The Political Economy of New Media Revisited

This paper defines media platforms in terms of the theory of traditional two-sided media markets, then goes on to develop the theory to include content providers as a third side of the market (the “platformisation of media”), the widespread introduction of sellable meta-information about the platform network (the “mediatisation of platforms”), and the importance of social networking technologies to the media platform. Issues of concern raised by this include privacy, intellectual property, and equity. Genres of resistance to unwanted visibility and invisibility, such as spoofing, spamming, fingering and silencing are also noted

Search engine bias: the structuration of traffic on the World-Wide Web

Search engines are essential components of the World Wide Web; both commercially and in terms of everyday usage, their importance is hard to overstate. This thesis examines the question of why there is bias in search engine results – bias that invites users to click on links to large websites, commercial websites, websites based in certain countries, and websites written in certain languages. In this thesis, the historical development of the search engine industry is traced. Search engines first emerged as prototypical technological startups emanating from Silicon Valley, followed by the acquisition of search engine companies by major US media corporations and their development into portals. The subsequent development of pay-per-click advertising is central to the current industry structure, an oligarchy of virtually integrated companies managing networks of syndicated advertising and traffic distribution. The study also shows a global landscape in which search production is concentrated in and caters for large global advertising markets, leaving the rest of the world with patchy and uneven search results coverage. The analysis of interviews with senior search engine engineers indicates that issues of quality are addressed in terms of customer service and relevance in their discourse, while the analysis of documents, interviews with search marketers, and participant observation within a search engine marketing firm showed that producers and marketers had complex relationships that combine aspects of collaboration, competition, and indifference. The results of the study offer a basis for the synthesis of insights of the political economy of media and communication and the social studies of technology tradition, emphasising the importance of culture in constructing and maintaining both local structures and wider systems. In the case of search engines, the evidence indicates that the culture of the technological entrepreneur is very effective in creating a new megabusiness, but less successful in encouraging a debate on issues of the public good or public responsibility as they relate to the search engine industry

Faces and charts : platform strategies for visualising the audience, the case of Facebook

Although the audience as an industrial media product has been scrutinised by scholars for decades, the visual presentation of the audience has been nearly absent from scholarly analysis. This article examines the interfaces that Facebook uses to present its audience to three different user groups (ordinary Facebook members, publishers, and finally advertisers) using a social semiotic analytical framework to analyse visuals, interactive elements and desired user paths. The interface displayed to ordinary users, the Facebook Friends page, uses a visual language with roots in the college yearbook, showing rows of faces with minimal available interactivity. This interface preserves the humanity of the audience, suggesting egalitarian social structures and timeless space outside Facebook's ordinary flow. The interfaces displayed to institutional users, Page Insights and Audience Insights, for publishers and advertisers respectively, are quite different, characterised by a multiplicity of charts and high interactivity, with a clear path for the user that ends in 'boosting' your page or 'buying' your audience. The Audience Insights pages for advertisers feature advanced interactive tools which use the conventions of experimental science. These two interfaces do significant rhetorical work, dehumanising and abstracting audiences into data quantities which can be packaged as products, and encouraging publishers to focus on the production of data measuring engagement. Both the promotion of the value of data and the elision of audience work and surveillance, graphically represented in the different interfaces, help platform businesses like Facebook strategically, by increasing the value of their data and by suppressing audience concerns about surveillance

Stretching immersion in virtual reality : How glitches reveal aspects of presence, interactivity and plausibility

Virtual reality (VR) immerses users in others’ lives, creating empathy and understanding long after the VR scenario has finished. As VR technology has matured, VR scenarios have begun to be used in complex real-world areas such as education, health and organisational change. These scenarios can be of variable technical quality, with limited interactive capacity, unrealistic environments and clunky or absent avatars. In this study, three scenarios related to gender inequality training were constructed with glitches in the core immersive qualities of presence, interactivity and plausibility in order to understand their effect on the immersive experience. Using a multi-step in-depth series of qualitative interviews to examine the whole immersive process, the results show that immersion is not compromised but changed by glitches. Limited interactivity led to uncomfortable interactions that allowed participants to process difficult emotions; implausible situations surfaced buried norms and prejudices; and avatar variation gave rise to a sense presence that also included distance, which gave the user opportunities for critical reflection. These results point towards immersion as a robust and richly textured concept, while interactivity, plausibility and presence can best be understood as dimensions rather than goals. Totally seamless and immersive experiences may not only be utopian but also unnecessary. The glitches in low-end productions can produce powerful communication without expensive technology