1,720,962 research outputs found
The disinformation society: Misinformation and disinformation in the late-capitalist public sphere
Get PDFThe technological ideologues and internet utopians who championed the world-wide web’s adoption promised that it would enable the smooth transfer of information with unprecedented scale and efficiency, characterising it initially as an “Information Super-Highway”. Decades later, not only have these cheery predictions not transpired, but the web and its ecosystem of dependent apps and platforms is now commonly blamed for the copious misinformation and disinformation that is said to have arisen since user-generated content became a feature of mainstream commercial media consumption. This body of work consists of two books, Filling the Void, published 2017 and After the Fact?, published 2020, and one article “What is Wrong with Social Media?”, published in 2022. These works contain a variety of analyses and theoretical contributions concerning a range of info-technological challenges that accompany the circulation of information of public importance via digital platforms, including “social media”. As well as misinformation and disinformation, these challenges include compulsive and excessive social media use, and the political-economic relations intrinsic to platform ownership. Covering the period between 2004 (when Facebook was first launched) and 2021 (when the last of the works submitted was actually written), these analyses aim to make their contribution to knowledge in two simultaneous ways. Firstly, they offer original analyses of what actually has transpired, which, besides their aspiration as scholarly contributions, are intended to provide reparative utility for media-makers and digital platforms who are serious about improving the quality of public conversation and information dispersal. Secondly, the works also challenge technocentric and positivist accounts of these phenomena on political-economic grounds, characterising them as a form of mystificatory narrative in themselves that obscures the true systemic causes of these challenges—which are also addressed as part of the analyses offered
What is Wrong with Social Media? An Anti-Capitalist Critique
Get PDFAs the liberal fantasy of a stable ‘capitalist democracy’ has steadily disintegrated in the last few years, the digital giants – Google, Apple, Twitter, and in particular, Facebook Inc. – have provided some of the most conspicuous evidence of the increasingly bitter and polarized nature of political discourse, having been amongst the main arenas in which many of these discursive conflicts have been played out. This staging has led many people to draw an association between social media and the broader political moment, and often to suggest that there might be causation between the two. There are good reasons to talk about social media together with polarization and other social and political problems. There are also many urgent criticisms of digital platforms that are much deserved, both in connection with these political circumstances and in broader political-economic terms. Unfortunately, however, many of the most frequently cited critiques of social media giants are not only inaccurate, but harmful, because of the ways in which they obscure our understanding of the threats that social media do represent, and the other more immediate causes of this political turbulence; the relative ease with which these erroneous charges can be rebutted; and the missed opportunities they amount to for understanding and protecting ourselves from social media apps appropriately, and responding to reactionary politics more effectively. To resist these criticisms can sometimes appear, to a superficial reader, to be defensive of social media corporations, but the opposite is true: in order to mobilize against the forms of capital that social media corporations represent, the world needs to stop repeating unsustainable arguments that rely on unsubstantiated claims, and that exceptionalize and isolate the pathologies of social media corporations as though they were some kind of unprecedented surprise; and to focus instead on the material and structural factors that are so commonly ignored by liberal and conservative commentaries alike. This essay will offer a summary and critique of these flawed arguments, suggest some alternative critical approaches, and then discuss some broader strategies for addressing the pathologies that social media do represent
The Wrong Speed: Left Accelerationism and The Need for a New Left Chronopolitics
No full textThis article revisits left accelerationism as a historically specific response to political paralysis and asks what, if anything, remains useful in that project under present conditions. It argues that left accelerationism emerged from a conjuncture marked by the exhaustion of inherited repertoires of struggle, the apparent stagnation of neoliberal order, and a deepening crisis of political agency. In that context, its critique of “folk politics”, its insistence that no tactic is historically inviolable, and its call for greater technological and scientific literacy on the left had genuine value. The article contends however, that the project was compromised by major conceptual and political errors: It underestimated the durability and violence of neoliberal capitalism, overstated the emancipatory potential of technologies and digital platforms formed within capitalist relations, and adopted the language of “accelerationism” despite that term’s proximity to anti-humanist and reactionary traditions associated with Nick Land. In place of any simple politics of speed, the article proposes the need for a new 'chronopolitics' that neither fetishises acceleration nor retreats into nostalgia or “slowness” as a privileged moral ideal. Such a politics would combine strategic openness, technological competence, and scientific literacy with caution, asymmetry, and sustained critique of the sociotechnical forms currently available. The argument, ultimately, is not for the intensification capitalism’s temporal (or other) logics, but for the development of a more intelligent and dialectical relation to time, memory, technology, and collective agency in conditions of ecological, political, and psycho-social crisis
Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media
No full textThis book demonstrates that, far from the rational, information-driven account of digital media that is often presumed to be a primary determinant of social media usage, particularly by those in the journalism industry and other industries concerned with factual information, a number of more complicated, social, cultural and psychological drivers explain compulsive social media use
What is Wrong with Social Media? An Anti-Capitalist Critique
No full textAs the liberal fantasy of a stable ‘capitalist democracy’ has steadily disintegrated in the last few years, the digital giants – Google, Apple, Twitter, and in particular, Facebook Inc. – have provided some of the most conspicuous evidence of the increasingly bitter and polarized nature of political discourse, having been amongst the main arenas in which many of these discursive conflicts have been played out.
This staging has led many people to draw an association between social media and the broader political moment, and often to suggest that there might be causation between the two. There are good reasons to talk about social media together with polarization and other social and political problems. There are also many urgent criticisms of digital platforms that are much deserved, both in connection with these political circumstances and in broader political-economic terms. Unfortunately, however, many of the most frequently cited critiques of social media giants are not only inaccurate, but harmful, because of the ways in which they obscure our understanding of the threats that social media do represent, and the other more immediate causes of this political turbulence; the relative ease with which these erroneous charges can be rebutted; and the missed opportunities they amount to for understanding and protecting ourselves from social media apps appropriately, and responding to reactionary politics more effectively.
To resist these criticisms can sometimes appear, to a superficial reader, to be defensive of social media corporations, but the opposite is true: in order to mobilize against the forms of capital that social media corporations represent, the world needs to stop repeating unsustainable arguments that rely on unsubstantiated claims, and that exceptionalize and isolate the pathologies of social media corporations as though they were some kind of unprecedented surprise; and to focus instead on the material and structural factors that are so commonly ignored by liberal and conservative commentaries alike. This essay will offer a summary and critique of these flawed arguments, suggest some alternative critical approaches, and then discuss some broader strategies for addressing the pathologies that social media do represent
Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media
Get PDFFilling The Void is a book about how the cultures and psychology of social media use fit within a broader landscape of life under capitalism. It argues that social media use is often a psychological response to the need for pleasure and comfort that results from the stresses of life under postmodern capitalism, rather than being a driver of new behaviours as newer technologies are often said to be. Both the explosive growth of social media and the corresponding reconfiguration of the web from an information-based platform into an entertainment-based one are far more easily explained in terms of the subjective psychological experience of their users as capitalist subjects seeking 'depressive hedonia, ' the book argues. Filling the Void also interrogates the role of social media networks, designed for private commercial gain, as part of a de-facto public sphere. Both the decreasing subjective importance of factual media and the ways in which the content of the timeline are quietly manipulated--often using labour in the developing world and secret algorithms--have potentially serious implications for the capacity of social media users to query or challenge the seeming reality offered by the established hegemonic order
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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