The Case for Establishing a Collective Perspective to Address the Harms of Platform Personalization

Personalization on digital platforms drives a broad range of harms, including misinformation, manipulation, social polarization, subversion of autonomy, and discrimination. In recent years, policy makers, civil society advocates, and researchers have proposed a wide range of interventions to address these challenges. This Article argues that the emerging toolkit reflects an individualistic view of both personal data and data-driven harms that will likely be inadequate to address growing harms in the global data ecosystem. It maintains that interventions must be grounded in an understanding of the fundamentally collective nature of data, wherein platforms leverage complex patterns of behaviors and characteristics observed across a large population to draw inferences and make predictions about individuals. Using the lens of the collective nature of data, this Article evaluates various approaches to addressing personalization-driven harms under current consideration. It also frames concrete guidance for future legislation in this space and for meaningful transparency that goes far beyond current transparency proposals. It offers a roadmap for what meaningful transparency must constitute: a collective perspective providing a third party with ongoing insight into the information gathered and observed about individuals and how it correlates with any personalized content they receive across a large, representative population. These insights would enable the third party to understand, identify, quantify, and address cases of personalization-driven harms. This Article discusses how such transparency can be achieved without sacrificing privacy and provides guidelines for legislation to support the development of such transparency

List Cultures

We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? Connecting German theories of cultural techniques to Anglo-American approaches that address similar issues, List Cultures makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn

Constitutional Challenges in the Algorithmic Society

The law struggles to address the constitutional challenges of the algorithmic society. This book is for scholars and lawyers interested in the intersections of law and technology. It addresses the challenges for fundamental rights and democracy, the role of policy and regulation, and the responsibilities of private actors

Organizational ambidexterity as a strategic decision: its relationship with strategic decision speed and the moderating role of CEO cognition and environmental dynamism under the global pandemic

The current study examines organizational ambidexterity as a strategic decision under the COVID-19 pandemic, incorporating ambidexterity in the process of decision making. Based on a survey on 144 organizational decision makers (CEOs) in Greece during the COVID-19 global pandemic crisis, the study examines how organizational ambidexterity is affected by fast decision making and the contingencies that affect this relationship, as well as whether being ambidextrous is beneficial for organizations under a global pandemic. The effects of CEOs’ cognitive characteristics and of environmental dynamism are examined as moderating factors in the newly established relationship between strategic decision speed and organizational ambidexterity. This research connects the literatures on strategic decision speed and organizational ambidexterity, by bridging micro and macro perspectives of strategic management. Findings suggest that reaching strategic decisions quickly is associated with achieving organizational ambidexterity, which in turn is associated with superior performance. Further, decision makers’ cognition and environmental dynamism moderate the relationship between strategic decision speed and achieving ambidexterity. Overall, this study sheds light on strategic management in dynamic environments, focusing on the decision-making process concerning organizational ambidexterity

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

2010 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s Fourth Annual GREAT Day. This file has a supplement of three additional pages, linked in this record.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1004/thumbnail.jp

Journalistic Practice and the Cultural Valuation of New Media: Topicality, Objectivity, Network

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, American journalism is undergoing an existential crisis provoked by the emergence of digital and networked communication. As the economic model of producing journalism is undergoing significant changes, this study argues that the crisis of journalism is primarily a cultural crisis of valuation. Because the practices that traditionally defined the exclusivity of journalism as a form of public communication have been transposed to the online and digital environment through social media and blogs, such practices no longer value journalism in the same terms like in the age of mass media. The key to understanding the cultural crisis of journalism in the present, this study argues, is to revise the traditional narrative and its associated terminologies of the institutionalization of journalism. Journalism is thus defined as a structure of public communication, which needs to be enacted by producers and audiences alike to become socially meaningful. The consequence of seeing journalism as a structure sustained through social practices is that it allows to see the relation between audiences and their journalistic media as constitutive for the social function of new media in journalism. Through the analytically central dimension of practice, the study presents key moments in the history of modern journalism, where the meaning of new media was negotiated. These moments include the emergence of topical news media oriented toward a mass market (the penny press in the 1830s) and the definition of a schema of objectivity which valued journalistic practice in professional and scientific terms around the turn of the twentieth century in analogy to photographic media. In each phase, material, cognitive and social practices helped to define the value of a given new medium for journalism. Through the schemas of topicality and objectivity, journalistic practice institutionalized a privileged structure of public communication. The legacy of defining these schemas is then regarded as the central reason for the cultural crisis of journalistic practice in the present, as practices have been transposed and re-valued to sustain either forms of alternative journalism (as peer-production) or forms of self-communication in network media like blogs. Neither the form nor the technology of the blog alone can explain this differential social relevance but only the different ways in which social practices integrated and value new media. The study synthesizes an interdisciplinary array of concepts from cultural studies, sociology and journalism studies on subjects such as public communication, interaction, news production and cultural innovation. The theoretical framework of practice theories is then applied to an extensive body of primary and secondary source material, in order to retrace the cultural valuation of new media in a historically-comparative perspective. The study offers a theoretical and empirical contribution to the analysis of cultural innovation, which can be adopted to other cultural forms and media