Tarleton Gillespie

The Politics of ‘Platforms’

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.

Who's Responsible for the Digital Divide? Public Perceptions and Policy Implications

Addressing the reasons for—and the solutions to—the “digital divide” has been on the public agenda since the emergence of the Internet. However, the term has meant quite different things, depending on the audience and the context, and these competing interpretations may in fact orient toward different policy outcomes. The goals of this article are twofold. First, the authors unpack the term “digital divide” and examine how it has been deployed and interpreted across a range of academic and policy discourses. Second, through a framing experiment embedded within a nationally representative survey, the authors demonstrate how presenting respondents with two different conceptual frames of the digital divide may lead to different perceptions of who is most accountable for addressing the issue. From this, they discuss the dynamic relationship between the construction and communication of policy discourse and the public understanding of the digital divide, as well as implications for effective communication about the digital divide and information and communication technology policy to the general public.

What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint

The flag is now a common mechanism for reporting offensive content to an online platform, and is used widely across most popular social media sites. It serves both as a solution to the problem of curating massive collections of user-generated content and as a rhetorical justification for platform owners when they decide to remove content. Flags are becoming a ubiquitous mechanism of governance—yet their meaning is anything but straightforward. In practice, the interactions between users, flags, algorithms, content moderators, and platforms are complex and highly strategic. Significantly, flags are asked to bear a great deal of weight, arbitrating both the relationship between users and platforms, and the negotiation around contentious public issues. In this essay, we unpack the working of the flag, consider alternatives that give greater emphasis to public deliberation, and consider the implications for online public discourse of this now commonplace yet rarely studied sociotechnical mechanism.

Designed to ‘effectively frustrate’: copyright, technology and the agency of users:

Recently, the major US music and movie companies have pursued a dramatic renovation in their approach to copyright enforcement. This shift, from the ‘code’ of law to the ‘code’ of software, looks to technologies themselves to regulate or make unavailable those uses of content traditionally handled through law. Critics worry about the ‘compliance’ rules built into such systems: design mandates for manufacturers indicating what users can and cannot do under particular conditions. But these are accompanied by a second set of limitations: ‘robustness’ rules. Robustness rules obligate manufacturers to build devices such that they prevent tinkering - not only must the technology regulate its users, it must be inscrutable to them. This article examines this aspect of technical copyright regulation, looking particularly at the Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption system for DVDs and the recent ‘broadcast flag’ proposed for digital television. In the name of preventing piracy, these arrangements threaten to undermine users’ sense of agency with their own technologies.

Copyright and Commerce: The DMCA, Trusted Systems, and the Stabilization of Distribution

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been criticized for granting too much power to copyright holders, offering them new technological controls that may harm the public interest. But, by considering this exclusively as a copyright issue, we overlook how the DMCA anticipates a technological and commercial infrastructure for regulating not only copying, but every facet of the purchase and use of cultural goods. In upholding the law in Universal v. Reimerdes, the courts not only stabilized these market-friendly arrangements in cultural distribution; they extended these arrangements into realms as diverse as encryption research and journalism, with consequences for the very production of knowledge.

The policy knot: re-integrating policy, practice and design in cscw studies of social computing

In CSCW and information science research today, the worlds of design, practice, and policy are often held separate, speaking to different audiences, venues, and fields of expertise. But many growing areas of CSCW work, including mobile, cloud, and social computing, run into problems precisely at this intersection. This paper presents a model for understanding processes of change and emergence in social computing in which policy, practice, and design show up in the form of complex interdependencies, or knots, that collectively determine the shape, meaning, and trajectory of shifting computational forms. We then apply this model to two recent social computing controversies: the 2011 privacy scandal surrounding the location-aware mobile app Girls Around Me; and controversies surrounding the 2010 launch of the Google Buzz social network. We argue that better attention to the mutually constitutive relations between design, practice and policy can expand the reach, depth, and impact of CSCW scholarship.

Affordances, Technical Agency, and the Politics of Technologies of Cultural Production

Culture Digitally is a collective of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig).

Engineering a Principle: 'End-to-End' in the Design of the Internet

The term ‘end-to-end’ has become a familiar characterization of the architecture of the Internet, not only in engineering discourse, but in contexts as varied as political manifestos, commercial promotions, and legal arguments. Its ubiquity and opacity cloak the complexity of the technology it describes, and stand in for a richer controversy about the details of network design. This essay considers the appearance, in the 1970s, of the term ‘end-to-end’ in computer science discourse, and how the term became a point of contention within disputes about how to build a packet-switched network. I argue that the resolution of some of those disputes depended on the transformation of the term from descriptor to ‘principle’. This transformation attempted to close specific design debates, and, in the process, made the term dramatically more useful in those discourses beyond engineering that eventually took a keen interest in the design of digital communication networks. The term, drawn from common parlance and given not only meaning but conviction, was shaped and polished so as to be mobile. As such, it actively managed and aligned disparate structural agendas, and has had subtle consequences for how the Internet has been understood, sold, legislated, and even re-designed.

Algorithmically recognizable: Santorum’s Google problem, and Google’s Santorum problem

ABSTRACT Because information algorithms make judgments that can have powerful consequences, those interested in having their information selected will orient themselves toward these algorithmic systems, making themselves algorithmically recognizable, in the hopes that they will be amplified by them. Examining this interplay, between information intermediaries and those trying to be seen by them, connects the study of algorithmic systems to long-standing concerns about the power of intermediaries – not an algorithmic power, uniquely, but the power to grant visibility and certify meaning, and the challenge of discerning who to grant it to and why. Here, I consider Dan Savage’s attempt to redefine the name of U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, a tactical intervention that topped Google’s search results for nearly a decade, and then mysteriously dropped during the 2012 Republican nominations. Changes made to Google’s algorithm at the time may explain the drop; here, they help to reveal the kind of implicitly political distinctions search engines must invariably make, between genuine patterns of participation and tactical efforts to approximate them.

Culture Digitally: Habitus of the New

Culture Digitally is a collective of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig on Twitter). In these dialogues, they are encouraged to grapple with theoretical questions, but to do so quite a bit faster than the glacial pace of publishing typically allows. We imagine them as the digital equivalent of the scholarly exchange of letters between