| 1. |
- Bolin, Göran, 1959-, et al.
(författare)
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Audience-metric continuity? Approaching the meaning of measurement in the digital everyday
- 2020
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Ingår i: Media Culture and Society. - : Sage Publications. - 0163-4437 .- 1460-3675. ; 42:7-8, s. 1193-1209
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article argues for an expansion of existing studies on the meaning of metrics in digital environments by evaluating a methodology tested in a pilot study to analyse audience responses to metrics of social media profiles. The pilot study used the software tool Facebook Demetricator by artist Ben Grosser in combination with follow-up interviews. In line with Grosser’s intentions, the software indeed provoked reflection among the users. In this article, we reflect on three kinds of disorientations that users expressed, linked to temporality, sociality and value. Relating these to the history of audience measurement in mass media, we argue that there is merit in using this methodology for further analysis of continuities in audience responses to metrics, in order to better understand the ways in which metrics work to create the ‘audience commodity’.
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| 2. |
- Brodie, Patrick, et al.
(författare)
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Cloud ruins : Ericsson's Vaudreuil-Dorion data centre and infrastructural abandonment
- 2021
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Ingår i: Information, Communication and Society. - : Routledge. - 1369-118X .- 1468-4462.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The past decade has seen the accelerated growth and expansion of large-scale data centre operations across the world to support emerging consumer and business data and computation needs. Built out rapidly, these emergent digital infrastructures carry the promise for new local industrial futures, all while their paths to obsolescence are shortened. Their lifespans are dependent on financial speculation, shifting corporate strategies, and advances in consumer technology. In this article we track the promise and afterlife of an abruptly abandoned data centre constructed by the global telecom giant Ericsson in Vaudreuil-Dorion, a town near Montréal, Québec, Canada, in order to expand emergent debates about digital ruination. Employing site visits, press reports, and qualitative interviews with architects and staff involved with the data centre's development in Sweden and Canada, we propose ‘cloud ruins’ as a sensitising concept to capture some of the specific meanings and material articulations that the abandonment of global data infrastructures may evoke in local contexts. Simultaneously familiar and novel, cloud ruins anticipate an emergent landscape of post-digital ruination that unfolds in the built environment in peripheral communities, part of the global logistical cities from within which our contemporary understandings of digitalisation are produced.
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| 3. |
- Forsler, Ingrid, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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Efficient Worker or Reflective Practitioner? : Competing Technical Rationalities of Media Software Tools
- 2018. - 1
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Ingår i: Technologies of Labour and the Politics of Contradiction. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783319762784 - 9783319762791 ; , s. 99-119
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The work of creators of digital media today is profoundly reliant on the use of specialised software. Yet, software is not merely an instrument of labour. The current hegemonies of society are incorporated in the technological design of tools, explicating what Feenberg (2009) calls technical rationality. Different production frameworks can embed distinct forms of such rationality depending on the goals of their creators. Drawing on theories of knowledge and feminist theory of technological development, Forsler and Velkova present an analysis of the production frameworks of three different manufactures of software tools for computer graphics, both industrial and user-driven. The chapter contributes with a conceptual theoretical model of how these frameworks are underpinned by different epistemological assumptions and competing visions of media practitioners.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Kaun, Anne, 1983-, et al.
(författare)
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In the Shadows of the Digital Economy : The Ghost Work of Infrastructural Labor
- 2020
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Ingår i: Selected Papers of Internet Research 2020. - : The Association of Internet Researchers.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- What does digital piecework have in common with laboring in the warehouse of a large online shopping platform? How is data cleaning related to digitization work and AI training in prisons? This panel suggests bringing these diverse ways of laboring in the digital economies together by considering these practices as infrastructural labor that takes the shape of shadow work (Illich, 1981) and ghost labor (Gray & Suri, 2019). Work and labor in modern, capitalist society imply power, authority and possibility for resistance, and these dimensions are crucial for understanding why and how infrastructures are realized and how they work. Infrastructure labor is ambiguous. It is both visible and invisible depending on the specific tasks and their inherent power relations (Leigh Star & Strauss, 1999). It includes both manual and cognitive labor. It is geared towards innovation as well as repair, maintenance and servitude. The panel aims to paint the contours of infrastructural labor at the margins of digital economies pointing towards forms of alienation and resistance that have for long been part of labor relations, but that are renegotiated in the context of emerging technologies within digital economies that need human labor to be sustained and further innovated.
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| 6. |
- Libertson, Frans, et al.
(författare)
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Data-center infrastructure and energy gentrification : perspectives from Sweden
- 2021
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Ingår i: Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1548-7733. ; 17:1, s. 153-162
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Which societal functions should be prioritized when the electricity grid reaches its maximum capacity? By using Sweden as an example, this policy brief discusses the societal negotia- tions that arise around capacity deficits of the electricity grid. By introducing the term energy gentrification, we aim to highlight the potential dangers of failing to recognize that energy also constitutes a societal resource, and like any other resource of the built environ- ment, it is exposed to the risk of exploitation if left unprotected. We propose energy gentrifi- cation as an analytical perspective, through which negotiations and potential conflicts can be studied when grid owners must prioritize who should be connected to the grid. In rela- tion to previous research on gentrification, we identify several parallels to the Swedish case of data centers, such as the relative prioritization of global versus local capital, the competi- tion over resources, the allusion to promises of job opportunities and regional development for justification, and the tradeoffs between common goods versus private interests. The per- spective of energy gentrification offers a useful approach for inquiring into the ethical dimensions of energy policies and for highlighting the bureaucratic nature of energy policy decision-making. The policy brief concludes by proposing opportunities for future research.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Mayer, Vicki, et al.
(författare)
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This site is a dead end? Employment uncertainties and labor in data centers
- 2023
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Ingår i: The Information Society. - : Routledge. - 0197-2243 .- 1087-6537. ; 39:2, s. 112-122
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside the “black box” – the data center, to examine uncertainties faced by those who work there. We do so through interviews and observations, first, of data center managers and executives at international trade expos, where anxieties about the shortage of data center workers but also their irrelevance were palpable. Then, we turn to a remote data center in Finland, where security guards and technical operators negotiate employment uncertainties through the biopolitics of their labor. In both sites, the uncertainties about data center employment are manifest and embodied, even if they are expressed and experienced in different ways. On both the top and bottom levels of data center hierarchies, people are discomfited by the possibility of their own redundancy. At the same time, they present the sunnier sides of data center work when they talked about their efforts to resolve ongoing issues of worker shortage, the lack of diversity in data centers, and the routines that could easily slide into boredom or anomie. We situate our findings on the long arc of capitalist transformations and discuss the insights they might provide for today’s data-driven economy in general.
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| 10. |
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Media backends : digital infrastructures and sociotechnical relations
- 2023
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- "Media backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional criticism to engage with infrastructural and industrial issues. This focus reflects a concern about the systemic inequalities that emerge when tech companies and designers fail to address workplace discrimination and algorithmic violence and exclusions. Moving from smart phones to smart dust, the essayists examine topics like artificial intelligence, human-machine communication, and links between digital infrastructures and public service media alongside investigations into the algorithmic backends at Netflix and Spotify, Google's hyperscale data centers, and video-on-demand services in India. A fascinating foray into an expanding landscape of media studies, Media Backends illuminates the behind-the-screen processes influencing our digital lives"--
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