Big Data, Social Media and User (dis)Empowerment

Rob Heymanroheyman@vub.ac.be

@robheyman

Quick overview of the prosumer-commodity

Personalized advertising

Cookie: {visited amazon.de}

Interest Sports: {Installed ‘Runtastic’}

Sponsored story: {Friend liked Fab Europe}& {Rob has not liked Fab Europe (yet)}

Big data promise/challenge

explicit implicit Emergent 3rd party

On becoming an advertiser

Sensitive data

“We do not use sensitive personal data for advert targeting. Topics you choose for targeting your advert don’t reflect the personal beliefs, characteristics or values of users.”

Recontextualisation

In 30 months maybe… : )

Audience labour (Smythe) and the prosumer-commodity (Fuchs)

• Users/prosumers are eyeballs sold into segments to advertisers

• Prosumers create the content that attract said eyeballs“For good reason, it is harder to get worked up about the

‘exploitative’ conditions of user-generated content sites than about the depredations of sweatshop labour and workforce

exploitation.” (Andrejevic, 2012)

Filter bubble

Facebook’s filter bubble

Some numbers

Zoom out!

Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) (Morozov 2013, p. 190)

Thus, Canadian legal philosopher Ian Kerr warns of the dangers inherent in the quest to "automate human virtue," which he describes as "programming people to 'do the right thing' by constraining and in some cases altogether eliminating moral behavior through technology rather than ethics or law."

But this system will not give us a Rosa Parks

Latour 1992 – Where are the missing masses?

Constraints (Norman, 1990)• Logical: look for the fifth step• Cultural: did you read from left to right?• Physical: The New York Metro

Affordances (Gaver)

{Button}Visual constraint ‘Click on me’

{Like} Cultural constraint: ‘to share on Facebook’

{Third party image} Hidden affordance: ‘Fetch image from server’ & ‘install cookie’

Registration

Registration

Settings

Nudging is to manipulation what public relations is to advertising: it gets things done while making all the background tinkering implicit and invisible. (Morozov 2013, p. 198)

Foucault’s biopower and biopolitics

“Longtemps, un des privilèges caractéristiques du pouvoir souverain avait été {…}”“la vieille patria potestas qui donnait au père de famille romain le droit de disposer de la vie de ses enfants comme de celle de ses esclaves; il la leur avait donnée, il pouvait la leur retirer.”“mais dans les seuls cas où le souverain se trouve exposé dans son existence même: une sorte de droit de réplique.”

Two new techniques

“La vieille puissance de la mort où se symbolisait le pouvoir souverain est maintenant recouverte soigneusement par l’administration des corps et la gestion calculatrice de la vie”

What changed?

“L’homme, pendant des millénaires, est resté ce qu’il était pour Aristote: un animal vivant et de plus capable d’une existence politique; l’homme moderne est un animal dans la politique duquel sa vie d’être vivant est en question”

How to control biopower?

“Un tel pouvoir a à qualifier, à mesurer, à apprécier, à hiérarchiser, plutôt qu’à se manifester dans son éclat meurtrier”

(Foucault 1976)

“Power is defined, from this perspective, as the capacity to structure the field of action of the other, to intervene in the domain of the other’s possible actions.”

(Lazzarato 2002)

Power through the algorithm?

• “It is not that these algorithms are all encompassing and dominant but that they offer integrated affordances and boundaries around which Web 2.0 users participate. These boundaries and affordances react and reorganize themselves around the users’ engagements.“(Beer, 2009)

Biopolitics in Facebook

Boz (2012)

A new constraint: Statistical constraint

Labour on Facebook

Graph explorer

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/

One of the things I liked

Sensitive data

“We do not use sensitive personal data for advert targeting. Topics you choose for targeting your advert don’t reflect the personal beliefs, characteristics or values of users.”

Sponsored stories 2.0Action Spec

Distribution based on:• Stories published through app• Like for Page• Like for post• Check-in• Comment on any Page post

Track awareness• Number of video plays• Likes on a particular post• Number of users posting on the

page’s wall

Conversion for specific offers• Number of users who claimed the

offer• Number of users who became fan• Number of users who engaged

(comment, like, share)• Tracking pixel

Sponsored story triggers• Stories published through apps• Likes of pages• Likes of websites• Likes of page posts• Comments on page posts• Shares of page posts• Check-ins

Labour on Facebook

Labour is part of any action

Facebook is the perfect empty vessel

"I think if we're doing our job, you're not feeling like it's mediated.”“If you study a complicated mechanism without seeing that it reinscribes contridictory specifications, you offer a dull description, but every piece of an artifact becomes fascinating when you see that every wheel and crank is the possible answer to an objection. The program of action is in practice the answer to an antiprogram against which the mechanism braces itself.“ (Latour 1992)

Programme and antiprogramme

Discussion

• How to inscribe transparency?• What is the value of consent if it is nudged?• How do we evaluate empty vessels? Or

technology?– Without the producer it is a black box– I look like a conspiracy-theorist

• How do we raise awareness against things that ‘just work’?

• Can we consider users responsible?

Further reading• Fuchs, C. (2012). The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook. Television & New Media, 13(2), 139–159.

doi:10.1177/1527476411415699• Smythe, D. W. (1977). Communications: blindspot of western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Social

Theory, 1(3), 1–21.• Andrejevic, M. (2012). Expoloitation in the data mine. In C. Fuchs, K. Boersma, A. Albrechtslund, & M. Sandoval

(Eds.), Internet and surveillance. The challenges of web 2.0 and social media (pp. 71–88). London: Routledge.• Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: technology, solutionism, and the urge to fix problems that

don’t exist. London: Allen Lane.• Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In W. E. Bijker & J.

Law (Eds.), Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 225–258). Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.

• Boz. (2012, August 8). Building and testing at Facebook. Facebook Engineering. Blog. Retrieved April 23, 2013, from https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/building-and-testing-at-facebook/10151004157328920

• Beer, D. (2009). Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society, 11(6), 985.

• Gaver, W. W. (1991). Technology affordances. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 79–84). Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=108856

• Arvidsson, A. (2005). Brands: A critical perspective. Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(2), 235–258. doi:10.1177/1469540505053093