The Mediated Construction of Reality by Nick Couldry Andreas Hepp & Andreas Hepp

Author:Nick Couldry,Andreas Hepp & Andreas Hepp
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745686530
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2016-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Translating Data into Practice

There are at least five fundamental ways in which data abstracted from social experience can translate into frameworks for social practice. These connect with the dimensions in terms of which the other chapters of Parts II and III are organized.

The first relates to the organization of space.14 As Kitchin and Dodge (2011) analyse extensively, many spaces (physical, organizational, informational) are now ‘coded’. Their operations are structured through the software that processes data inputs of various sorts: the highly controlled space of the airport security queue is one clear example (2011, Chapter 7), entry into which is impossible without having met various data-related conditions in a prescribed sequence. This is an aspect of the rise, more generally, of the automated management of social processes. Unlike traditional surveillance, this form of control allows no gaps, since it operates through ‘a grammar of action’, that is, ‘a systematic means of representing aspects of the world [. . .] and an organized language for processing those representations’ (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011, p. 80, drawing on Agre, 1994). Under these conditions, the spaces Kitchin and Dodge call ‘code/spaces’ are figurations (in our term) of a particular, highly organized sort, driven by today’s complex forms of interdependency.15 Social media platforms feel like ‘spaces’ where, quite simply, we encounter others, but their existence is shaped by the underlying operation of platform software and its calculative infrastructure. Insofar as they create publics, these are ‘calculative publics’ (Gillespie, 2014, pp. 188–191), not that calculability itself is new: Weber (1978, p. 975) already saw this a century ago as ‘the peculiarity of modern culture’, but it has a constitutive role today that is unprecedented.

A related point can be made about the time of online media. Online media encourage us to operate in a distinctive time of required reactions related to the ‘expected’ rhythms of platform interaction: the Facebook timeline, the Twitter hashtag stream (Weltevrede et al., 2014). This time is not natural but the result of configuring time-sequenced data in a particular array designed to stimulate ever more interaction. We relate to this array as if it were a natural production by the human parties involved in the exchange, yet without the data-based presentation of the platform, there would be no mutual orientation in space–time, and so no ‘interaction’. Many platform devices (such as email reminders) are designed to train people to rejoin the flow of what has been called ‘social media time’ (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014), should they slip out of it. This helps stabilize new data-based figurations that can function as ‘social metronomes’ (Neverla, 2010, p. 183).

The third translation operates at the level of the self. Each of us is familiar with the need to operate as a self under various descriptions: difficulties arise when contradictory descriptions of ourselves converge on a single interaction, and this much is familiar from social phenomenology. Unfamiliar from that classic work is the idea that each of us has not just a self-based identity (vis-à-vis the state or corporation

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.