be fully understood as a mode of governance. Instead, ubiquitous nudging emerges as a mundane ‘effect’ of the practical arrangements that make up the platform economy and that reinforce incremental and testable changes into its products.
February, 21st 2024 1:15-2:15pm FAB 1.01
Elif Buse Doyuran is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh and a research affiliate for the Data Civics Observatory at Edinburgh Futures Institute. She works on the sociology of platform economies. Drawing on fieldwork and a series of interviews with product developers and marketers, her doctoral research examines the epistemologies and practical organisation of ‘nudging’ across the internet, to understand how platforms move our actions. The first article from this research, ‘Nudge goes to Silicon Valley: Designing for the disengaged and the irrational,’ was recently published in the Journal of Cultural Economy. Along with her colleagues, she has co-founded and convenes The Platform Social, a research network of postgraduate and early career researchers working on digital society and economy. She holds an MSc from London School of Economics and Political Science.
Resisting Algorithms: Power, Agency and Imagination beyond the Dystopian Juncture - Emiliano Treré (Cardiff University)
In an age where algorithms shape our every interaction, understanding how to navigate and resist their influence is crucial. This talk is based on the findings of a 5-year research project that culminated in the book “Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power” (co-written with T. Bonini for MIT Press, 2024). I will shed light on how global workers, influencers, and activists develop tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that control our lives. Through rich ethnographic insights spanning the Global North and the South, this talk unveils how we are not harmless against algorithmic power. At the same time, I caution about not romanticizing algorithmic resistance considering the profound power imbalance inherent in the platform society.
March, 6th 2024 1:15-2:15pm FAB 1.01
Emiliano Treré is a Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies and Director of International Development at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. He’s a widely cited author in digital activism, critical data/algorithm studies and digital disconnection with a focus on Latin America and the Global South. He co-founded the ‘Big Data from the South’ Initiative and co-directs the Data Justice Lab. His monograph Hybrid Media Activism (Routledge, 2019) won the Outstanding Book Award of the ICA Interest Group ‘Activism, Communication and Social Justice’. Data Justice (Sage, 2022), his latest co-authored book, was the runner up of the Sage Social Justice Book Award. His latest co-authored book, Algorithms of Resistance (MIT Press, 2024), explores collective forms of power, agency and resistance in the platform society. For more info on his work: emilianotrere.com
Media and Creative Industries Research Seminars Series - CDI @ Warwick's Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies (Winter Term)
Narratives from the creative sector often center on those who, despite the challenges, manage to keep going and eventually thrive in the cultural sector or as creative professionals. The focus on quitting brings under the spotlight the others, those who, after a series of attempts at staying in the creative industries, left the sector. This presentation centers on the case of Italian graduates from a creative writing program, and it investigates their biographies and reasons for quitting. It argues that in their cases, quitting depended on a set of expectations about the meanings and practices of work in culture and on their refusal to adhere to a series of implicit rules that they had to conform to if they wanted to stay in the publishing industry.
October, 18th - 13:00 - 14:00 FAB 1.01
Medical Influencers in the Wellness Realm: Lifestyle Expertise and the Wuestion of Credentials - Rachel O'Neill (LSE)
Existing literature on wellness influencers takes for granted that such individuals lack accredited expertise, and further contends that their popularity indexes widespread public distrust in experts generally and medical professionals especially. These arguments overlook the existence of medical doctors who are themselves wellness influencers — who share dietary and lifestyle advice on social media, participate in industry trends and conventions, and monetise their followings through sponsored content and other commercial ventures. In this talk I introduce the figure of the medical influencer or ‘medfluencer’ as an object of critical enquiry, using a series of case study subjects from the UK context. Demonstrating the extent to which such individuals reproduce rather than resolve the tensions said to characterise their unaccredited counterparts, I argue that credentials are not in themselves sufficient to undo the problematics associated to wellness influencing and, moreover, may open out new realms of conflict and contradiction.
November 1st, FAB 1.01 13:00 - 14:00
Mixed Feelings: on the Platformisation of Moods and ‘Vibes’ - Ludmilla Lupinacci (Leeds)
Over the past few years, digital platforms have increasingly tailored their content to both respond to and create certain moods, vibes, atmospheres or ambiences (Roquet 2016). This trend has indeed begun to spark discussion on whether platforms such as TikTok represent the end of ‘social media’ as we know it, as the centrality of networks and interpersonal interactions is replaced by self-indulgent activities such as mindless scrolling. Engaging with those debates, in this presentation I will offer a critical assessment of social media’s current experiential turn and its specificities, and propose a critical-phenomenological framework for the theorisation of this ongoing shift precisely at the intersection of embodied affect and the political economy of platformisation. I take moods, ‘vibes’ and their mediation to be both foundational to embodied experience and yet deeply embedded in socio-technical and material practices (Highmore 2013). In this regard, this presentation also aims to engage with a discussion on how, through processes of datafication, personalisation, standardisation, and algorithmitisation (Stark 2020) bodily states such as moods become practices that can be managed through social media once those technologies become central to contemporary ‘regimes of sensory calibration’ (Starosielski 2021).
Social Networks: Exploring and Visualising with Gephi
Do you want to learn a new skill in this Autumn Term? Network analysis offers an interesting way of exploring and visualising networks between social, economic, and political actors.
In this workshop, we explore how to use the Gephi software to visualise and understand a 17th Century network. We will explore the network and consider what the patterns in the data suggest. You are encouraged to prepare for the session by reading the links from the Workshop Web Page, but this is not essential if you do not have time beforehand.
This workshop will be led by Dr Godwin Yeboah and Dr James Tripp who are Senior Research Software Engineers and part of the "Research Computing" team in the Research and Technology Platforms (they are also part of the Centre for Digital Inquiry).
Please read more (and register if interested or share) using the following webpage.
Mastodon Research Event (CFP): June 2023
Call for Presentations
Social Networks: Exploring and Visualising with Gephi
Do you want to learn a new skill in this Spring Term? Network analysis offers an interesting way of exploring and visualising networks between social, economic, and political actors.
In this workshop, we explore how to use the Gephi software to visualise and understand a 17th Century network. We will explore the network and consider what the patterns in the data suggest. You are encouraged to prepare for the session by reading the links from the Workshop Web Page, but this is not essential if you do not have time beforehand.
This workshop will be led by Dr Godwin Yeboah and Dr James Tripp (of the newly formed Information and Digital Group Technology for Research; they are also part of the Centre for Digital Inquiry).
Please read more (and register if interested or share) using the following webpage.
How to create a map for print and web using QGIS
Do you want to learn a new skill in this Spring Term? Have you ever thought of creating a basic map for a presentation or publication? What about creating an interactive web map for your own website or just to experiment how that will look in an internet browser? If you answered yes to any of these questions, and you are in Warwick, this workshop is for you!
In this introductory course, we will give you an overview on how to use different cartographic techniques to effectively present outcomes of digital data exploration using QGIS software. We assume no prior knowledge of GIS (Geographic Information System) and will explain how to get data into the GIS as well as how to produce maps using data. The workshop lead is Dr Godwin Yeboah (g.yeboah at warwick.ac.uk).
How to create a map for print and web using QGIS
Do you want to learn a new skill in this Autumn Term? Have you ever thought of creating a basic map for a presentation or publication? What about creating an interactive web map for your own website or just to experiment how that will look in an internet browser? If you answered yes to any of these questions, and you are in Warwick, this workshop is for you!
In this introductory course, we will give you an overview on how to use different cartographic techniques to effectively present outcomes of digital data exploration using QGIS software. We assume no prior knowledge of GIS (Geographic Information System) and will explain how to get data into the GIS as well as how to produce maps using data. The workshop lead is Dr Godwin Yeboah (g.yeboah at warwick.ac.uk).
How to Think About Digital Subjectivity, Nov 18th, 10am-3pm
In this intimate workshop, Olga Goriunova, Tony Sampson, and Nate Tkacz, will present their recent work. Through notions of 'conceptual personae' (Sampson), 'model characters' (Goriunova) and 'primal users' (Tkacz), each will present a different way to think about digital subjectivity. The workshop is open, but places are limited.
Register here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cdi/news-events/registration_digital_subjectivity
Tony Sampson's Guide to A Sleepwalker's Guide to Social Media
Join us for a discussion about Tony Sampson's new work of dystopian media theory. Here's a description of the book:
Positing online users as 'sleepwalkers', Tony Sampson offers an original and compelling approach for understanding how social media platforms produce subjectivities.
Drawing on a wide range of theorists, including A.N. Whitehead and Gabriel Tarde, he provides tools to track his sleepwalker through the 'dark refrain of social media': a refrain that spreads through viral platform architectures with a staccato-like repetition of shock events, rumours, conspiracy, misinformation, big lies, search engine weaponization, data voids, populist strongmen, immune system failures, and far-right hate speech. Sampson's sleepwalker is not a pre-programmed smartphone junkie, but a conceptual personae intended to dodge capture by data doubles and lookalikes. Sleepwalkers are neither asleep nor wide awake; they are a liminal experimentation in collective mimicry and self-other relationality. Their purpose is to stir up a new kind of community that emerges from the potentialities of revolutionary contagion.
At a time in which social media is influencing more people than ever, A Sleepwalker's Guide to Social Media is an important reference for students and scholars of media theory, digital media and social media.
Details:
November 17th, 4:00-5:30 pm
Online and in person
Register: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cdi/news-events/sampson_registrationLink opens in a new window