Understanding Digital Literacy in the Age of Attention Economy

Posted on May 29, 2024 in Other subjects

Critical Digital Literacy

09/01/18

Rheingold’s Five Digital Literacies

• Attention
• “Crap Detection”
• Participation
• Collaboration
• Network Smarts

Five Areas of Critical Digital Literacy

• Economy
• Security/Privacy
• Culture
• Technology
• Identity

Five Resources Model of Critical Digital Literacy

• Decoding
• Meaning Making
• Using
• Persona
• Analysing

The Attention Economy

16/01/18

• “Attention” – a key aspect in the development of “media/communication” studies
• Rheingold: Attention as one of the most important “digital literacies”
• “Attention” as a key economic resource
• “Attention” as a key cognitive resource

Plato: Phaedrus

• Had worries about writing on the quality of memory
• Create a resemblance of truth

“Amusing Ourselves to Death”

• Feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance
• Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information

Harold Innis’ Media Theory

• Preface: “Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?”
• What are the “biases” of different media?
• How do different media support or undermine “monopolies of knowledge?”

Marshall McLuhan’s Media Theory

• Different media tune our attention in particular ways
• Sensory biases of different media & media environments
• All media involve “figure/ground” relationships
• “All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of inattention (ground)”
• “We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish”

Media as “Attentional Forms”

Economic Basis of Attention?

• Attention is a kind of strange economic resource
• It’s this way due to broader economic changes
• Google and Facebook are merchants of attention

Media and Economics of Attention

• Dominant system: “Commercial Media”
• Dallas Smythe (and others) forward “audience commodity” thesis
• Primary product of commercial media is the production of audiences
• Selling eyes & ears
• Audiences perform important “work” for advertisers and media interests

“The Information Society”

• Underpins shifts in government policy
• Articulated in neoliberal policies
• Information Society different from Industrial Society
• Goal of production is less to make and circulate things
• More about producing changes in “relationship, image, and perception”
• Shifts in employment
• Rise of the “knowledge economy”
• Post-industrial society

The Attention Economy

• Competition for attention has fueled the rise of “infotainment”
• Goal: capture and monetize attention
• Clickbait
• Content Farms
• Real-Time Bidding
• Attention is both scarce AND measurable
• E.G. Real-Time Bidding (Rubicon Project)
• Digital media act as “attentional assemblages”
• Mobile Media → Apps
• Measurement = clicks, downloads, likes, views, followers, shares, “impressions” etc…
• Attention “a new currency of business”
• New kind of “capital?”
• Branding key to the process of building attentive capital
• “By consuming attention and making it scarce, the wealth of information creates poverty that in its turn produces the conditions for a new market to emerge. This new market requires specific techniques of evaluation and units of measurement (algorithms, clicks, impression, tags, etc.). (Terranova)
• Attentions (as a scarce resource) is consumed by information (an abundant resource)
• Our modern mediated condition is characterized by a “serious poverty of attention”

Attention Theft

• Companies that seize our attention for nothing in exchange or without our consent
• Gas Station TV; tv embedded in gasoline pumps, blast ads at a captive consumer
• Waiting room ads; Taxi TV, movie theater, other examples
• “Happens anywhere you find your time and attention taken without consent”
• “Combined they threaten to make us live life in a screen-lined cocoon, yet one that leaves us more like larva than butterflies, shrunken and incapable of independent thought

• What makes it theft?
• Neuroscience has established that our brain’s resources are involuntarily triggered by sound and motion
• Screen “seize scarce mental resources”
• EG auto-play videos on Instagram
• Given the “market value” of time and attention, when taken without consent or compensation, similar to taking money from your pocket
• Keyword is “Consent”

• Effects on mental health just starting to be understood
• “Constant switching between stimuli… degrades our perceptions, influences our language, hinders effective decision making, and derails our ability to capture and recall detained memories of life effects”
• Greater effect on children, teens, vulnerable populations
• Freedom of thought and free will

The Filter Bubble

23/01/18

• Like the Echo chamber
• If someone is interested in X and Y is similar, Y will show up as well
• Shows people things that make them happy and want to engage in the service
• Algorithmic feedback mechanism that predicts what the person’s next place of interest would be
• Things like Google, Facebook, etc.
• Bubble of your interests and search subjects
• Keeps views and ideas similar, different ideas and views are prohibited

• Filter bubbles and echo chambers have a political cost to them
• Have billions of people whose internet lives are shaped around these environments can be problematic

Two Ways to Conceptualize the Filter Bubble

• Passive
• Active

• Credibility and ranking is only as viable as the people ranking themselves

Democracy and Filtering

‘Active’ Filter Bubbles

• How to develop skills and strategies for filtering content
• Determining good/accurate information and content
• Minimizing eliminating “crap”
• Rheingold: Harnessing filter bubble capabilities is a key digital…..
  
• Rheingold: Critical Consumption of Information:
• Information
• Authority
• Credibility
• Accuracy
• Sourcing
• Others?

• Who is the author?
• What are the author’s sources?
• “Easywhois” – find out who owns a website
• Are they funded by advertising? If so what kind of advertising?
• How much traffic do they get?
• Alexa.com
• Network-tools.com
• Do they allow you to engage

• Credibility is “always a perceived quality”
• Measure of how accurate you think the information is
• Shaped by a variety of factors
• “Credibility and highly regarded brands reduce the burden of investigating the credibility of information online” (81)
• Not always 100% accurate

The Digital Panopticon

30/01/18

Active Filter Bubbles

• Credibility is “always a perceived quality”
• Measure of how accurate you think the information is
• Shaped by a variety of factors
• “Credentials and highly regarded brands reduce the burden of investigating the credibility of information online.” (81)
• Not always 100% accurate

• Perception of credibility affected by a variety of cues (82):
• Position on search results page
• Popularity of site
• Tone of writing
• Proof of ‘neutral affiliation
• Previous personal experience with the site

• Sample survey of university students suggests they “would be willing to compromise certainty about credibility for speed and convenience.” (82)
• How to assess the trade-off?
• Google PageRank algorithm built on popularity as a measure of credibility
• Familiarize yourself with “anatomy of search page results” (87)

• Don’t just trust one source – triangulate
• Use a variety of criteria to assess credibility
• “People who link and forward without checking closely are part of the problem.” (91)
• Content Curation!
• Infotention (attention to information)
• P. 96-108

Content Curation

• Content curation as “new media organization”
• To organize, to select for presentation, to preserve, or to cure/heal
• “Curation as ‘value-added” media
• Curation as digital literacy

Surveillance as Embedded & Infrastructural

What is Surveillance?

Panopticon

• A metaphor for understanding how fields of visibility are created
• Relationships of power/control map onto fields of visibility
• Who is visible and to whom; for what purpose?
• Awareness of visibility can shape (or reform) the behaviour of the individual
• Lack of awareness of visibility can enable various forms/intensities of manipulation

“Digital Panopticon”

• FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) has become a real problem

Dataveillance

• What does “data visibility” mean?
• Aggregation
• Profiling
• Prediction
• Feedback

The Price of Connection

Surveillance Capitalism

• New Infrastructure of connection
• The Internet; TCP/IP
• “changes the scale on which human beings are in touch with each other.”

• Economic pressure driving the intensification of connection and monitoring of everyday life
• Brings corporate interests deeper into the spaces of social life
• Targeted advertising, consumer tracking
• “Online platforms… are a way of optimizing the overlap between the domains of social interaction and profit”

• “Capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and processing: it is as if social itself has become the new target of capitalism’s expansion.”

‘Platform Capitalism’

• Creating digital spaces where certain activities can happen
• People can socialize, buyers can interact, etc.

Your Data Double

Profiling Machines

You Are What You Click

• Micro-targeting, + filter bubble
• Marketing and advertising industry seek to classify all users to make customized/targeted ads more cost-effective
• Privacy, anonymity?
• Your value as a target also depends on socioeconomic class, your credit, your purchasing record, but also gender, race, ethnicity…

Democratization of Surveillance

Embedded Beings

13/02/18

• Individual “autonomy” (self-rule) a cherished goal of the Enlightenment
• At the heart of tech utopians theorizing the prosumer
• Blending of our minds and devices
• Rise of neuromarketing and “Persuasive technologies” designed to change people’s attitudes and behaviours deployed throughout society
• Rise of “social engineering”
• “Nudge” decision making
• Privacy a crucial aspect of autonomy (re: privacy interfaces)

Prosumption: Labour of the Self

Prosumption and Participatory Culture

Participatory Culture:

• Low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
• Strong support for creating and sharing creations of others
• Informal mentorship where what is known by the most experienced passed on to movies
• Members believe contributors matter
• Members believe contributions matter
• Members who feel some degree of social connection

Rheingold: Participatory Power

• Architecture of Participation
• Genres of participation:
• Friendship driven
• “Hanging out”; using

• Interest-driven
• “Created by people who have not previously known each other but use digital media to find each other, hang out, and share the products of their mutual interest”
• – E.G. Reddit; Twitch, BoardgameGeek, others?

The Global Village

• How electric media connects us
• Space and Time are shrunk down and we can connect to everyone in a small area

Satellite Communication

• Way to communicate across borders, didn’t need cables, wires, it was easy to connect

Flexibility

• Flexible workforce
• In the global market, things are changing rapidly

Work-Life Balance

Tech Boom

A Sociology of the Smartphone

• Smartphones have altered the texture of everyday life, digesting many long-standing spaces and rituals, and transforming others beyond recognition

The Condition of Immediacy

Digital Semiotics

20/03/18

Social Network as Interface – QUESTION ON EXAM

• Social networking platforms offer interfaces with other networked individuals
• Content is networked together, organized by (linked to) individual users
• Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat offers interfaces for enabling social capacities..

Social Network Platform as Interface

• Social network structure mediated by platform (e.g. Facebook)
• Social networks

• Shift from group-centric societies towards network-centric societies
• Group-centric: all individuals know each other
• Network-centric: individuals likely do not know each other
• Networks are also the generators of value; hence profitability

Three Laws of Network Value

• Sarnoff’s Law: in broadcast media the value of the network increases arithmetically with the number of receivers
• More receivers, more value

• Metcalf’s law: the value of many-to-many networks (e.g. Internet) increases even more quickly than broadcast (etc.) because adding nodes multiplies the reach of each node
• Value increases with n²

• Reed’s Law: many-to-many platforms served as platforms for human group formation; increase utility because the value of each node is multiplied by not only the number of other nodes it can communicate with but also by the potential number of groups it can communicate with
• Reed outlines three

Value in Networks

• Types of network value can be seen in the evolution of the Internet:
• Earliest usage dominated by terminals accessing a small number of timesharing hosts
• E.G. database, servers, etc
• “Content is King”, Netflix
• In the 90s traffic was dominated by newsgroups, mailing lists, special interest websites, etc…
• “Group Forming Networks” (GFN)
• The central role is filled by jointly constructed value
• “Many kinds of transactions and collaboration that had been conducted outside the Internet became absorbed into the growth of the Internet’s functions…”(201)

• The Network offers a key concept for understanding many new digitally-enabled phenomena
  

The Power of Networks

• Castells outlines 7 ways that technologically mediated social networks are transforming society:
• First: three networks are global, transmit time for information is instantaneous
• Second: networked organizations “outcompete” command-and-control bureaucracies
• Third: networking of civil and political institutions is a response to the governance crisis of nation-states
• Fourth: networks of activists are restructuring civil society at local and global levels
• Fifth: networked individualism, visual communities, and smart mobs are redefining sociality
• Sixth: “media space” now encompasses the whole range of human social practices
• Seventh: power is located in the networks that structure society

Networked Individualism

• Rainy & Wellman: characteristics of individuals who will thrive in the emerging networked environment
• “Those who can act as autonomous agents to cultivate their personal networks and their personal brands
• “Those with bigger and more diverse networks”
• “Those who can function effectively in different contexts and ‘collapsed context.”

Social Capital

• Measure of social cohesion and solidarity
• “Paying it forward”
• Trust and reciprocity
• Online social networks can intensify and broaden the ability to build social capital
• Develop and diversify networks of solidarity and trust
• Create new opportunities to “pay it forward”

Semiotics

Three Types of Signs

• Icons
• Index
• Symbol

Digital Semiotics

• Multimedia functions of computer technology allow flexible/malleable contextual meanings
• Video, images, sounds, emoticons can be “remixed” in ways not previously possible
• New meanings arise, are more volatile, and rely increasingly on “insider knowledge” provided by peer networks

• Digital/Social Networks allow for the rapid circulation of content and meanings
• “Viral” content
• Meme-ification of content
• Digital content “sampled” in order to become part of a larger grammar and syntax
• E.G. Gifs create small loops that act as a new type of grammar

• Digital Semiotics makes “context” more difficult to capture
• Speed of circulation
• Tension between specialized meanings and “open” forums
• Greater difficulty in stabilizing meaning among heterogenous online audiences/users

Digital “Objects”

• Digital “objects” lack fixity
• As phenomena produced via code they are subject to change and annotation
• They circulate through social networks, and their contextual meanings can change