Launching the LSE Media Policy Project Brief 1: Public responses

The LSE Media Policy Project’s first policy brief, entitled ‘Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection’, was successfully launched last week on the eve of the judicial review for the Digital Economy Act (DEA) began a few days later on March 23. The report authors, Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng advocate file-sharing as an important activity in participatory culture responsible for fostering creativity and innovation; rather than as a criminal activity requiring often repressive copyright enforcement measures

Peggy Valcke on EU Approaches to Monitoring Media Pluralism

Professor Peggy Valcke, director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law & ICT (ICRI) and research professor at K.U.Leuven, spoke at yesterday’s Media Policy Project expert workshop on ‘Assessing Media Plurality’. Professor Valcke addressed OfCom’s approach to media pluralism in light of the EU Media Pluralsim Monitor and provided an excellent overview to media pluralism in the EU

Expert meeting on media literacy

The LSE Media Policy Project hosted an expert meeting on media literacy last week and is pleased with the outcome – stimulating debate and lively discussion! The slides are hosted on Scribd

Book review: the ambivalent internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online by Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner

In The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity and Antagonism Online, Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner explore the contradictions and paradoxes of the internet as a realm of ‘vernacular creativity’ . This is a thoughtprovoking and original study that diverges from a ‘good or bad’ binary to instead demonstrate the messy ambivalence of internet culture today, writes Dr Zoetanya Sujon

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and Understanding Social Media Beyond the Screen

One of the challenges many HE professionals face in classrooms geared towards teaching or learning about social media, is teaching apparently digitally savvy students who feel their intense familiarity with social media is the same as critical understanding. While some may indeed be critical and indeed, possess a sophisticated understanding of algorithms, privacy, and the complex structures of social media, many do not. As such, guiding learners to move beyond their experience of the newsfeed, stream, or front page can be tremendously challenging as well as tremendously rewarding. This chapter examines one approach for dealing with this sometimes difficult teaching context, providing a broad overview of the growing importance for critical perspectives on social media. Beginning with an outline of the rich variety of student experiences, this chapter contextualizes some of the learning challenges I have encountered in my own classrooms while teaching social media, challenges which require an open classroom and a critical view of the idea of ‘digital natives’. This chapter also presents Facebook, particularly its interactions with Cambridge Analytica, as an ideal case for tackling the complexities of social media and pushing users beyond the social experience. The aim of this section is to examine the importance of personal data as the core business model of Facebook, and most mainstream or corporate social media. Finally, this chapter includes three key exercises that can be used in classrooms to help learners to understand how Facebook works and some of what the Cambridge Analytica case reveals about social media. In sum, the purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the best ways to bring critical thinking into the experience of social media by providing a mix of theory and practical tasks so that learners can understand concepts of personal data collection and ‘surveillance capitalism’ in relation to their own Facebook accounts and social media use. The Cambridge Analytica case is particularly important and effective for engaging learners’ critical understanding of social media and moving their perspective beyond the screen

New technologies and the idea of citizenship: patterns of public participation in two cases

Many kinds of social, participatory and citizen oriented platforms make up today's media landscape. Many claim that open source and collaborative media change the ways we think about citizenship (Jenkins). Tim O'Reilly claims that Web 2.0 applications "have a natural architecture of participation" (2005). Yet social constructionists, feminists and sceptics caution against attributing new technologies with these kinds of natural characteristics. Drawing from the cultural history of early internet and mobile technologies, this research asks what, is meaningful about technologically specific ideas of citizenship. In order to answer this question, I draw from theories of standard and cultural citizenship; analyze a sample of technologically specific ideas of citizenship (e.g. netizenship, e-citizenship, technological citizenship, cyber citizenship); and conduct in depth empirical analysis of two case studies. Theoretically, this research synthesizes and builds upon citizenship theories beginning with T. H. Marshall and followed by cultural citizenship (e.g. Pakulski 1997; Isin and Wood 1999; Stevenson 2001; 2003). From this conceptual frame, the empirical patterns of connection are analyzed along three primary axes: membership systems; rights and obligations; and participatory strategies. Technologically specific ideas of citizenship fit well with theories of cultural citizenship and cultural rights closely resemble most of those rights that are also technologically specific such as rights to: participate, ideational and symbolic spheres, voice, to representation and to innovate. The cases are of two citizenship initiatives using internet or mobile platforms: the BBC's iCan project and Proboscis' Urban Tapestries project. While these projects emerged on the cusp of social media, both cases are early iterations of participatory media. Both cases provide insights into articulations of changing ideas of citizenship and participatory practices. Technologically specific ideas of citizenship are conditional. Project users engage different kinds of membership than producers and there is an uneven distribution of cultural rights which favours producers. As a result, users engage different and mostly shallow patterns of public participation. In contrast, producers have broader membership networks, stronger protection of rights and show more variation in deeper more collectively oriented participatory strategies. In the case of limited or partial forms of participation, findings suggest that citizenship language is used as an active manipulative strategy to centralize media organizations as dominant public sites. I argue that the characteristics of technologically specific ideas of citizenship mark a distinct moment in the history of media and citizenship; a moment characterized by the emergence of "public citizenship." The idea of public citizenship attempts to capture the ways in which technologically specific ideas of citizenship, at least in practice, involve making space for ordinary people in cultural institutions

Disruptive Play or Platform Colonialism? The Contradictory Dynamics of Google Expeditions and Educational Virtual Reality

This paper provides an exploratory case study Google Expeditions(GE), a virtual reality (VR) toolkit designed for the classroom, and its roll-out in the UK through the “pioneer program”. Drawing from existing research on Google, platform studies, and interdisciplinary work on the digital landscape, this paper examines the conflicting tensions around the logic of Google for Education (GFE) and the tangled user experiences of GE within a higher education context. Findings are drawn from participant observation of a one day GE trial; participant observation of 396 people’s mostly first-time experience with GE; a post-trial survey with those predominantly first-time users (N = 100); and participant observation of invite-only GFE events organized by Apps Events on GFE’s behalf. In addition to providing a detailed insight into the roll-out of a rising educational Google product, findings suggest GE engages contradictory dynamics. On one hand, users experience exciting, disruptive play, and on the other, the pioneer program extends Google’s platform empire, colonizing educational space and those within it

Disruptive Play or Platform Colonialism? The Contradictory Dynamics of Google Expeditions and Educational Virtual Reality

This paper provides an exploratory case study Google Expeditions (GE), a virtual reality (VR) toolkit designed for the classroom, and it’s roll-out in the UK through the “pioneer program”. Drawing from existing research on Google, platform studies, and interdisciplinary work on the digital landscape, this paper examines the conflicting tensions around the logic of Google for Education (GFE) and the tangled user experiences of GE within a higher education context. Findings are drawn from participant observation of a one day GE trial; participant observation of 396 people’s mostly first time experience with GE; a post-trial survey with those predominantly first-time users (N = 100); and participant observation of invite-only GFE events organized by Apps Events on GFE’s behalf. In addition to providing a detailed insight into the roll-out of a rising educational Google product, findings suggest GE engages contradictory dynamics. On one hand, users experience exciting, disruptive play, and on the other, the pioneer program extends Google’s platform empire, colonizing educational space and those within it

The Triumph of Social Privacy: Understanding the Privacy Logics of Sharing Behaviors Across Social Media

Current scholarship positions privacy as something that is networked and complex, shifting away from ideas of privacy as individualized and control oriented. Drawing from a small sample of in-depth research using media diaries, interviews, and a small survey (N = 270) of London, United Kingdom, residents 18–37 years of age, this research examines the tensions between privacy and sharing culture as lived experiences, revealing three themes. First, privacy matters, and second, respondents identify their experiences of sharing and understandings of privacy in more traditional privacy terms: as an individualized right focused on control, pointing to a disconnect between sharing culture and concepts of privacy. Third, respondents describe their sharing behaviors as clearly shaped by privacy logics, almost entirely driven by social rather than institutional privacy. These social privacy logics are made visible through “private sharing,” “public friends,” and the depersonalization of shared public content. These evolving ways of navigating sharing culture point to the apparent triumph of social privacy over institutional privacy,but they also reveal a platform failure to make institutional privacy coherent in respondents’ lives

The Rise of Platform Empires: Sociality as Mass Deception

The Cambridge Analytica ‘scandal’ revealed the collection of mass amounts of data not only from willing Facebook participants, but also from their non-consenting Facebook friends. In this paper, I argue that mass, secret data collection from willing and unwilling users (and non-users) is not a scandal, rather it is an industry standard driving the working business model for social media and digital platforms. The Cambridge Analytica case provides deep insight into this business model and into Facebook’s role in the rise of platform empires shaping social interaction, global economics, and not only surveillance capitalism but also data colonialism (Zuboff 2019; Couldry & Meijas 2019). While GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, TenCent) make up these platform empires, Facebook has led the way in presenting social connection as its primary aim, rather than the increasingly sophisticated collection of personal data in exchange for highly profitable targeted advertising. This mass deception is hugely significant because: it has historic precedents in the culture industries (e.g. Adorno & Horkheimer 1944; Smythe 1981); it presents digital sociality as an experience of connection and visibility while also transforming sociality into a process for invisibly producing data; and it obscures the protection of privacy-as-a-right through a complex language of copyrights and data ownership. It is this kind of deceptive sociality which promotes the rise of platform empires (and platform imperialism), eroding social privacy and transforming ordinary people into data subjects