As TikTok exploded in popularity following the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, use from individual users skyrocketed. During this time, political content became largely ubiquitous across the app. Politics play out daily on TikTok, as individuals craft messages within the technological affordances and sociocultural dynamics of the app. This study expands on research regarding civic engagement in digital public spheres by examining and describing how TikTok shapes political expression and discourse through three technological affordances on the app: the Green Screen, the Stitch, and the Duet. While these affordances are often hailed as features that bolster user creativity through increased possible interactions, our analysis found these increased possible interactions to be highly specific, and also limited in conjunction with politics. On political TikTok, these affordances function more as political commentary than conversation, lending to an overall volatile environment.
{"title":"Us, Them, Right, Wrong: How TikTok's Green Screen, Duet, and Stitch help shape political discourse","authors":"Mackenzie Quick, Jessica Maddox","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i3.13360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i3.13360","url":null,"abstract":"As TikTok exploded in popularity following the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, use from individual users skyrocketed. During this time, political content became largely ubiquitous across the app. Politics play out daily on TikTok, as individuals craft messages within the technological affordances and sociocultural dynamics of the app. This study expands on research regarding civic engagement in digital public spheres by examining and describing how TikTok shapes political expression and discourse through three technological affordances on the app: the Green Screen, the Stitch, and the Duet. While these affordances are often hailed as features that bolster user creativity through increased possible interactions, our analysis found these increased possible interactions to be highly specific, and also limited in conjunction with politics. On political TikTok, these affordances function more as political commentary than conversation, lending to an overall volatile environment.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140255774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The discourse surrounding the potential educational transformation brought about by generative AI has largely neglected the sensory aspect of learning. In this position paper, I emphasize the significance of sensory studies and their theoretical foundations of embodiment and multimodality as catalysts for novel perspectives on the intersection of AI and the future of education. I delve into the question of whether generative AI serves as a precursor to a new literacy or merely arises as a consequence of ongoing theoretical advancements in contemporary literacy studies. I argue that the concept of agency, which includes both personal and social aspects, should be central to recognizing the importance of sensory learning as an emerging paradigm in reimagining learning futures.
{"title":"Fostering children’s agency in their learning futures: Exploring the synergy of generative AI and sensory learning","authors":"N. Kucirkova","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i3.13266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i3.13266","url":null,"abstract":"The discourse surrounding the potential educational transformation brought about by generative AI has largely neglected the sensory aspect of learning. In this position paper, I emphasize the significance of sensory studies and their theoretical foundations of embodiment and multimodality as catalysts for novel perspectives on the intersection of AI and the future of education. I delve into the question of whether generative AI serves as a precursor to a new literacy or merely arises as a consequence of ongoing theoretical advancements in contemporary literacy studies. I argue that the concept of agency, which includes both personal and social aspects, should be central to recognizing the importance of sensory learning as an emerging paradigm in reimagining learning futures.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140256231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Across global higher education contexts, students and staff are communicating online. Online communication is facilitated by the online disinhibition effect (reduction of nonverbal cues eases communication) and in turn this may make online self-presentation (behaviours used to present a desired version of the self) easier. Students may be utilising online self-presentation techniques to facilitate online communication with staff. We know that online self-presentation techniques can be advantageous, but where inappropriate they may be detrimental to the student-staff relationship. This study explores whether students are using self-presentation techniques when they communicate online with staff via an archival review of both private (e-mail messages) and public (Moodle forum posts) online educational environments. Through a deductive thematic analysis we identify that students are indeed using online self-presentation techniques but that these vary depending on whether the online educational environment is private or public. This is the first study to explore this topic via an archival review and we encourage future research to consider the role of online self-presentation techniques within student-staff communication.
{"title":"Student’s impression management and self-presentation behaviours via online educational platforms: An archival review","authors":"Beatrice Hayes, Aiman Suleiman, Dawn Watling","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i3.13280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i3.13280","url":null,"abstract":"Across global higher education contexts, students and staff are communicating online. Online communication is facilitated by the online disinhibition effect (reduction of nonverbal cues eases communication) and in turn this may make online self-presentation (behaviours used to present a desired version of the self) easier. Students may be utilising online self-presentation techniques to facilitate online communication with staff. We know that online self-presentation techniques can be advantageous, but where inappropriate they may be detrimental to the student-staff relationship. This study explores whether students are using self-presentation techniques when they communicate online with staff via an archival review of both private (e-mail messages) and public (Moodle forum posts) online educational environments. Through a deductive thematic analysis we identify that students are indeed using online self-presentation techniques but that these vary depending on whether the online educational environment is private or public. This is the first study to explore this topic via an archival review and we encourage future research to consider the role of online self-presentation techniques within student-staff communication.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140256098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper presents an account of technopolitics in Mastodon, noncommercial, decentralized social media. Mastodon’s significance has further risen in light of Twitter/X’s recent decimation of its public sphere functions; a noncommercial and ideally public alternative to commercial social media is (even more) urgently needed. The autoethnographic narrative presented here, hinging on a dispute initiated and sustained by an intemperate donkeykeeper in Europe, is idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it reveals meaningful aspects of the network’s features, which point to both the promise of such an architecture and to how it falls short in hailing other users and facilitating transparent communication, two important and related functions in democratic communication online. If we appraise Mastodon in view of civic commitments, this peculiar episode contains lessons for thinking about distribution, conviviality, and their intersections in social media. I show how Mastodon has been designed for “lossy distribution” and argue that this has implications for optimizing democratic functions of noncommercial social media.
{"title":"Showing your ass on Mastodon: Lossy distribution, hashtag activism, and public scrutiny on federated, feral social media","authors":"Christina Dunbar-Hester","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i3.13367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i3.13367","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents an account of technopolitics in Mastodon, noncommercial, decentralized social media. Mastodon’s significance has further risen in light of Twitter/X’s recent decimation of its public sphere functions; a noncommercial and ideally public alternative to commercial social media is (even more) urgently needed. The autoethnographic narrative presented here, hinging on a dispute initiated and sustained by an intemperate donkeykeeper in Europe, is idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it reveals meaningful aspects of the network’s features, which point to both the promise of such an architecture and to how it falls short in hailing other users and facilitating transparent communication, two important and related functions in democratic communication online. If we appraise Mastodon in view of civic commitments, this peculiar episode contains lessons for thinking about distribution, conviviality, and their intersections in social media. I show how Mastodon has been designed for “lossy distribution” and argue that this has implications for optimizing democratic functions of noncommercial social media.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140256399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper explores how AI policy documents mediate the stabilization of socio-technical assemblages. It does so by developing the theory-methods package of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ and applying it to the U.K.’s National AI Strategy. By centering the conceptual slipperiness of emerging technologies such as AI, this framework sheds light on how policy documents work to stabilize emerging socio-technical assemblages comprising specific actors, ideologies, flows of capital, and relationships of power. In the context of the National AI Strategy, discursive infrastructuring reveals how the document stabilises: AI as an autonomous and inevitable force; a technical/social dualism which privileges the technical over the social in driving innovation; the ‘heroic engineer’ as an individual, masculine and rational archetype; and, the U.K. as a dominant and modernising player on AI’s global stage. This assemblage does not only exist in the document’s words; it is translated into practice through the funding of institutions, the centring of technical pedagogies of AI, and the opening of visa routes for ‘globally mobile individuals’. The application of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ to the National AI Strategy thus elucidates the constitutive role of policy discourse in stabilising politically situated material-semiotic conceptions of AI.
{"title":"Infrastructuring AI: The stabilization of 'artificial intelligence' in and beyond national AI strategies","authors":"Sophie Bennani-Taylor","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i2.13568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i2.13568","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores how AI policy documents mediate the stabilization of socio-technical assemblages. It does so by developing the theory-methods package of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ and applying it to the U.K.’s National AI Strategy. By centering the conceptual slipperiness of emerging technologies such as AI, this framework sheds light on how policy documents work to stabilize emerging socio-technical assemblages comprising specific actors, ideologies, flows of capital, and relationships of power. In the context of the National AI Strategy, discursive infrastructuring reveals how the document stabilises: AI as an autonomous and inevitable force; a technical/social dualism which privileges the technical over the social in driving innovation; the ‘heroic engineer’ as an individual, masculine and rational archetype; and, the U.K. as a dominant and modernising player on AI’s global stage. This assemblage does not only exist in the document’s words; it is translated into practice through the funding of institutions, the centring of technical pedagogies of AI, and the opening of visa routes for ‘globally mobile individuals’. The application of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ to the National AI Strategy thus elucidates the constitutive role of policy discourse in stabilising politically situated material-semiotic conceptions of AI.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139845660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper we study the dimension of time in social security, namely, the requirement of claimants to adopt a particular temporality in return for entitlements. We focus on the temporal rules and mandates of Universal Credit (UC), a unified benefit in the United Kingdom that delivers payment to claimants through a dynamic, automated means-testing system. UC imposes temporality through a monthly assessment period, a unit of time that UC has made infrastructural through an automated payment system. From our empirical study, we offer two sets of examples of how UC’s particular temporality shapes claimant experience of the benefit. In these cases, the monthly assessment period conflicts with other temporalities that claimants must contend with — those set by employers through their employer payment cycle, in one, and the timeframes dictated by childcare providers and the practical needs of people with young children in the other. In both cases, a temporal mismatch leads to a loss of entitlement, a phenomenon we call temporal punitiveness.
{"title":"Automating universal credit: A case of temporal governance","authors":"Lena Podoletz, Morgan Currie","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i2.13580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i2.13580","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we study the dimension of time in social security, namely, the requirement of claimants to adopt a particular temporality in return for entitlements. We focus on the temporal rules and mandates of Universal Credit (UC), a unified benefit in the United Kingdom that delivers payment to claimants through a dynamic, automated means-testing system. UC imposes temporality through a monthly assessment period, a unit of time that UC has made infrastructural through an automated payment system. From our empirical study, we offer two sets of examples of how UC’s particular temporality shapes claimant experience of the benefit. In these cases, the monthly assessment period conflicts with other temporalities that claimants must contend with — those set by employers through their employer payment cycle, in one, and the timeframes dictated by childcare providers and the practical needs of people with young children in the other. In both cases, a temporal mismatch leads to a loss of entitlement, a phenomenon we call temporal punitiveness.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139786005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper we study the dimension of time in social security, namely, the requirement of claimants to adopt a particular temporality in return for entitlements. We focus on the temporal rules and mandates of Universal Credit (UC), a unified benefit in the United Kingdom that delivers payment to claimants through a dynamic, automated means-testing system. UC imposes temporality through a monthly assessment period, a unit of time that UC has made infrastructural through an automated payment system. From our empirical study, we offer two sets of examples of how UC’s particular temporality shapes claimant experience of the benefit. In these cases, the monthly assessment period conflicts with other temporalities that claimants must contend with — those set by employers through their employer payment cycle, in one, and the timeframes dictated by childcare providers and the practical needs of people with young children in the other. In both cases, a temporal mismatch leads to a loss of entitlement, a phenomenon we call temporal punitiveness.
{"title":"Automating universal credit: A case of temporal governance","authors":"Lena Podoletz, Morgan Currie","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i2.13580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i2.13580","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we study the dimension of time in social security, namely, the requirement of claimants to adopt a particular temporality in return for entitlements. We focus on the temporal rules and mandates of Universal Credit (UC), a unified benefit in the United Kingdom that delivers payment to claimants through a dynamic, automated means-testing system. UC imposes temporality through a monthly assessment period, a unit of time that UC has made infrastructural through an automated payment system. From our empirical study, we offer two sets of examples of how UC’s particular temporality shapes claimant experience of the benefit. In these cases, the monthly assessment period conflicts with other temporalities that claimants must contend with — those set by employers through their employer payment cycle, in one, and the timeframes dictated by childcare providers and the practical needs of people with young children in the other. In both cases, a temporal mismatch leads to a loss of entitlement, a phenomenon we call temporal punitiveness.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139845829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ben Collier, James Stewart, Shane Horgan, Daniel R. Thomas, Lydia Wilson
The targeted digital advertising infrastructures on which the business models of the social media platform economy rest have been the subject of significant academic and political interest. In this paper, we explore and theorise the appropriation of these infrastructures — designed for commercial and political advertising — by the state. In the U.K., public sector bodies have begun to repurpose the surveillance and messaging capacities of these social media platforms, along with the influencer economy, to deliver targeted behaviour change campaigns to achieve public policy goals. We explore how frameworks of behavioural government have aligned with Internet platforms’ extensive infrastructures and the commercial ecologies of professionalised strategic marketing. We map the current extent of these practices in the U.K. through case studies and empirical research in Meta’s Ad Library dataset. Although the networks of power and discourse within the ad infrastructure are indeed acting to shape the capacities of the state to engage in online influence, public bodies are mobilising their own substantial material networks of power and data to re-appropriate them to their own ends. Partly as a result of attempts by Meta to restrict the targeting of protected characteristics, we observe state communications campaigns building up what we term patchwork profiles of minute behavioural, demographic, and location-based categories in order to construct and reach particular groups of subjects. However, rather than a clear vision of a ‘cybernetic society’ of reactive information control, we instead find a heterogeneous and piecemeal landscape of different modes of power.
社交媒体平台经济的商业模式所依赖的有针对性的数字广告基础设施一直是学术界和政界关注的主题。在本文中，我们将探讨国家对这些为商业和政治广告而设计的基础设施的利用，并将其理论化。在英国，公共部门机构已开始重新利用这些社交媒体平台的监控和信息传递能力，以及影响者经济，开展有针对性的行为改变活动，以实现公共政策目标。我们探讨了行为政府框架如何与互联网平台的广泛基础设施和专业化战略营销的商业生态相协调。我们通过案例研究和对 Meta 广告库数据集的实证研究，描绘了这些实践在英国的现状。虽然广告基础设施中的权力和话语网络确实在塑造国家参与网络影响的能力，但公共机构也在调动自身大量的物质权力和数据网络，将其重新用于自身目的。部分由于 Meta 试图限制以受保护特征为目标，我们观察到国家传播活动建立了我们所说的基于细微行为、人口和位置类别的拼凑档案，以构建和接触特定的主体群体。然而，我们并没有看到一个反应式信息控制的 "控制论社会 "的清晰愿景，相反，我们发现的是一个由不同权力模式组成的异质而零碎的景观。
{"title":"Influence government, platform power and the patchwork profile: Exploring the appropriation of targeted advertising infrastructures for government behaviour change campaigns","authors":"Ben Collier, James Stewart, Shane Horgan, Daniel R. Thomas, Lydia Wilson","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i2.13579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i2.13579","url":null,"abstract":"The targeted digital advertising infrastructures on which the business models of the social media platform economy rest have been the subject of significant academic and political interest. In this paper, we explore and theorise the appropriation of these infrastructures — designed for commercial and political advertising — by the state. In the U.K., public sector bodies have begun to repurpose the surveillance and messaging capacities of these social media platforms, along with the influencer economy, to deliver targeted behaviour change campaigns to achieve public policy goals. We explore how frameworks of behavioural government have aligned with Internet platforms’ extensive infrastructures and the commercial ecologies of professionalised strategic marketing. We map the current extent of these practices in the U.K. through case studies and empirical research in Meta’s Ad Library dataset. Although the networks of power and discourse within the ad infrastructure are indeed acting to shape the capacities of the state to engage in online influence, public bodies are mobilising their own substantial material networks of power and data to re-appropriate them to their own ends. Partly as a result of attempts by Meta to restrict the targeting of protected characteristics, we observe state communications campaigns building up what we term patchwork profiles of minute behavioural, demographic, and location-based categories in order to construct and reach particular groups of subjects. However, rather than a clear vision of a ‘cybernetic society’ of reactive information control, we instead find a heterogeneous and piecemeal landscape of different modes of power.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139845843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article presents an ethnographic account of the advocacy initiative, conducted by NGO PersonalData.IO and the company Hestia.ai, that seeks to empower gig workers by helping them regain access to their personal data through data access rights, using the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. It is based on a case study of Uber drivers in Geneva that has a worldwide relevance for the gig economy. Previously self-employed, drivers are now classified as employees and their working time and earnings must be calculated according to local labour laws. We contribute to debates on algorithmic management in ride-hailing platforms by focusing on participatory methods of accountability through personal data, from an infrastructural perspective. First, we focus on the nexus between personal data protection and algorithmic management to understand the domination of ride-hailing platforms over the workers’ means of production, i.e., their personal data. We provide empirical transparency on the data structures of Uber for the sake of algorithmic accountability. These structures are utilised for their surge pricing algorithms and ultimately govern the workforce. Second, within a collective process of governance, we built participatory tools and methods for empowering gig workers and data scientists. These are means for calculating earnings and working that made explicit a new social meaning of work, i.e., “lost time between rides”.
{"title":"Governing work through personal data: The case of Uber drivers in Geneva","authors":"Jessica Pidoux, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, Jacob Gursky","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i2.13576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i2.13576","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents an ethnographic account of the advocacy initiative, conducted by NGO PersonalData.IO and the company Hestia.ai, that seeks to empower gig workers by helping them regain access to their personal data through data access rights, using the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. It is based on a case study of Uber drivers in Geneva that has a worldwide relevance for the gig economy. Previously self-employed, drivers are now classified as employees and their working time and earnings must be calculated according to local labour laws. We contribute to debates on algorithmic management in ride-hailing platforms by focusing on participatory methods of accountability through personal data, from an infrastructural perspective. First, we focus on the nexus between personal data protection and algorithmic management to understand the domination of ride-hailing platforms over the workers’ means of production, i.e., their personal data. We provide empirical transparency on the data structures of Uber for the sake of algorithmic accountability. These structures are utilised for their surge pricing algorithms and ultimately govern the workforce. Second, within a collective process of governance, we built participatory tools and methods for empowering gig workers and data scientists. These are means for calculating earnings and working that made explicit a new social meaning of work, i.e., “lost time between rides”.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139785757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper explores how AI policy documents mediate the stabilization of socio-technical assemblages. It does so by developing the theory-methods package of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ and applying it to the U.K.’s National AI Strategy. By centering the conceptual slipperiness of emerging technologies such as AI, this framework sheds light on how policy documents work to stabilize emerging socio-technical assemblages comprising specific actors, ideologies, flows of capital, and relationships of power. In the context of the National AI Strategy, discursive infrastructuring reveals how the document stabilises: AI as an autonomous and inevitable force; a technical/social dualism which privileges the technical over the social in driving innovation; the ‘heroic engineer’ as an individual, masculine and rational archetype; and, the U.K. as a dominant and modernising player on AI’s global stage. This assemblage does not only exist in the document’s words; it is translated into practice through the funding of institutions, the centring of technical pedagogies of AI, and the opening of visa routes for ‘globally mobile individuals’. The application of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ to the National AI Strategy thus elucidates the constitutive role of policy discourse in stabilising politically situated material-semiotic conceptions of AI.
{"title":"Infrastructuring AI: The stabilization of 'artificial intelligence' in and beyond national AI strategies","authors":"Sophie Bennani-Taylor","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i2.13568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i2.13568","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores how AI policy documents mediate the stabilization of socio-technical assemblages. It does so by developing the theory-methods package of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ and applying it to the U.K.’s National AI Strategy. By centering the conceptual slipperiness of emerging technologies such as AI, this framework sheds light on how policy documents work to stabilize emerging socio-technical assemblages comprising specific actors, ideologies, flows of capital, and relationships of power. In the context of the National AI Strategy, discursive infrastructuring reveals how the document stabilises: AI as an autonomous and inevitable force; a technical/social dualism which privileges the technical over the social in driving innovation; the ‘heroic engineer’ as an individual, masculine and rational archetype; and, the U.K. as a dominant and modernising player on AI’s global stage. This assemblage does not only exist in the document’s words; it is translated into practice through the funding of institutions, the centring of technical pedagogies of AI, and the opening of visa routes for ‘globally mobile individuals’. The application of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ to the National AI Strategy thus elucidates the constitutive role of policy discourse in stabilising politically situated material-semiotic conceptions of AI.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139785978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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