Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy [1st ed.] 9783030365240, 9783030365257

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
The Challenge of Networked Democracy (Michael Trice, John Jones)....Pages 1-13
Front Matter ....Pages 15-15
Platform Utopianism after Democracy (Jeff Pruchnic, Antonio Ceraso)....Pages 17-37
Inside the Swarms: Personalization, Gamification, and the Networked Public Sphere (Thomas Dunn)....Pages 39-56
The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Networks: Heterogeneity in the Effect of Technology on Collective Action Mobilization (Mathew Jenkins)....Pages 57-76
Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement (Bolane Olaniran, Indi Williams)....Pages 77-94
Reasons of the Heart: Political Applications of Emotion Analytics (Susan Currie Sivek)....Pages 95-113
Front Matter ....Pages 115-115
Cyber Creeps: The Alt-Right and the Evolution of Social Media Hatemakers (Bryan L. Jones)....Pages 117-134
Third Spaces, Sequencing, and Intertextuality: (De)Constructing Misinformation and Fake News (Dan Martin)....Pages 135-156
Subverting the Platform Flexibility of Twitter to Spread Misinformation (Liza Potts, Stephanie Mahnke)....Pages 157-172
Creation of an Alt-Left Boogeyman: Information Circulation and the Emergence of ‘Antifa’ (Patrick Love, Alisha Karabinus)....Pages 173-198
Tweeting Inequity: @realDonaldTrump and the World Leader Exception (Paul Muhlhauser, Daniel Schafer)....Pages 199-212
Front Matter ....Pages 213-213
Finding Ideological Divisions in Indian Society Through Online Twitter Conversations (Shalina Chatlani)....Pages 215-236
Digital Solidarity in Times of Crisis: The Case of Greece (Eleni-Revekka Staiou)....Pages 237-251
#Metoo in China: Affordances and Constraints of Social Media Platforms (Chen Chen, Xiaobo Wang)....Pages 253-269
Trump Daddy (Rhiannon Goad)....Pages 271-291
Digital Dissent and Censorship in the Kashmir Conflict (Arif Hussain Nadaf)....Pages 293-312
The Fifth Estate Joins the Debate: The Political Roles of Live Commentary in the First Televised Presidential Debate Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (Craig T. Robertson, William H. Dutton)....Pages 313-328
Sovereignty and Algorithms: Indigenous Land Disputes in Digital Democracy (Matthew Homer)....Pages 329-343
Back Matter ....Pages 345-348

Citation preview

RHETORIC, POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy Edited by John Jones · Michael Trice

Rhetoric, Politics and Society Series Editors Alan Finlayson University of East Anglia Norfolk, UK James Martin Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK Kendall Phillips Syracuse University Syracuse, USA

Rhetoric lies at the intersection of a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods, drawing upon the study of language, history, culture and philosophy to understand the persuasive aspects of communication in all its modes: spoken, written, argued, depicted and performed. This series presents the best international research in rhetoric that develops and exemplifies the multifaceted and cross-disciplinary exploration of practices of persuasion and communication. It seeks to publish texts that openly explore and expand rhetorical knowledge and enquiry, be it in the form of historical scholarship, theoretical analysis or contemporary cultural and political critique. The editors welcome proposals for monographs that explore contemporary rhetorical forms, rhetorical theories and thinkers, and rhetorical themes inside and across disciplinary boundaries. For informal enquiries, questions, as well as submitting proposals, please contact the editors: Alan Finlayson: [email protected] James Martin: [email protected] Kendall Phillips: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14497

John Jones  •  Michael Trice Editors

Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy

Editors John Jones The Ohio State University Columbus, OH, USA

Michael Trice Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA

Rhetoric, Politics and Society ISBN 978-3-030-36524-0    ISBN 978-3-030-36525-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36525-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: CoverZoo / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Amy, Stella, and Henry—John For Shannon and all the A’s, big and little—Michael

Contents

1 The Challenge of Networked Democracy  1 Michael Trice and John Jones Part I The State of Deliberation, Community, and Democracy on Social Media  15 2 Platform Utopianism after Democracy 17 Jeff Pruchnic and Antonio Ceraso 3 Inside the Swarms: Personalization, Gamification, and the Networked Public Sphere 39 Thomas Dunn 4 The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Networks: Heterogeneity in the Effect of Technology on Collective Action Mobilization 57 Mathew Jenkins 5 Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement 77 Bolane Olaniran and Indi Williams

vii

viii 

Contents

6 Reasons of the Heart: Political Applications of Emotion Analytics 95 Susan Currie Sivek Part II The Design of Misinformation 115 7 Cyber Creeps: The Alt-Right and the Evolution of Social Media Hatemakers117 Bryan L. Jones 8 Third Spaces, Sequencing, and Intertextuality: (De)Constructing Misinformation and Fake News135 Dan Martin 9 Subverting the Platform Flexibility of Twitter to Spread Misinformation157 Liza Potts and Stephanie Mahnke 10 Creation of an Alt-Left Boogeyman: Information Circulation and the Emergence of ‘Antifa’173 Patrick Love and Alisha Karabinus 11 Tweeting Inequity: @realDonaldTrump and the World Leader Exception199 Paul Muhlhauser and Daniel Schafer Part III The Global Future: Social Media and Collective Action 213 12 Finding Ideological Divisions in Indian Society Through Online Twitter Conversations215 Shalina Chatlani 13 Digital Solidarity in Times of Crisis: The Case of Greece237 Eleni-Revekka Staiou

 Contents 

ix

14 #Metoo in China: Affordances and Constraints of Social Media Platforms253 Chen Chen and Xiaobo Wang 15 Trump Daddy271 Rhiannon Goad 16 Digital Dissent and Censorship in the Kashmir Conflict293 Arif Hussain Nadaf 17 The Fifth Estate Joins the Debate: The Political Roles of Live Commentary in the First Televised Presidential Debate Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump313 Craig T. Robertson and William H. Dutton 18 Sovereignty and Algorithms: Indigenous Land Disputes in Digital Democracy329 Matthew Homer Index345

Notes on Contributors

Antonio Ceraso  is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul University. His research focuses on the relationship between amateur and expert knowledge building in rhetorics of science, technology, and technical communication. Shalina Chatlani  is currently the science and technology reporter at the local NPR station for San Diego, KPBS.  She has completed her undergraduate at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with a degree in Science, Technology and International Affairs, and then stayed on at Georgetown for her master’s in Communication, Culture and Technology. Chatlani’s work has been published in the space research journal Quest, and her work as a journalist has been carried by NPR, Here & Now, Marketplace, Nashville Public Radio, and Education Dive, among others. Chen  Chen  is Assistant Professor of English at Winthrop University, where she teaches academic, and professional and technical writing courses. Her research focuses on rhetoric and digital media, technical communication pedagogy and programmatic development, and graduate students’ professionalization in rhetoric and composition. Thomas Dunn  is a doctoral candidate in English at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). His research explores the intersections of cognitive theory, phenomenology, and computation in narrative analysis, using algorithmic methods and model-based narratology to analyze both modernist literature and digital media. He did his MA in English xi

xii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

from CUNY’s Brooklyn College, MLIS (Master of Library and Information Studies) from Rutgers University, and BA from Bowdoin College. He teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice as a doctoral teaching fellow. William H. Dutton  is Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California and a fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin School of the University of Oxford, supporting the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre. He was the Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy at Michigan State University (MSU) when this research was launched. Rhiannon Goad  is visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, where she specializes in teaching professional writing courses and curricula development. Her research considers the reciprocal relationship between American national identity and white masculinity. Matthew Homer  is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing Program at Virginia Tech University. He is interested in the rhetorics of science and technology, digital rhetorics, and indigenous rhetorics. Specifically, his work focuses on the differing rhetorical groundings of science and technology, and the colonial or decolonial logics that underlie scientific and technological uses. Mathew  Jenkins  is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Saint Martin’s University. He studies political behavior and public opinion in the context of digital media, and he has a regional focus on East Asia. Bryan  L.  Jones is a visiting assistant professor at Oklahoma State University in the Department of English: Rhetoric and Professional Writing, where he researches what is revealed and concealed in the rhetoric of political leaders and opinion makers of all stripes, from anarchist to fascist. John Jones  is an associate professor in the Department of English at the Ohio State University, where he is the Director of Digital Media Studies and the Director of the Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) Institute. He studies digital media, rhetoric and writing theory, and professional and technical communication. His work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Kairos, and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. Together with Catherine Gouge he has

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xiii

edited special issues of Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Communication Design Quarterly Review focused on the rhetorics of wearable devices. He is the editor, with Lavnia Hirsu, of Rhetorical Machines, a collection that explores the connections between rhetoric and computation. Alisha  Karabinus  is a PhD candidate in English at Purdue University and a co-host of the long-running Not Your Mama’s Gamer podcast. Her research centers on experience in games and gaming culture, as well as on student experiences in writing and rhetoric. Her work has appeared in such journals as Technical Communication and Kairos. Patrick Love  is an assistant professor at Monmouth University studying online education, circulation, and information economies in the Rhetoric and Composition program. Patrick’s broader interests are professional and technical communication, digital rhetoric, and intersectional social mobility. Stephanie Mahnke  is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Literature at Utah Valley University. She has worked as a researcher for WIDE and has held fellowship positions in HASTAC and Cultural Heritage Informatics. She currently works with nonprofits on building digital archives and digital cultural heritage sites. Her research approaches questions around the ethics, creation, and sustainment of material and digital spaces for cultural communities. Dan Martin  is an assistant professor and Director of Composition and Writing in the Disciplines at Central Washington University, where he directs the writing program and teaches a variety of writing courses. His research focuses on using rhetorical frames to investigate digital writing environments, creating dialogic pedagogies for first year composition (FYC), and using video feedback to respond to writing across disciplines. He is an assistant editor for Kairos and his work has appeared in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetoric and Composition Studies, and in edited collections Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression, Hate Speech, and Harassment and Coding Pedagogies. Paul Muhlhauser  is Associate Professor of English at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. His work has appeared in Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion, Women and Language, the Journal of Popular Culture, Computers and Composition Online, and Kairos: A

xiv 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. He likes writing about digital technologies, interface design, zombies, the Avengers, and dating apps. He makes beautiful webtexts, loves his chickens, and is a gentleman farmer. He dedicates his chapter in the book to Daniel Schafer and Meadowlark Muhlhauser. Arif Hussain Nadaf  is Assistant Professor of Journalism Studies at the Islamic University of Science & Technology, Kashmir, India. He has done his doctoral research from the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia (University), New Delhi, India. Hailing from the conflict territory of Kashmir, Nadaf has reported the conflict in the region for the local press before formally joining the field of academic research in 2013. His research interests include conflict reporting, political communication and new media research. He holds MA in Mass Communication and Journalism from the University of Kashmir. Bolane  Olaniran  is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University. His research includes communication technologies and computer-mediated communication, organization communication, cross-cultural communication, and crisis management and communication. He has authored several articles in discipline focus and interdisciplinary focus journals (i.e., regional, national, and international) and edited book chapters in each of these areas. He has served as consultant to organizations at local, national, and government levels. Liza  Potts is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University, where she leads WIDE Research and is a co-founder of the Experience Architecture program. Her research interests include networked participatory culture, social user experience, and digital rhetoric. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and others. Liza has published 3 books and over 65 publications focused on disaster response, user experience, and participatory memory. Her professional experience includes working for technology startups, Microsoft, and design consultancies.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xv

Jeff Pruchnic  is an associate professor and Director of Composition in the Department of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of the book Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition (2014) and numerous articles on the intersections of rhetoric, science, and digital media. He is working on a book project about the rhetorical and ethical dilemmas posed by the topics of genetic engineering, climate catastrophe, and artificial intelligence, tentatively titled On the Ends of Species. Craig T. Robertson  is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University whose research focuses on the politics of digital technologies and the news. Specific focus is placed on alternative media, fact-checking journalism, verification practices, news credibility, and political uses of social media. Craig’s work has been published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics and Journalism Studies. Daniel Schafer  is Lecturer in English at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. His work has appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Computers and Composition Online; the Journal of Global Health; Women and Language; and elsewhere. Daniel’s research interests include global and public health, multimodal composition, and digital technology. He also serves as the director of communications and development at the global health nonprofit HealthNovations International. He dedicates his chapter in the book to Paul Muhlhauser and Baker Schafer. Susan Currie Sivek, PhD  is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. Her research focuses on the role of new technologies in media, particularly in journalism and political communication. She teaches courses in multimedia storytelling, writing, and media theory. Eleni-Revekka  Staiou graduated from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Communication and Media Studies, and, in 2008, completed her postgraduate studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), obtaining an MSc in Communication, Information and Society. In 2017 she received her PhD from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Communication and Mass Media, with a focus on the

xvi 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Greek solidarity initiatives and their communication via social media. She is now a postdoctoral researcher, and her research interests are social media and their potential use by individuals, nonprofit organizations, and governmental bodies. Michael  Trice is a lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication. He has had multiple articles published on the intersections of digital platforms and community media, including organizational practices within disruptive online activists (such as GamerGate) and deliberative issues in community content management systems, such as LocalWiki. Xiaobo  Wang  is Assistant Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, where she teaches technical and professional communication courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Her research interests are transnational rhetoric and communication, global technical and professional communication design, comparative rhetoric, and writing in the disciplines. Indi  Williams  received her doctorate from Arizona State University in Educational Technology and her master’s in Communication Studies from Texas Technology University, Lubbock, Texas. Ms. Williams received a BA in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include virtual learning communities, Web 2.0 e-learning, instructional communication in distance education, human-computer integration, internet culture, and the anticipation of future interaction in online relationship development.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5

Percent of respondents reporting participation in peaceful gathering. (Note: Vertical bars indicate 95% confidence intervals)63 Percent of respondents reporting participation in peaceful gathering (East Asia only). (Note: Vertical bars indicate 95% confidence intervals) 65 Predicted number of protests (Pooled model). (Note: Shading indicates 95% confidence intervals) 68 Screen capture of popular REE! gif 128 Screenshot of democraticmoms.com home page. (Retrieved September 17, 2018, from democraticmoms. com/category/nevertrump/. Screenshot by Author) 139 Screenshot of americanflavor.news archives page. (Retrieved March 13, 2018, from americanflavor.news/archives/. Screenshot by Author) 142 Screenshot of conservativedailypost.com home page. (Retrieved March 18, 2018, from conservativedailypost.com Screenshot by Author) 142 Triangle of misinformation. (Image by Author, adapted from Foss et al. (2014)) 144 Screenshot of newpoliticstoday.com home page. (Retrieved April 6, 2017, from Screenshot by Author) 151 Coding across all articles collected in all timeframes 181 Coding across all MSM articles 183 Coding across all AN articles 183 Twitter reach by source 184 Google interest and tweet volume, January 18–22, 2017 185 xvii

xviii 

List of Figures

Fig. 10.6 Fig. 10.7 Fig. 10.8 Fig. 10.9 Fig. 10.10 Fig. 10.11 Fig. 10.12 Fig. 10.13 Fig. 10.14 Fig. 10.15 Fig. 10.16

Fig. 10.17 Fig. 10.18 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 12.3 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2 Fig. 13.3 Fig. 15.1

Google interest and tweet volume, April 13–17, 2017 186 Google interest and tweet volume, April 25–29, 2017 186 Google interest and tweet volume, August 9–14, 2017 186 All codes for AN sources in the January timeframe 188 All codes for MSM sources in the January timeframe 189 All codes for the first April timeframe (only AN sources appeared during this timeframe) 189 All codes for AN sources in the second April timeframe 190 All codes for MSM sources in the second April timeframe 190 All codes for AN sources in the August timeframe 191 All codes for MSM sources during the August timeframe 192 Frequency of code occurrences across all time frames, in all articles, with clustering This clustering allows for relational observations of how codes change over timeframe and source. Comparing all codes to all AN and all MSM codes allows for observation of the ‘share’ of not only various ideas, but also associations (Figs. 10.17 and 10.18). For instance, associations between white nationalism and the right spring largely from MSM sources; AN sources spend less time on either idea, or the association between them, but AN sources more frequently refer to ‘commies’ as reference to ‘the left.’ Perhaps most revealing here is the greater share given to violence in general in the AN sources, a clear indicator that AN sources are pushing the idea of a violent ‘antifa.’ 196 Codes across all AN articles 197 Codes across all MSM articles 197 FCRA final graph 222 Sample highlighted graph—nationalist sentiment 223 Demonetization final graph 227 Types of media used by the solidarity initiatives for their communication245 Specific media used by the solidarity initiatives for their communication246 Media used by the initiatives to communicate with and maintain their audience 247 Frequency of themes 281

List of Tables

Table 4.1 Main regression results Table 4.2 Lagged regression results Table 10.1 Alternative narrative influencers, as adapted from Starbird. (Note: website The Real Strategy was no longer online at the time of our research) Table 10.2 Top code occurrences by timeframe and outlet category Table 12.1 Sample tweets from interest groups Table 12.2 Top word pairs per group, theme Table 12.3 Sample tweets from interest groups Table 12.4 Pros and cons of using Twitter data for outreach efforts Table 13.1 Types of initiatives (Staiou & Gouscos, 2018) Table 15.1 Description of themes Table 15.2 Examples of themes Table 15.3 Frequency of themes Table 17.1 Number of tweets in each category before, during, and after the debate (and overall) Table 17.2 Average and total number of retweets for tweets of each type Table 18.1 Search results for the term “Hawaiian sovereignty”

67 69 180 182 225 226 228 230 241 277 278 282 319 324 336

xix

CHAPTER 1

The Challenge of Networked Democracy Michael Trice and John Jones

Early pronouncements about the leveling power of the internet—as a means of publication, as a site of rational deliberation—have more recently given way to debates over the effect of social media on democratic uprisings (Tufekci, 2017; Vaidhyanathan, 2018) or the impact of slacktivism on democratic participation (Christensen, 2011; Vie, 2014). There is now little doubt that digital media can affect democratic processes. Brexit, the Aadhaar Act in India, and the 2016 US elections have all underscored how the democratizing potential of social media is counterbalanced by a prominent array of actors utilizing hate speech, state-sponsored propaganda, and misinformation to achieve anti-democratic goals. While there have always been voices of caution and restraint regarding the promise and dangers of digital networks, in the years since the Arab Spring the pendulum of debate has swung to focus on the dangers of online media to democracy.

M. Trice (*) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Jones The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Jones, M. Trice (eds.), Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36525-7_1

1

2 

M. TRICE AND J. JONES

As the reach and robustness of digital networks has increased, it has become clear that many platforms are struggling to balance the openness necessary for deliberation and freedom of communication with the need to protect citizen speech from the disruptive behavior of aggressive online mobs, authoritarian governments, and misinformation from a host of sources (cf. Coleman, 2018; Tufekci, 2017). Recent events have demonstrated the precarity of digitally based democratic movements, revealing social media’s vulnerability to manipulation as well as the limits of both governmental oversight and the wisdom of crowds to police this manipulation and its impact on the public sphere. The privileging of attention— likes, engagement, clicks—over democratic ideals such as accuracy and rationality appears to have stunted the civic ethos once envisioned as a primary product of digital culture (cf. Coleman, Moss, Parry, & Blumler, 2015; Gillespie, 2010), and this has called into question the presumption that the web is an efficient market of ideas, able to drown out misinformation and propaganda with rational discourse. Similarly, strategies for digital governance (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Welchman, 2015), the flow of information across digital spaces (Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2017), and value-­ based argumentation (N. N. Jones, 2016) that were understood as cornerstones of civic participation online (Benkler, 2006), have been undermined or repurposed as tools of disruption and cultural antagonism (Massanari, 2017). If the digital revolution has arrived, that revolution has not been as open or democratic as we were promised. We are living, then, in a time marked by the evolution of social media’s relationship to democracy and governance, and it remains to be seen whether digital media will serve to disrupt democracy, spread it, or serve some role in between. Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy explores this evolution and the future of networked democracy in chapters that address social media’s impact on the public sphere, the role of misinformation in online spaces, and the challenges facing individuals, collectives, and governments as they work within and in response to this environment. The authors gathered here examine how digital platforms influence democratic deliberation across multiple cultures and nations, considering online moderation, governance, and activism in the aftermath of recent anti-democratic manipulation and interference. In doing so, the collection demonstrates how emerging digital methods and communication theory are integral to addressing the challenges introduced by disruptive events from across the globe.

1  THE CHALLENGE OF NETWORKED DEMOCRACY 

3

Networked Democracy Networked democracy is shaped in response to networked propaganda and misinformation as well as the specific challenges posed by networked effects to traditional concepts of deliberative democracy. To establish a baseline for traditional deliberative democracy, we draw upon Blumler and Coleman’s (2015) five guidelines for effective communication in democracies, broadly summarized below: 1. Allow accessible and reliable surveillance of the governmental apparatus to citizens. 2. Allow citizens a “meaningful” choice as a norm of democratic process. 3. Allow access to all affected stakeholders to participate in the process. 4. Allow those who hold “significant power in the political process” to be held to account for that power. 5. Allow citizens a method to “meaningfully” understand the decision-­ making process and communicate with those in power. The affordances and scale available to global networks of activists engaging their own governments and institutions as well as foreign governments and institutions have created new tensions around accountability, transparency, and representation. For example, digital networks bring together collections of stakeholders with agendas and interests that compete at the local, national, and global levels, stressing traditional mechanisms of accountability by mixing and matching citizen stakeholders with a variety of institutions (media, economic, political, and activist) beyond the national. Thus, institutions in China affect citizen interests in the United States as movements like #MeToo move from the United States to China. The ease of digital networking enables governments and citizens to form non-traditional alliances that can preclude the deliberative, communicative engagement—the offering of viable choices to all stakeholders— of traditional democracy, even as anonymity in spaces like Twitter and 4chan can elide transparency for both citizens and institutions. Digital activism can now originate from domestic citizens or foreign non-citizens, contain both information and disinformation promoted by any of these actors, and all these media exist within the same networks, a situation that challenges structures founded on equal representation. At the same time, key stakeholders might be excluded from key conversations by not being on the right platform at the right time.

4 

M. TRICE AND J. JONES

Responding to these tensions, networked democracy must prioritize meaningful engagement while remaining accountable, accessible, and transparent to stakeholders, even as what it means to be a stakeholder grows increasingly complicated within digital networks. Unlike networked disinformation or propaganda—where propaganda is a message from the state to the people that serves state power, and misinformation is counterfactual information provided by state or non-state actors to undermine or confuse networked discourse (Tufekci, 2017)—networked democracy seeks the means to sufficiently stabilize facts and values to reach effective policy outcomes for a population by offering policy choices that are accessible, meaningful, and transparent. It is, at heart, a rhetorical act of closing stases, both social and political, by the consensus of the governed. Unfortunately, such stases can be closed via networked propaganda or misinformation as well. The current prominence (in public discourse) of networked misinformation and propaganda has become a device to undermine deliberative values, as actors promoting disinformation move within transnational digital networks. This collection is concerned with how networks enable power and its exercise in online spaces at the local, national, and global level, simultaneously examining the rhetorical and functional capabilities of networked political communication. Although this collection does not resolve the challenges to networked democracy, it offers numerous methods, theories, and cases from across the globe that can serve as a blueprint for democratic responses to these phenomena.

A Brief History of Networked Democracy At the turn of the twenty-first century, digital democracy remained heavily speculative. In the pre-Web 2.0 world, it was difficult to imagine that the internet could bypass the power of broadcast and cable television (Jenkins, Thorburn, & Seawell, 2004). Yet, the rising power of networked and global communities (Castells, 2009; Meyrowitz, 1986) raised significant concerns about tensions between the global and the local that would connect many of the issues related to digital democracy over the following two decades. It has become clear that digital technologies have altered collective action, most notably by lessening the importance of common identification among members of groups (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). Despite the belief that “organization-less organizing” would outperform traditional hierarchies and collectives, these groups have adapted to this new networked reality by moving beyond traditional membership to

1  THE CHALLENGE OF NETWORKED DEMOCRACY 

5

provide more avenues for individuals to connect with the group (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2012; Staiou & Gouscos, 2014). Such changes, however, apply equally to democratic and anti-­democratic organization. As far back as 2004 Jenkins and Thorburn (Jenkins et al., 2004) understood that digital media and the internet had given renewed life to radicalism across the spectrum even as they underestimated the potential impact of this change. It would take a decade for digital networks to demonstrate their efficiency in connecting isolated radicals to larger communities and for this to make its mark on wider culture, increasing the effectiveness and appeal of far-right and far-left populism, terrorist recruiting, and a host of emergent, disruptive subcultures. Paradoxically, digital networks have been able to undermine and challenge authoritarian regimes and their mechanisms of power even while providing new avenues for totalitarian and anti-democratic propaganda and control.

Web 2.0 The first decade of the twenty-first century offered a tale of initial success in digital, global collaboration. From Wikipedia to torrents to social media, Web 2.0 promised to be an enormous boon to public deliberation and thus lead to more responsive institutions. Though partisan radicalism was already a significant concern (Castells, 2009; Jenkins et al., 2004), the promise of self-organization, such as in Wikipedia (Reagle, 2010; Zittrain, 2008), seemed an opportunity for the civil-libertarian web to prove itself. Long-standing communities like The Well had indicated the possibility of anonymous communities to “own their words.” Yet other communities, like 4chan, were also on the rise. 4chan, which was founded by Christopher Poole in 2004, became a radically different form of counterculture, showing that aggressive troll culture was no longer something to be managed within communities—a disruptive force limited to a single site—but a growing ethos of disruption and harassment unto itself. 4chan and The Well provided opposing visions of a future web dedicated to libertarian openness, and these two visions would prove predictive of later struggles taking place on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, reddit, and Twitter.

6 

M. TRICE AND J. JONES

Early Optimism and Critique In the United States, the 2008 election opened many eyes to the possibility of digital engagement. While the companies that dominate social media today were not yet a force, the small donor phenomenon indicated a new avenue for digital attention to shift elections. Though at the time Twitter was a nascent platform known for the “fail whale” and Facebook remained mostly a network of college students, the surprising success of the Obama campaign in garnering small donations via email lists was an early suggestion of the political power of social networks. It would be two years later, when unrest in Tunisia launched the Arab Spring, that popular opinions about social media as an agent of disruption and democracy would shift dramatically. Protests in Tunisia would come to be associated with spreading activism in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, and protests and violence would see governments topple in Libya and Egypt. In the aftermath, Syria, Libya, and Yemen would become theaters of conflict for multiple countries, notably struggles between the United States, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. While military conflict and physical protest came to define these conflicts in their early days, organizing on social media played a significant role, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt (Tufekci, 2015). Of course, we now see the on-going violence related to these movements in starkly different terms and paeans for the democratic promise of social media have silenced in the face of the more familiar and deadly methods of civil warfare. In the United States, social media organization would play a pivotal role in the national rise of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and The Tea Party. The networked capabilities of digital media allowed OWS to operate as factional and decentralized local protests across multiple cities even while sharing a name and general sentiment (DeLuca, Lawson, & Sun, 2012; J. Jones, 2014). The messages of OWS operated primarily as signage but foreshadowed digital meme wars to come. Similarly, The Tea Party relied upon a mix of traditional broadcast and decentralized digital messaging in forming a countermovement to the Obama presidency. While electoral politics drove a great deal of attention during this time, a brewing shift in the culture wars was arising online as well. In 2014 GamerGate would signal the first of a new wave of cultural warfare in digital spaces (Massanari, 2017). GamerGate would prove a particularly strategic and tactically aware movement targeting game designers, journalists, and academics perceived as feminist and/or progressive (Chess & Shaw,

1  THE CHALLENGE OF NETWORKED DEMOCRACY 

7

2015; Trice, 2015). On Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube, it drew attention to the cross-platform rise of aggressive cultural engagement and the trolling tactics of the web (Phillips, 2015).

The 2016 Election: The Arab Spring Comes to the West In 2016, many events brought wide public attention to what had up to that point largely been academic concerns about digital democracy. Brexit, the 2016 US elections, and Myanmar’s atrocities against Rohingya Muslims were indicative of far-right nationalist surges across the globe, a trend that continued in the 2017 French presidential election (which nationalists lost) and the 2018 Brazilian presidential election (which they won). These events pushed to the fore the disruptive engagement of digital actors in political processes, from for-profit actors in the United States and Turkey to transnational political operatives like Russia’s IRA and England’s Cambridge Analytica. A critical issue facing democracies in the current era is how well deliberative democracy responds to social and technological disruption. The role of misinformation in digital spaces has come to dominate discussions around propaganda that once focused on broadcast organizations. The willingness of state actors, corporations, and NGOs to mobilize across digital, broadcast, and physical spaces has complicated many of the old distinctions between both the actors and the spaces in which they inhabit. What started as concerns about Al-Qaeda recruitment and activism by the loose digital collective of Anonymous, grew into more traditional styles of propaganda. GamerGate, centered in the United States and Great Britain, demonstrated the power of anonymous digital activism to raise the profile of media figures on Twitter and YouTube, such as Milo Yannopoulos and Carl Benjamin (Massanari, 2017), who would go on to play fringe roles in Brexit and the 2016 US election. Yet the strategies of these groups would increasingly shape the nature of political campaign tactics going forward. In India, Myanmar, and the Philippines, authoritarians have used social media for personal myth-making and to control information (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). The tension of digital platforms rests in how facts and disinformation, activists and authoritarians have adapted to the functionality of social media to serve multiple goals. The contrast between efficient authoritarian responses to technological disruption and the messy

8 

M. TRICE AND J. JONES

response of the democratic process have raised questions about the extent to which liberal democracies might experiment with authoritarianism as a tool of political expediency. These contradictions are on full display in the chapters that follow, as the authors explore successes and challenges in digital deliberation, rhetoric, and meaning-making in this new networked, global (yet frequently localized) civil discourse.

The Plan of the Book The thematic connection that runs through the book is the exploration of the tension between the forces of networked propaganda, misinformation, and networked democracy. The first part, “The State of Deliberation, Community, and Democracy on Social Media,” interrogates the potential for, and potential challenges to, networked democracy in the current social media environment. In “Platform Utopianism after Democracy,” Jeff Pruchnic and Antonio Ceraso examine the ways in which political effects emanate from social media platforms like Facebook. While they acknowledge that Facebook and similar sites can have political goals, Pruchnic and Ceraso argue that their political impacts come primarily from interactions on those platforms that then trickle out to other environments, showing how the worst outcomes of social spaces, such as bot-based trolling and other harassment, should not surprise us but rather emerge as central features of the ad-networks that currently dominate social media. Switching focus to the conversations that exist on social media, Thomas Dunn argues that the tools of social media have assumed a unique place in public discourse through their ability to be personalized and gamified for particular users. Drawing on the work of cognitive linguists, network theorists, and others, Dunn shows how algorithmically produced caricatures of users that reinforce non-rational deliberative outcomes have hijacked the social imaginary—the orienting lifeworld formed by the physical and social environment—and supplanted the online deliberative utopias that were imagined in the early days of the web. In “The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Networks: Heterogeneity in the Effect of Technology on Collective Action Mobilization,” Mathew Jenkins attempts to account for the impact of cultural norms on collective action online, focusing on South Korea and Japan. In doing so, he shows that social sites are not one-size-fits-all tools for organizing people across the globe, underscoring the need for more nuanced research of collective action in online spaces. Similarly, Bolane A.  Olaniran and Indi Marie

1  THE CHALLENGE OF NETWORKED DEMOCRACY 

9

Williams’s “Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement” takes a broad look at the role of social media in empowering anti-democratic voices and ideologies, connecting this content to the ways in which the spread of these ideas influences users’ behavior. Susan Currie Sivek’s “Reasons of the Heart: Political Applications of Emotion Analytics” explores the history and implementation of emotion analytics, a range of software and hardware tools that attempt to identify emotions in social media and surveys their possible impact on political processes. Together, these chapters ground those that follow by outlining the challenges and possibilities of networked democracy within the platform constraints of the social web. The second part, “The Design of Misinformation,” identifies the ways in which current social media have, through platform affordances or design choices, allowed for the creation and dissemination of misinformation. Bryan L. Jones shows how hate groups use our desire to stay connected to each other to push ideas that would seem radical or divisive, focusing on the ways groups like the alt-right have legitimized ideas like white victimhood, thus enabling many members of the white middle class to see themselves, falsely, as a persecuted minority group. “Third Spaces, Sequencing, and Intertextuality: (De)Constructing Misinformation and Fake News” by Dan Martin explores the semiotic and rhetorical methods used to promote false and fabricated information via social media. The design of social media tends to even out differences in news sources—for example, a story from the Wall Street Journal would appear on Facebook with the same design and presentation as a story from a fake news site— and Martin argues that this leveled playing field allows the purveyors of misinformation to manipulate language in order to gain legitimacy for themselves. Patrick Love and Alisha Karabinus’s “Creation of an Alt-Left Boogeyman: Information Circulation and the Emergence of ‘Antifa’” explores the ways in which social media helped to create connections between the term antifa and violence and the impact of this association. In so doing, they explore the interactions between mainstream media and alternative narrative (AN) media outlets. Using an ecological approach, Love and Karabinus track how “meaning, narrative, and knowledge are made” in contemporary new media ecologies, showing how the interaction of multiple actors, such as mainstream and alternative media sources, contribute to antifa’s evolution into a symbol of violence. Where Jones, Martin, and Love and Karabinus focuses on the language used by those sharing misinformation, Liza Potts and Stephanie Mahnke

10 

M. TRICE AND J. JONES

argue that the features of social media platforms can render them hospitable to manipulation. In examining recent changes to Twitter—such as switching from “favorites” to “likes” as a means of user-categorization— Potts and Mahnke show how attempts to make Twitter more user-friendly and to rein in bad actors have led to the flourishing of dark patterns, designs that intentionally manipulate the truth and their readers. Similarly, “Tweeting Inequity: @realDonaldTrump and the World Leader Exception” by Paul Muhlhauser and Daniel Schafer analyzes Twitter’s world leader exception policy—which holds that world leaders on the service are not subjected to the same content moderation as other users—showing how this exception allows leaders to use the site as a platform to spread misinformation and other harmful speech. Instead of stopping with this exploration of misinformation, the final part provides case studies that demonstrate how activists and others are adapting to the social media environment outlined in the first two parts, creating new spaces for deliberation and networked democracy. The chapters in “The Global Future of Social Media and Collective Action” theorize the deliberative environments created by social media, analyzing the mechanisms of disinformation and propaganda. By exploring case studies that demonstrate the success and limitations of networked democracy across the globe, the collection seeks to offer a holistic picture of global networked democracy for this era. Shalina Chatlani’s “Finding Ideological Divisions in Indian Society through Online Twitter Conversations” uses the introduction of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act in India, a law that has been used to limit funding from outside countries to Indian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to examine ideological divisions in Twitter conversations. Using sentiment analysis to track emotional states in text, Chatlani identifies the ways in which online communities develop ideological and political beliefs and suggests how they can be used to improve communication efforts. Eleni-Revekka Staiou examines Self-organized Social Solidarity (SoSS) initiatives, civil society groups that formed after Greece’s economic crisis, exploring the media they use for communication and what this says about digital solidarity in Greece. Chen Chen and Xiaobo Wang’s “#Metoo in China: Affordances and Constraints of Social Media Platforms” tracks the #metoo movement in China and the ways in which it has travelled through social networks popular in the region. Rhiannon Goad’s “Trump Daddy” is a case study of network use for the circulation of arguments. Examining posts at /r/The_Donald, a Reddit discussion

1  THE CHALLENGE OF NETWORKED DEMOCRACY 

11

board or subreddit focused on Donald Trump, Goad shows how commentators on the subreddit invoked the US “founding fathers” to claim legitimacy for Trump, weaving a complex set of identifications between the then-presidential candidate and a white, male conception of “authentic” claims to Americaness. Arif Hussain Nadaf’s “Digital Dissent and Censorship in the Kashmir Conflict” examines internet censorship imposed by the Indian government in the Kashmir region, exploring how networked communications are challenging censorship and authoritarianism in the region. Craig Robertson and William H.  Dutton mine the live tweeting of a presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to examine the salient features and utility of this commentary as it relates to democratic processes. Tracking a sample of tweets, they find that these tweets serve the democratic role of allowing commentators to question and critique the candidates and debate moderators. Finally, in his case study of indigenous social media use, Matthew Homer’s “‘Sovereignty and Algorithms: Indigenous Land Disputes in Digital Democracy” shows how tools like search engines can exclude indigenous discourse, and, in the process, serve as a means of recirculating narratives of whiteness. In contrast to these algorithmic erasures, indigenous (and other) activists have turned to alternative forms of networking, particularly the use of hashtags, which allow them to create a space for empathy and identification in online spaces. The future of digital democracy will largely be determined by the interplay between non-state actors, platforms, and institutional responses to them. In bringing together scholarship that captures emerging understandings of knowledge-making and political speech on digital platforms, the means by which misinformation is spread and allowed to metastasize on these platforms, and a range of cases that show how grass-roots movements respond to these developments, this collection provides researchers, policy makers, and activists with a new understanding of digital tools and their future role in supporting democratic institutions.

References Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Bennett, W.  L., & Segerberg, A. (2013). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12 

M. TRICE AND J. JONES

Bimber, B., Flanagin, A., & Stohl, C. (2012). Collective action in organizations: Interaction and engagement in an era of technological change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blumler, J.  G., & Coleman, S. (2015). Democracy and the media—revisited. Javnost-The Public, 22(2), 111–128. Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chess, S., & Shaw, A. (2015). A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about# gamergate and embrace hegemonic masculinity. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(1), 208–220. Christensen, H. S. (2011). Political activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or political participation by other means? First Monday, 16(2). Coleman, S. (2018). Introduction. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 117–121. Coleman, S., Moss, G., Parry, K., & Blumler, J. G. (2015). Can the media serve democracy? Essays in honour of Jay G. Blumler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DeLuca, K. M., Lawson, S., & Sun, Y. (2012). Occupy Wall Street on the public screens of social media: The many framings of the birth of a protest movement. Communication, Culture & Critique, 5(4), 483–509. Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. Jenkins, H., Thorburn, D., & Seawell, B. (2004). Democracy and new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jones, J. (2014). Compensatory division in the Occupy movement. Rhetoric Review, 33(2), 148–164. Jones, N.  N. (2016). Narrative inquiry in human-centered design: Examining silence and voice to promote social justice in design scenarios. Journal of Technical Writing & Communication, 46(4), 471–492. Massanari, A. (2017). Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society, 19(3), 329–346. Meyrowitz, J. (1986). No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillips, W. (2015). This is why we can’t have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reagle, J. M. (2010). Good faith collaboration: The culture of Wikipedia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ridolfo, J., & DeVoss, D.  N. (2017). Remixing and reconsidering rhetorical velocity. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 7(2/3), 59–67. Staiou, E.-R., & Gouscos, D. (2014). Self-organized social solidarity (SOSS) initiatives in Greece: Exploring their scope and their relationship to online media. International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age (IJPADA), 1(4), 21–43.

1  THE CHALLENGE OF NETWORKED DEMOCRACY 

13

Trice, M. (2015). Putting GamerGate in context: How group documentation informs social media activity. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 33rd Annual International Conference on the Design of Communication. Tufekci, Z. (2015). Algorithmic harms beyond Facebook and Google: Emergent challenges of computational agency. Colorado. Tech. Law Journal, 13, 203. Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vie, S. (2014). In defense of “slacktivism”: The human rights campaign Facebook logo as digital activism. First Monday, 19(4). Welchman, L. (2015). Managing chaos: Digital governance by design. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media. Zittrain, J. (2008). The future of the internet: And how to stop it. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Retrieved from http://futureoftheinternet.org/

PART I

The State of Deliberation, Community, and Democracy on Social Media

CHAPTER 2

Platform Utopianism after Democracy Jeff Pruchnic and Antonio Ceraso

In April 2018, Facebook launched an advertising campaign designed to refresh the platform’s image after (and in front of) a series of damaging revelations about its use during the 2016 US elections. The campaign, which appeared across multiple media, names specific instances of past wrongs (fake news, data misuse) but promises a return to core functions of connecting people as friends “from now on.” While some of the language of the ad was immediately criticized for eliding Facebook’s active role in, for instance, sharing data with the campaign firm Cambridge Analytica (Beer, 2018; Tiku, 2018), we’d like to take the “From Now On” ads at face value to begin with. If we’d like to play, in a sense, the believing game with “From Now On,” it is because the ad indexes two features of platforms that will be our topic in this chapter. First, the ad shows us that Facebook represents itself as providing a particular social model; second, the ad suggests that that model is vulnerable to specific

J. Pruchnic (*) Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Ceraso DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Jones, M. Trice (eds.), Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36525-7_2

17

18 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

sorts of disruptions, pathologies, or breakdowns: something happened which damaged the form of social life Facebook thinks of itself as providing. This chapter focuses on the politics of computing platforms: interactive online ecosystems that structure connections between people, organizations, and resources. In his 2010 article “The ‘Politics’ of Platforms,” Tarleton Gillespie (2010) traced the multiple ways that the term ‘platforms’ has functioned as a productive trope for platform creators and stakeholders in platform industries. Having been “loosened from its strict computational meaning,” Gillespie suggests, the term “platform” signals complex negotiated relationships and rhetorical discursive action occurring between platform companies, their users, government, and other economic and social stakeholders. The “politics of platforms,” in this sense, can be read as the multiple discursive and material relationships established between different interest groups, a fairly conventional and compelling definition of politics applied to a digital space. So, for example, Gillespie argues that by calling their technologies platforms, companies like Facebook are able to position their activities as intermediaries, and neutral ones at that, a sort of null surface where user content is voluntarily placed for the user’s own reasons, and little more. Whereas Gillespie focuses, both in his early definitional work and in his more recent work (Gillespie, 2018) on the moderation of platform content, on competing interests of platform stakeholders, we take an admittedly more abstract view to explore the competing political models of platforms themselves. We currently associate the term political platform as formal sets of principles attached to political parties and often issued ahead of important elections. The popularization of the political platform of this type is often attributed to 1830s writings of the American journalist and radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In developing the concept of the political platform, Garrison (1831) begins by appealing to  the shared or “common” attributes of all citizens, frequently attaching his prescriptions to the “common ground,” they share, their “common nature,” or the “common object” of their desires, principles that, mimicking the language of the nation’s founding document, are often described by Garrison as “self-­ evident.” These principles are then translated as particular “planks” that collectively form the “platform” being promoted, and that platform is then translated into a series of actions and a vision of societal interaction in which they can best be fostered and sustained. Analyzing digital platforms here, we will suggest something of an inverted process is taking place: digital platforms model competing

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

19

systems of interaction and governance, ones often based on their creator’s visions of an ideal version of political economy. By collapsing the distinction between structures of authority and behavior, on the one hand, and the technologies that might encourage or discourage those structures, on the other, platforms embody and execute those structures in their dynamic networking of their users. Rather than a set of formal principles that might articulate preferred forms of interaction, in other words, platforms are all action: training grounds and immersive environments for learning and participating in those ecosystems. The behaviors learned on platforms then flow outward to reshape the ways we can and do participate in the more traditional domains of political economy and public discourse, and the ways we come to envision governance and democracy. While the use of social media as a mode of communication to influence voter behavior in a variety of worldwide political elections leading up to and beyond the 2016 US presidential race has been under much recent scrutiny, we suggest that the political impact of social media and other platforms goes beyond their function as communicative media to include their role as microcosms for political economy. In this chapter, we examine digital platforms as microcosmic political economies, or environments that function to enact various human political models in several registers. First, we argue that competing platforms become sites to experiment with the various rhetorical potentials of their grounding political models. As enclosed spaces designed to flatten or “level” distinctions between providers and consumers of goods and services and structure, platforms by design or accident present competing examples for the shaping of not just (economic) association but also communication. Second, we trace how the vulnerability of platforms to destructive rhetorics functions in the gap between the human political models that they seek to emulate and the digital structures that enact those models. Third, we describe the increasing tendency for platforms to be positioned as alternatives to more traditional “infrastructures” of democratic government, infrastructures often being passively or actively undermined by platforms and attendant changes in regulatory structures. We close by discussing the historically foreclosed political model of isonomia, as described in Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the History of Philosophy (2017), arguing that it provides a way to think through the vulnerabilities of “platform democracy.”

20 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

Platforms as Political-Economic Models, or, Do Platforms Have Politics? It’s long been common in digital studies to distinguish digital phenomena by their various layers, such as their code layer and their interface layer, etc. We will follow that precedent here in order to discuss the self-presentation of platforms as political-economic models. Rather than splitting platforms into technological and social layers, however, we focus on the economic layer and the political layer. The economic layer involves what Gillespie and others refer to as the business model of platforms (Gillespie, 2010, p. 359): what they do in a competitive profit environment to draw income and compete against other platforms. The political-economic layer is both the self-representation of the platform as a space for particular kinds of social relations and the material affordances and constraints that shape such interactions. At the economic layer, we follow Nick Srnicek’s typology and economic-­ historical analysis of platforms presented in Platform Capitalism. For Srnicek (2017), digital platforms—understood as environments that allow parties to interact in various ways—should be understood within ordinary economic history, and their parent companies should be seen as ordinary economic actors, producing a particular set of economic goods and responding to competitive pressures. By focusing on platforms as typical economic phenomena, Srnicek develops a useful typology for understanding platforms at the economic layer, dividing the kinds of platforms into advertising, cloud, industrial, product, and lean platforms (Srnicek, 2017, pp. 36–92). Advertising platforms like Facebook and Google are primarily concerned with leveraging large user bases for advertising. Cloud platforms provide storage and associated apps, mainly to businesses; platforms like Dropbox, Box.net, Zoho, and various Amazon services, for example, reduce the need for internal IT infrastructure. Industrial platforms enable ever more flexible and customized production by tracking production and delivery at all points of the production and supply chain cycle. Product platforms (like Spotify, or Apple Music) transform goods into services by providing the environment through which users “rent.” Finally, lean platforms (Uber, AirBnB) function as outsourcing hubs, companies that have “hyper-outsourced” workers, fixed capital, maintenance costs, and training (Srnicek, 2017, p. 76). This typology, of course, recognizes that many crossovers and hybrids both already exist and may emerge more fully.

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

21

Amazon, for example, is both a product platform for retail consumers (of music, of streaming video) and a cloud platform for businesses through Amazon Web Services; similarly, Zoho and other cloud platforms may develop branches as industrial platforms as they more fully integrate a variety of business functions. While these platform types differ according to what they sell on the front end, Srnicek (2017) argues that they share the same core function that distinguishes them from previous types of economic actors: they extract data as raw material at scale and analyze it. Understanding platforms as sites of data extraction and analysis is now common for advertising platforms like Facebook; Srnicek (2017) argues that it is fundamental for understanding each of the platform types. What distinguishes the contemporary digital platform from previous types of environments is the scale and constant flow of analyzed data; it becomes increasingly central to all business operations, intensifying and surpassing the data needs first discovered in the lean industries that preceded platform-dominated economies. Whereas large amounts of analyzed data from assembly line, supply chain, and customers was of low to moderate interest in Fordist economies, and became crucial inputs in Toyotist or just-in-time economies, they are absolutely necessary in platform economies. As a result, Srnicek (2017) suggests, platforms become crucial infrastructural pieces of contemporary economies, no less central than roads for the delivery of goods and services (p. 92). In such an economy, moreover, one would expect to see the elevation of data extraction and analysis methods within all fields of activity (even, say, literary studies), as the need to train workers in data-­ centric procedures and modes of reasoning increases. One should also expect a wide variety of data conflicts, just as environmental conflict marks the primary extraction of raw materials, and labor conflict marks the site of efficiency gains through control of the production process. Data misuse, Facebook’s “From Now On” ad tells us, is not our friend. The economic layer as theorized by Srnicek (2017) has remarkable explanatory power on the production and industrial side. That is, it helps explain why firms would engage platforms and seek advantage through constant flows of data—including the platform companies themselves. It is less helpful in explaining why particular kinds of platforms arise and become popular within each category type (why is there more than one kind of advertising platform?), or why people who receive no clear data advantage from platforms use them so relentlessly. A business using Predix as an industrial platform, in other words, gains a data advantage from the

22 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

recording and analysis environment, but an ordinary Facebook user receives no clear data benefit from the extraction process (supposing one discounts targeted ads as particularly valuable efficiency). Of course, people engage in platforms for a wide variety of reasons, some fairly straightforward, and some below the level of clear explanation. However, the rhetoric surrounding platforms suggest that one factor that attracts people to platforms is the forms of political-interactivity that they model. We turn now to the question of how platforms model or claim to model particular political-economic arrangements. Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986) has long served as a canonical work for theorizing the intersection of politics and technology. From the vantage point of the present, it can also be read as work marking the transition in which the term “technology” is much less likely to bring to mind hardware (like the nuclear reactor of Winner’s title) and more likely to conjure in its audience’s mind software or networked computing systems (the first commercially available versions of both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems that were released within the two years prior to The Whale and the Reactor’s publication). Charting the differences between both of these relationships—hardware and software, the early days of pervasive computing at the time of Winner’s writing versus its ubiquity in the present—can provide us with an entry point into charting what is new or special about digital platforms as an inflection point in the history of politics and technology. In the second chapter of The Whale and the Reactor, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” Winner (1986) acknowledges that the belief that “technical things have political qualities” might be taken as controversial (p. 22). However, he quickly leads his audience to an acknowledgment of the ways that, however implicitly, different technologies and technical systems work to subtend or reflect different forms of “politics,” glossed by Winner as “arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements” (p. 22). To summarize briefly, Winner identifies two primary ways that we might attach political qualities to technology. For one, there are instances in which “the intractable properties of certain kinds of technology are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalized patterns of power and authority” (p. 38). To use a pair of examples that Winner (1986) will return to frequently in the text, solar power and nuclear power are large-scale technological

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

23

systems that seem to presume different forms of collective management, and thus valorize different forms of political economy. Nuclear power seems to require the authoritarian, hierarchical control of energy resources that are  needed to coordinate and makes safe the  dangerous process of nuclear fission, decay, and fusion. Conversely, solar power seems feasible even under more decentralized and independent management and coordination of resources. Winner’s second category for sorting the politics of technology encompasses technologies that have a wider “range of flexibility” but in which “the design or arrangement of a device or system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting” (p. 38). Among other examples, here Winner mentions historian David Noble’s work on the addition of automated technologies to factory systems (p.  28). While added for the ostensible purpose of cutting costs or improving efficiency, these changes also result in shifting agency and control out of the hands of floor workers and into those of management. Winner’s scheme is undoubtedly still relevant to a large variety of technologies that emerged or became more pervasive after the time of his writing; computing platforms, however, introduce an entirely new relationship between politics and technology, one that both mixes the two categories named by Winner and extends beyond them. Whereas Winner mentions the effects of technologies to maintain or presuppose particular arrangements of power between individuals and between individuals and a larger community in which they are part, platforms are perhaps best read as creating entirely new “micro-political economies” within themselves, ecosystems in which such arrangements are written in advance—these relations being more or less the structure of the platform “itself”—and then, through a user’s participation in the platform, made to seem either the natural or ideal political-economic arrangement. Indeed, this characteristic of platforms was very much a transparent component of some of the earliest and influential platforms. Here descriptions of these emergent forms of digital structure tended to make their ideological forms more apparent, and in many such cases, creators of platforms were entirely explicit in aligning their understanding of the real or ideal arrangement of power structures and communal interaction with the ways these platforms structured or disinhibited those same structures. Take, for instance, Craigslist creator Craig Newmark, who has spoken frequently of designing that platform specifically around his beliefs in human potentials for cooperation and trust. Indeed, this is true even down

24 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

to the (in)famously minimalist interface of Craigslist, which has been attributed to Newmark’s beliefs that “people are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day” (“Why Craigslist is such a mess,” 2009). In a 2009 interview, Newmark reflects on how the design and success of such minimalist systems might help us better understand ways to “make grassroots democracy as much a part of our government as representative democracy” (“Why Craigslist is such a mess,” 2009). Indeed elsewhere, Newmark more actively positions Craigslist as a component in an emergent “participatory or network democracy” in which greater numbers of people can be organized into “new forms of governance” that find the bartering and loosely organized exchanges of goods and services on systems like Craigslist as their model or inspiration (Novak, 2008). Some of that work has involved Newmark collaborating with platforms of more recent vintage but whose creators even more explicitly foreground the overlap between their political aspirations and their computing structures. For example, the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization, leverages “civic technologies” to, among other functions, make open data concerning government available for the application programming interface (API) methods of other applications (Sunlight Foundation, n.d.). Kiva, similarly, provides a peer-to-­ peer microlending platform. We can find another prominent early example of the explicit integration of a platform creator’s investment in a particular vision of political economy in the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has discussed the importance of Randian Objectivism in the emergence and design of that platform and insisted that “one cannot understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding [Friedrich] Hayek,” and in particular Hayek’s famous anti-­ socialist 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (Mangu-Ward, 2007). One might not immediately identify Wikipedia, a famously free collective and collaborative project, with the Austrian economist most commonly associated in the present with proto-neoliberalism and libertarianism; however, as Wales explains in another profile, Wikipedia’s success is organized around Wales’ understanding of (dis)incentive structures for personal motivation and ideal systems for leveraging individual contributions for “mass collaboration” (Schiff, 2006). In this light, Hayek’s argument that decentralization of decision-making power and (what we would now call) the crowdsourcing of expertise (Hayek, 1945, pp. 524–530) does seem relevant to Wales’ project, and Wikipedia appears

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

25

as something like an experimental ecosystem for the dynamic organizing and connecting of “decentralized” knowledges and capacities outside of a planned economy or central authority. Wales’ reference to Hayek in particular is prescient for the ways that subsequent platform designers and administrators have positioned their products against the role of democratic planning and government regulation, a point we will return to. However, for now, and on a broader scale, it is also easy to see the ways that the ubiquity of platforms are positioned as ushering in competing forms of political-economic arrangement (“platform capitalism” versus “the sharing economy,” for instance) as well as how competing platforms distinguish themselves from each other by embodying and/or projecting such contrasts: the weirdly asocial ride service Uber, which has emerged as a kind of ur-text for lean platforms that undermine market regulations and disrupt organized labor, versus BlaBlaCar, the ride-sharing platform premised on idealized forms of both communitarianism and conversation between working-class strangers. Platforms thus function as multiple competing “micro-political economies” in at least two ways. On the one hand, they make actual, if in a bounded form, the very model of social and economic interaction that their developers position as real and ideal in the broader socius. The effective functioning of the platform can be positioned as evidence of the accuracy of this model in transferring these structures into a digital realm and/ or for promoting the “rightness” or effectiveness for it as a structure for all economic and/or social interaction. In other words, platforms serve as models in both senses of the term: either as accurate reflection of the larger system they are attempting to map and replicate (a model of that system) or itself a prototype or basis for an ideal or improved version of that broader structure of interactions, online and off (a model for that system). In the rest of this chapter, we take up two particular ways that the micro-political economies of platforms function: (1) as individual spaces for rhetorical action between users and other stakeholders and (2) as a collective swerve away from the infrastructural qualities of earlier technologies and the strong version of democracy they often claimed for themselves.

2016: Platform Pathologies Where the examples of Craigslist and Wikipedia show a platform idealism in action, what kind of political economic arrangements does the Facebook’s “From Now On” ad suggest? The ad relies on similar idealistic

26 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

claims, imagining the political economic arrangement of Facebook as a site for connecting individuals in friends and family groupings. These claims, moreover, have been repeated continuously by company founders and spokespersons. If platforms serve as sites of training or modeling, Facebook’s self-representation imagines a low-conflict space of connection, informal networks of known participants that, in terms of its political economic arrangement, most closely resembles a clan or informal kinship structure. What the ad also indexes, of course, are (some of) the ways the idealized model has broken down in practice. The political economic microcosm generates the same problems as the arrangements they seek to model. Furthermore, these problems are amplified and extended by both the economic layer of data extraction and analysis, and by the technological infrastructure itself. By way of example, in terms of the political economic model, the form of the friendship network promoted by Facebook is precisely the sort of social environment that is likely to produce rumor networks, and selective information engagement (what Eli Pariser calls filter bubbles) even under ordinary non-digital conditions. At the economic layer (perhaps the only one that can be “worked on” by the platform company), Facebook functions as an advertising platform, extracting and analyzing user data, then feeding the results back toward the user and similar users as ads, adding new data-driven feedback to the way the user is interpellated by the model. Finally, the technological apparatus, because it is designed to reinforce the model, provides the user with tools (such as snoozing, hiding, defriending) that enable more and more closed networks. The problem of filter bubbles, then, isn’t merely one of “personalization” or algorithmic selection, despite Eli Pariser’s otherwise astute analysis of the phenomenon, nor will it be “solved” by “getting back to connecting friends and family.” Rather, it is built into that (political economic) model itself, always present as a potentiality of that model in practice. Breakdowns or pathologies of digital social networks have long been of interest; early studies of chat rooms and discussion forums, for instance, connected technologically enabled anonymity to harassment in these spaces long ago. What has developed in platform spaces is the recognition that the breakdowns of platform idealities are directly related to rhetorical work happening in those spaces. The ground for this recognition had been prepared in multiple platform-based conflicts. In the case of #GamerGate, for instance, Michael Trice and Liza Potts (2018) have traced a clear set of activist strategies for using Twitter’s technological affordances to attack

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

27

and harass “enemies,” with activists especially focused on maintaining anonymity and amplifying their messages through various hashtag and following strategies (p. 5). While these strategies are centered on the technical apparatus, it’s clear that they also reflect a political-economic formation in practice. Where Twitter represents itself as (and builds its platform to reflect) a generalized form of direct democracy, its pathological side becomes the figures that have haunted direct democracy since its first appearance: the unruly crowd or mob on the one hand, and the rhetorically savvy demagogue on the other. Indeed, Trice and Potts (2018) refer to the #GamerGate activists as “aggressive, hostile mob-like activists” and a “growing anonymous mob,” in addition to other mentions of “mob-­ like” behavior (p. 1). Of course, the figure of the crowd or mob is endemic in discussions of digital democracy, though one might detect a shift from their “wisdom” in more optimistic times to the return of the terrifying mob today. Tarleton Gillespie’s (2018) more recent work on moderation of social media platforms takes the question of platform pathologies as its major focus, working this shift from the optimistic wisdom of crowds to the vicious and harassing mobs that currently people our politico-digital imaginary. For Gillespie (2018), the tension between the idealized political model and its pathologies can be located in the early myths of the “open web”—a fantasy of unfettered participation on the one hand, and a desire to create and protect “virtual communities” on the other. Paired with the economic (and increasingly political and policy-based) imperatives of maintaining usable and desirable spaces of interaction, the result is a necessity for regulation that platforms also disavow. Moderation, Gillespie demonstrates, was always a thorny concern for platform stakeholders, but has become a central issue in how platforms operate and shape public discourse. While disavowed, moderation on platforms—the internal regulation of what we’re calling platform pathologies “is not an ancillary aspect of what platforms do,” but is “essential, constitutional, definitional” (p. 21). If moderation is necessary, it is certainly because different users will have different interests, as in Gillespie’s example of self-tagging of pornographic content on Tumblr. However, when it comes to harassment, hate speech, and the kinds of mobs described by Trice and Potts (2018), Gillespie’s model would seem to suggest that these bad actors just simply exist. The mistake of the open web proponents, then, was to ignore the way extrinsic negative beliefs and behaviors would simply follow users into the digital (media) space. The mistake, in other words, was the lack of

28 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

regulation of these already existing modes. While our analysis here would not deny the migration of existing social behaviors and rhetorics into online spaces, we also suggest that such rhetorics co-evolve with the platforms through which they operate, that the platforms themselves create rhetorical potentialities for these pathologies. In this sense, platform pathologies are not simply content that platforms negatively moderate, but forms of discursive action that they positively model. Our point is not to criticize the invocation of a #GamerGate mob (it very much had that appearance!) or Gillespie’s excellent work on moderation. Rather we suggest that the available rhetorical strategies that we’re calling pathologies were already embedded in and issue from the political economic model of Twitter and associated platforms. If 2016 marks a moment for platforms more generally, it may be because activities we might view as pathological took on the general appearance of direct rhetorical strategy. Put another way, they were inverted from negative side effects of the political economic models to positive capacities of these very models. Swarming bots, troll farms, aggressive mob harassment, rampant conspiracy rumors in increasingly polarized networks: these all showed themselves not to be a mere negative possibility of either the society at large or the models with which users experimented, but central to their functioning, or at least unavoidable elements of the rhetorical environment. While the US election (and, for that matter, Brexit) functioned as a momentous catalyst for this recognition, it was the problem of the political economic microcosms themselves that became clear.

Democracy in Blockchains Thus far we have stressed the ways that digital platforms function as competing microcosmic political economies and the unique features of those microcosms in regard to how they might function as idealized versions of political economy (as conceived by their designers), and how the differences between platforms also have a rhetorical effect in shaping the exchange of persuasive communication that take place on and through them. Looking at platforms from these perspectives emphasizes how individual platforms function as “cities within the city” of the broader landscape of platform technologies as a whole. However, there are also important lessons to be learned about the impact of the more general characteristics and trends of computing platforms within the wider polis, in

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

29

looking at platforms as a collective force reshaping broader understandings of the real and ideal processes of democratic governance. We are interested in particular in a common shared characteristic of platforms that is implied by their name: their desire or real functioning as a “leveling” force, as a system that serves to enclose a particular space of activity or exchange and then present its environment as one in which all participants are on “equal footing” and/or that allow the dynamic exchange of roles between its users. The most common form of this kind of exchange, or at least the one that tends to garner the most attention in discussion of platforms, has been the tendency for many for-profit platforms to allow participants to function as users and/or providers of the services or resources being exchanged on that platform. As described in a recent popular press book on the “platform revolution,” the lure and mystery of platforms for both venture capital and the broader cultural imaginary is the way these ecosystems blend and make fluid categories of producer and consumer; within platforms “rather than flowing in a straight line from producers to consumers, value may be created, changed, exchanged, and consumed in a variety of ways and places, all made possible by the connections that the platform facilitates” (Parker, Van Alstyne, & Choudary, 2016, p. 6). As a mechanism for “leveling” entrance into a market of exchange, what is perhaps most distinct about platforms is their potential for both lowering the bar for entry into labor and resource markets as well as (however passively) coordinating or, in Gillespie’s reading, serving as an intermediary for the transactions that take place there. From this perspective, we might consider platforms as part of the broader trend in the admixture of economics and governance that Michel Foucault called the “enterprise society” peopled by a new vision of the human as homo economicus (2008, p.147). Much of what Foucault discusses around this idea overlaps with qualities more generally grouped under the category of “neoliberalism” for the ways these changes position “economic liberty” as a category that needs protection from government regulation of the market. As Foucault writes “the model and principle of the market was exchange, and the freedom of the market, the non-­ intervention of a third party, or any authority whatsoever… [the] most that was asked of the state was that it supervise the smooth running of the market, that is to say, to ensure respect for the freedom of those involved in exchange” (p. 118). What separates Foucault’s analysis from other analyses of the emergence of neoliberalism as a dominant mode in the world economy is his focus on two things. First, Foucault attends to the shift

30 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

from “exchange” as the mode that needs (however minimal) regulation to “competition” as the key category that must be protected by government intervention in a democracy (p. 147). Here the government’s role is not so much to protect “equality” in exchange and protect citizens from exploitation, but to ensure their “freedom” to compete. Second, as suggested by his focus on the “new species” of homo economicus, Foucault draws our attention to the ways that these changes, ostensibly restricted to the realm of capitalist exchange, tend to bleed into other areas: economic metrics blotting out other methods of determining the values and freedoms proper to democratic citizens. As Wendy Brown (2015) writes, glossing Foucault, the concept of homo economicus is most succinctly the positioning of “the human as an ensemble of entrepreneurial and investment capital” over and above other rights or qualities (p. 36). It is of course not surprising that platforms would evince such tendencies, ones that, Brown (2015) tells us, have become more or less ubiquitous in any form of exchange in the present, “evident on every college and job application, every package of study strategies, every internship, every new exercise or diet program” (p.  36).  However, what is unique about platforms as political technologies is their ability to create multiple and competing versions of this larger system of participation and exchange while simultaneously grafting them to explicit or implicit forms of political economy. Moreover, rather than appearing as just one of many elements of a “networked neoliberalism,” a broader network of forces reflecting a normative logic of neoliberalism, platforms are perhaps best understood as active training grounds for normalizing particular economic behaviors and identities that can then be used to affect and even undermine systems of exchange existing outside of these platforms. We might consider the particular intense versions of the tendencies that sometime go by the proper names of homo economicus or neoliberalism within computing platforms from two different vantage points within contemporary political economy. For one, regulatory differences have tended to put pressure on competing industries outside of platforms to either deregulate quickly or decline. Platforms have tended to emphasize not only the freedom of access to markets—the flexibility, for instance, to be a TaskRabbit or Uber provider in the morning, but a TaskRabbit or Uber consumer in the evening—but also freedom from regulations and from the institutions traditionally governing those practices. As the platform most frequently used as a synecdoche for the potential for “disruption and innovation” that a new platform can produce within a market,

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

31

Uber is once again exemplary here. The key to Uber’s prominence has appeared to be the way it links up common resources (motor vehicles) and expertise (driving) with consumers. However, Uber’s tactics for evading the governmental regulations and protections that were previously central to the ride market—that is, the regulation of paid driving services like taxis—has proved to be its more valuable set of disruptive ideas. The differential regulations between those services have led to tragic consequences for drivers whose livelihood was linked to exclusion of access and institutional protections. The month we began writing this chapter (May 2018), The New York Times reported on the fifth suicide by a taxi driver in as many months, a phenomenon that the Times has covered extensively since—many of the families left behind attributing the suicides to competition from Uber and the rapid devaluation of the expensive taxi medallions previously necessary to operate as a professional driver in the city limits (Stewart & Ferré-Sardurní, 2018). In addition to putting pressure on, and otherwise avoiding the regulatory mechanisms of more traditional market models, platforms present the potential for replacing them altogether. Consider, for instance, the variety of platforms based on blockchain technology, distributed ledger systems for recording and documenting financial transactions. Though blockchain in the public imagination over the last several years has focused rather narrowly on its role in producing and managing digitally produced alternative currencies (or cryptocurrencies) like Bitcoin, as a network, blockchain provides a distributed system for creating, storing, and verifying the kinds of information necessary to ensure the reliable transfer of not just currency and physical goods, but all manner of records needed to validate ownership rights, contractual obligations, and other guaranteed or contingent arrangements amongst and between individuals and organizations. Repeating a key pitch point used almost ubiquitously by platform designers, blockchain evangelists have stressed the ways such distribution eliminates the need for professionals and companies to play intermediating roles in such process of exchange or verification, clearing the way for consumers and producers to interact directly. However, due to the immensely ductile and multivalent nature of blockchain as opposed to more specialized platforms, one might wonder if the target being disrupted by blockchain is best identified as not so much a particular industry as it is “government” itself, the need for organized and locally or (inter)nationally constituted infrastructures to structure, protect, and validate the rules of exchange among and between individuals and organizations. When the

32 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

county clerk’s office is no longer needed to verify your deed or the liens against it, blockchain, as the saying goes, is like Uber, but for government itself. Much has been written about the potential for the distributed nature of such systems for skirting governmental and international regulatory authorities; as technology critic Adam Greenfield (2017) writes in reference to distributed systems like Etherium, the platform based around the cryptocurrency Ether, “when functionality is smeared out across the entire network, no one jurisdiction can suppress it, however much they might want to” (p. 149). However, we might need to add that platforms built on technologies like blockchain risk not only subverting government institutions but also taking their place entirely. As a reliable and encrypted mechanism for ensuring contracts and financial transactions, blockchain, at least symbolically, seems to fulfill the neoliberal ideal of eliminating the need for even the most basic “intrusion” of government institutions for the purposes of validating and ensuring contractual transactions and financial exchanges. As Bonnie Honig (2017) argues persuasively in her recent collection of lectures, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, those very institutions are increasingly the most visible and important elements of what we traditionally think of as democratic government, the visible signs of the democratic infrastructure subtending democracy as a recognizable environment surrounding its citizens. As Honig (2017) writes, in a time where neoliberal logic tells us “state bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy is said to be inefficient” and “private service providers, answerable to market more than to governmental mechanisms of accountability, are also seen as more reliable than government agencies,” shared institutions and infrastructures “are part of the ‘holding environment’ of democratic citizenship; they furnish the world of democratic life” (p. 5). As Honig goes on to argue, these structures “do not take care of our needs only” but also “constitute us, complement us, limit us, thwart us, and interpellate us into democratic citizenship” (p. 5). Insofar as platforms seek to disrupt and take the place of such structures, we may do well to track their “environmental impact” on democracy. Indeed, we might think of platform economies not so much as (yet another) symptom of neoliberalism, but rather as the next step in its evolution. Nancy MacLean’s recent history of neoliberal activism in the United States, Democracy in Chains (2017), gains its title from her focus on the ways that such advocacy has tended to undermine the ability of the majority to influence government regulation and resource allocation. In

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

33

MacLean’s telling, these efforts begin, initially, by attempting to reduce democratic participation quite directly through the restriction of voting rights and, in later years, shifts toward the erosion or “shrinking” of government as a tax-collecting and regulating authority. In such a sequence, economic liberty and the right to competition takes precedence over democratic government as an arbiter and protector of a much more expansive series of rights. Throughout that text, MacLean traces the search for what one of its key proponents refers to as a “technology” of revolution, a functional shorthand for what might effectively spread or effectuate the message of neoliberalism (p. 129). One of the legacies of platforms as political technologies may turn out to be the ways they fostered actual technologies that may overlap the desire for this kind of “technology”: that they might accelerate the curtailing of democratic infrastructures and government regulation of the market leaving us with something like a “democracy in blockchains.” In other words, while platforms and the political-economic models they foster might not work to directly overthrow or shrink existing regulatory law and mechanisms of tax capture, they have in fact been working to rapidly expand areas of the economy existing outside of such regulations and/or those with more minimal protections (most obviously through coming up with ever more flexible and lightweight mechanisms for organizing contract labor and other varieties of short-term work). If, as MacLean (2017) suggests, a problem facing neoliberal activists is the intrinsic unpopularity of legislative attempts to repeal worker rights and employer obligations—regulations that tend to  benefit the many at the expense of the relatively (and relatively well-off) few—platforms suggest another possible option: layering entirely new infrastructures of labor and exchange outside of those controlled by those hard-earned regulations.

Conclusion: Isonomia Before and After Democracy We see resonance between Srnicek’s (2017) analysis of platform capitalism, Honig’s (2017) attention to public things, and the general disruption of regulation that traffics as blockchain, in the shifting discursive position of infrastructure. Both Srnicek and Honig are focused intently on infrastructural qualities. For Srnicek, platforms develop an infrastructural quality through their ubiquitous and continuous data extraction, their network effects, and their tendency toward monopoly status: if (big) analyzed data becomes a crucial element for effecting transactions and interactions, then the platforms that extract and supply it function as real infrastructures. For

34 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

Honig, the material infrastructures we share in common form a “holding environment” that not only shapes our understanding of democratic citizenship but creates our desires in Arendtian fashion to build more such public things. We can, however, immediately see the problem: Srnicek and Honig are not discussing the same infrastructures, since platforms are not public things in the same way. It’s not surprising, then, that Srnicek closes Platform Capitalism by calling for just the sort of Arendtian projects analyzed and praised by Honig: “Rather than just regulating corporate platforms, efforts could be made to create public platforms—platforms owned and controlled by the people. (And, importantly, independent of the state surveillance apparatus)” (p. 128). We agree with Srnicek that public platforms, however distant a possibility they may seem at present, are a needed response to the current platform political-economies. However, as we have argued throughout, public platforms would themselves present us with the problems of democratic platforms already apparent in their private version. If Twitter, to take one example, functions as a rhetorical training ground in direct democracy, it also functions as a training ground in its pathologies, rife with rhetorical strategies for harassment, demagoguery, and violence. What political economic models may be available for public platforms, then? In Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and The Origins of Philosophy (2017), we discover the political model of isonomia, or “no-rule.” Isonomia was the term used for Cleisthenes’ reform of the Athenian political system, but for Karatani, isonomia is a borrowing from the poleis of western Ionia, preceding Athenian democracy and never fully captured by it. Moreover, it was “not simply an idea but a living reality in the city states of Ionia” (p. 15). As Karatani sees it, the Athenian (direct) democracy that often serves as an imaginary model for political-economic interaction on platforms was itself a form that favored freedom only at the expense of equality. The problems of modern democracy are present in prototype in Athenian democracy, from a “reduction of rhetoric to a set of techniques for domination” (p. 108) to the “exploitation of slaves and other foreigners” (p. 17). As Karatani has it, modern liberal democracies “swing back and forth like a pendulum between poles of libertarianism (neoliberalism) and social democracy (the welfare state),” and the model of Athenian democracy “will never allow us to solve the problems of modern democracy” (p. 16). An alternative political economic model, Karatani contends, can be found in the isonomic city states of western Ionia.

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

35

For Karatani, the political-economic model of isonomia is preferable to that of Athenian democracy. It can be described as a kind of council-based governing form, open to a money economy but too flexible to generate real wealth disparity. Importantly for Karatani, these poleis were made up of immigrants and so had abandoned tribal or clan affiliation; as a result, the “Ionian polis was established through social contract among individuals,” and was “free from traditional community bonds” (p. 35). Moreover, communities thus constituted warded off inequality because “should inequality arise within the polis, one could simply leave” (p. 35). Such a model of community cuts against both the fixed community of most democratic models and the built in network effects of platforms, where, as Gillespie notes, “the longer a user stays on a platform and the larger it gets, the more she is compelled to stick with it, and the higher the cost to leave” (p. 177). Finally, the poleis of western Ionia were engaged in small farming, manufacture, and trade, but provided an economic model that didn’t fall back into oligarchy, as the freedom of movement prevented the establishment of large land-owning classes. The Ionian poleis provide for Karatani a counter-model to either the Athenian imperial democracy, the Spartan state, or the tribal confederations of the other poleis. The seemingly utopian description should not cloud Karatani’s main target in Isonomia. Karatani highlights the Ionian poleis in order to forward an alternative narrative of the history of political philosophy. Ionian thinkers such as Thales and Empedocles are often classed as “natural philosophers”—they inaugurate a Greek rationalism, but true philosophy, the narrative usually goes, and particularly ethical and political thought, would have to wait for the Athenian fifth and fourth centuries, for Athenian democracy as its social environment. Karatani rejects this narrative. The politics of no-rule cannot be separated from the natural philosophy of the Ionian thinkers, or the sophists, for that matter; rather, the history of philosophy, read through Plato and Aristotle (which is to say, read through the problems of Athenian democracy), conceals the ethical and political content of Ionian natural philosophy. Karatani sketches a different history, where the natural philosophy of the Ionians was not distinguished from its political-economy. This merging of natural and political philosophy goes directly, moreover, to the question of technology. Karatani contrasts the Ionian focus on production or making with Aristotle’s view of (fixed) nature (p.  62). Whereas Aristotle will famously portray humans as “by nature a rational animal,” the Ionian natural philosophers took a developmental or

36 

J. PRUCHNIC AND A. CERASO

evolutionary view, presenting human political behavior as in a process of becoming through its encounters with technology (pp. 63–64). The famous Ionian natural philosophy of becoming, to put it another way, was not merely a comment on the “natural world,” but considered “the generation of the universe, the emergence of life, the evolution of life forms, and the historical development of human society” to be arrayed on the same plane. For Karatani, it was the encounter with craft, with manufacture, with small farming that generated this view, in contrast to the elite thought emerging in Athenian democracies; the perception of becoming “must have been rooted in the experience of technology that flourished in Ionia” (p. 63). We acknowledge that the seemingly anarchic political-economic arrangements that Karatani places under the sign of isonomia may seem pie-in-the-sky, and come with their own problems. Karatani’s examples of similar isonomic communities outside of the Ionian poleis (medieval Iceland, colonial America!) are not especially encouraging. Moreover, we recognize the risk that such a model simply replays the early fantasies of the open web—if not as a libertarian dream than as the frequent radical invocations of something like Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones, themselves seemingly isonomic in quality, and commonly applied in early web discourses. Gillespie (2018) is right, we think, to highlight how such claims of openness continue to infect not only the public discourse of platforms but also their fundamental operations. What isonomia provides, even if imaginary, however, is a political economic model both before and after democracy, a model that calls into question the inverse relations of equality and freedom that mark modern democracies, a model that points us to the co-evolution of platforms and their rhetorical potentialities. If platforms are a training ground for living a particular political economic arrangement, for practicing its rhetorics and relations, they may be, for all their problems and pathologies, a place to imagine and play out reconceptions of political models that transcend our current arrangements, rather than models that worsen them.

References Beer, J. (2018, April 25). Facebook says sorry (sort of) in its biggest ad campaign ever. Fast Company. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. New York: Zone. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979 (M.Senellart, Ed. and G.  Burchell, Trans.). Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

2  PLATFORM UTOPIANISM AFTER DEMOCRACY 

37

Garrison, W. L. (1831, January). To the Public. The Liberator, 1(1). Gillespie, T. (2010). The ‘politics’ of platforms. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. New Haven: Yale University Press. Greenfield, A. (2017). Radical technologies: The design of everyday life. New York: Verso. Hayek, F. A. (1945, September). The use of knowledge in society. The American Economic Review, 35(5), 519–530. Honig, B. (2017). Public things: Democracy in disrepair. New  York: Fordham University Press. Karatani, K. (2017). Isonomia and the origins of philosophy (J. A. Murphy, Trans.). Durham: Duke University Press. MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. New York: Viking. Mangu-Ward, K. (2007, June). Wikipedia and beyond: Jimmy Wales’s sprawling vision. Reason, 39(2). Novak, C. (2008, December). Craig Newmark talks philanthropy, politics. U.S. News & World Report. Parker, G. G., Van Alstyne, M. W., & Choudary, S. P. (2016). Platform revolution: How networked markets are transforming the economy and how to make them work for you. New York: Norton. Schiff, S. (2006, July). Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?. The New Yorker. Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stewart, N., & Ferré-Sardurní, L. (2018, May). Another taxi driver in debt takes his life. That’s 5 in 5 months. The New York Times. Retrieved from https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/nyregion/taxi-driver-suicide-nyc.html Sunlight Foundation. (n.d.) Our Mission. Retrieved from https://sunflightfoundation.com Tiku, N. (2018, April 26). Facebook launches a new ad campaign with an old message. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/ facebook-launches-a-new-ad-campaign-with-an-old-message/ Trice, M., & Potts, L. (2018, January). Building dark patterns into platforms: How GamerGate perturbed Twitter’s user experience. Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, 6(3). Retrieved from https://www.presenttensejournal. org/volume-6/building-dark-patterns-into-platforms-how-gamergateperturbed-twitters-user-experience/ Why Craigslist is such a mess. (2009, August). Wired. Retrieved from https:// www.wired.com/2009/08/ff-craigslist/ Winner, L. (1986). The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 3

Inside the Swarms: Personalization, Gamification, and the Networked Public Sphere Thomas Dunn

More than a decade ago, in 2006, Yochai Benkler wrote with cautious optimism on the wealth of networks—on what he believed was the Internet’s democratizing potential. In his summation, “a series of changes in the technologies, economic organization, and social practices of production,” which he grouped loosely in a single appellation, that of the networked information economy (NIE)—created new possibilities for information, knowledge, and culture (p.  2). E-mail and mailing lists, which in the early aughts constituted “the most popular application on the Net”; static web pages and blogs, which granted broadcast capabilities to lay individuals and allowed their readers to respond directly; and short message services, “the so-called email of mobile phones” (Benkler, 2006, pp. 218–219), all made possible new types of collaboration “among farflung individuals,” allowing them to function more effectively as “agents of political economy” (Benkler, 2006, p.  16). By communicating

T. Dunn (*) The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Jones, M. Trice (eds.), Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36525-7_3

39

40 

T. DUNN

information and points of view, these new technologies enabled the network’s outer edges to feed their opinions, observations, and ideas back to the central, mass mediated core. Accordingly, so Benkler (2006) thought, the NIE was a platform for “better democratic participation” that “foster[ed] a more critical and self-reflective culture” (p.  2), in which hyperlinks to primary documents both established a speaker’s credibility and developed readers’ critical competence by encouraging scrutiny. In the wake of the last election, however, and in the midst of febrile commentary on fake news, filter bubbles, and Russian propaganda, not to mention Facebook’s recent scandals involving data privacy and Cambridge Analytica, one cannot help but read this elegiacally, as the rose-tinted view of a different era. The Social Web generates a much different online culture, defined by polarized network spaces in which groups of known associates uncritically circulate materials that confirm their established views. Gilead Lotan (2016), a data scientist at Points, attributes this polarization to our collective homophily (“our preference to connect [on social media] to people like us” (para 18)); to the operation of back-end algorithms “attuned to social signals (clicks, likes, shares, and comments)” (para 18); and to new techniques of visual storytelling that depart from the ideals of rationalcritical discourse and additionally leverage an expanding range of communicative media. Within the resulting ecosystems, “attention attracts attention” (Citton, 2017, p. 48). Even bald-faced lies proliferate wildly. A recent study by MIT concluded that, on Twitter, “fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories,” and that people, not algorithms or bots, are largely responsible (Meyer, 2018, para 2), though algorithms certainly contribute—Twitter’s Trending Topics algorithm consistently catapults lies and rumors into wide and rapid circulation. (Topics that trend on Twitter reflect, not just the popularity of the surrounding conversation, but also its velocity based on the volume of Tweets it receives in a given moment; when that volume dramatically increases, the topic gets further promoted (Pasquale, 2015, p.  77); this generates a logarithmic increase in self-reinforcing intensity—Benklerian feedback gone awry). Media hacking (the manipulation of social media to define a political frame) and algorithmic gaming (the coordinated efforts of small groups to falsely accelerate stories and content) further distort what topics trend on social networks, and therefore what people see. In consequence, the networked public sphere no longer promotes (if ever it actually did) the active

3  INSIDE THE SWARMS: PERSONALIZATION, GAMIFICATION… 

41

and sustained cooperation of skeptical thinkers; instead, insulated echo chambers now construct their “own realities,” defined by deeply entrenched and opposing narratives (Lotan, 2016, para 18). The Web, the cloud, the Stack—by whatever name one calls it, this agglomeration of platforms and technical systems has become so large and complicated, so thoroughly integrated in the social body, that it requires a radical rethinking of the lifeworld, and of the role of mediated communication in the construction of social reality. In the words of Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp (2017), “the social world is not just mediated but mediatized: that is, changed in its dynamics and structure by the role that media continuously (indeed recursively) play in its construction” (p. 15). As an increasingly fundamental aspect of the social world, media changes how we think, and the ways in which we think together. Given its observable consequences, it is tempting to argue in Habermasian terms that systems like Social Media have colonized the lifeworld, replacing communicative reason with the logics of steering media. At the same time, however, the metric of ‘colonization’ operates at too gross a scale to be analytical useful—it frames both the lifeworld and the Internet in ideal terms as separate and self-contained systems that instantiate incommensurable logics. To understand more precisely the ways in which the public sphere has become “colonized” by steering media, and thus fundamentally mediatized, this chapter explores the aggregate and general effects of two new and defining aspects of the Social Web on our sense of the public, the Social Imaginary, and our shared repertoire of meaningful social activity. Specifically, this chapter explores the effects of personalization and gamification, as they manifest respectively in algorithmic filtering tools and common participatory features (e.g., friending, sharing, commenting, and reacting).

I Differences in individual psychology make it difficult to theorize, at least within the framework of cognitive science, the aggregate effects of personalization and gamification on social cognition and the public sphere. Moreover, the Habermasian framework of communicative action does not adequately address the roles of cognition, thinking, and inference in the emergent configurations of the networked public sphere. Theorizing the extant dynamics and effects of social mediatization consequently requires a hybrid framework that integrates concepts from cognitive theory with

42 

T. DUNN

more traditional philosophical concepts, such as the Social Imaginary, which, in the words of Charles Taylor (2004), encompasses “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper notions and images that underlies these expectations” (p. 23). In other words, “the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (p. 23). My wager is that John Searle’s notion of Intentionality, with its emphasis on the embedding of conscious thought within individual and cultural Backgrounds, can help bridge contemporary notions of model-based cognition and philosophical paradigms of the lifeworld that function in theories of the public sphere. Popular depictions of thinking frame it as inner speech, or the manipulation of symbols in the brain. In the field of cognitive science, these two phenomena are known as propositional representations and mental models, respectively. Whereas the former mimic linguistic propositions, the latter, at least as described by Philiph Johnson-Laird (1983), with whom the concept of mental models originated, consist of schematized, nonlinguistic mental representations whose elements and formal structure resemble (in simplified form) a referentially indexed situation (whether perceptual or conceptual) (p. 397). In other words, a mental model does not describe a situation so much as embody it; it is a mental instrument whose basic structure facilitates inference. In recent years, a diverse taxonomy of mental models has developed, addressing varying degrees of model complexity (image schemas and schemata, frames, roles, scripts, frameworks, etc.). Distinctions aside, these mental models share particular features: they all make it possible for individuals “to make inferences and predictions, to understand phenomena, to decide what action to take and to control its execution, and above all to experience events by proxy” (Johnson-Laird, 1983, p.  397). Phrased differently, they are rules of thumb, routinized actions, and useful heuristics that internalize salient details of the world and thus make possible both meaningful and effective responses. Mental models and propositional representations are compatible with Searle’s notion of Intentional states—conscious states that qualify as Intentional by virtue of being directed at objects and states of affair in the world, as perceptions, beliefs, hopes, desires, etc. (1983, p.  1). These Intentional states, however, only make sense within subconscious networks of other Intentional states (which might be compared to schemata

3  INSIDE THE SWARMS: PERSONALIZATION, GAMIFICATION… 

43

and frameworks), and against a Background of practices, mental capacities, and preintentional assumptions that are not themselves representational (1983, p.  19). One of Searle’s favorite explanations of the Background involves inference from non-literal language—in short, metaphors and figures of speech only make sense based on a set of internalized givens regarding the larger world and culture in which we live. Such Background capacities, however, might also include what Johnson-Laird describes as recursive procedures—interpretive “macrorules” for generalizing propositions (1983, p. 379). In essence, these recursive procedures “carry out such tasks as the mapping of propositional interpretations into models” (Johnson-Laird, 1983, p. 446), which occurs “as automatically as the tuning of muscles” (p. 412). Together, these Background capacities, internalized givens, and recursive procedures enable both subconscious and conscious Intentional states to come into being. Taken together, this background and network (which, following the arguments of Cornelius Castoriadis, I would like to call the imaginary) “play a central and unifying role in representing objects, state of affairs, sequences of events, the way the world is, and the social and psychological actions of daily life” (Johnson-Laird, 1983, p. 446). Consequently, they fundamentally organize an individual’s lifeworld. Because they arise, moreover, from her ongoing interactions with a shared, social environment, the individual’s imaginary has social extensions; it “extends beyond the immediate background understanding that makes sense of our particular practices,” reaching into the “wider grasp of our whole predicament: how we stand to each other, how we got to where we are, how we relate to other groups, and so on” (Taylor, 2004, p. 25). Furthermore, because we are embedded in a physical world, our personal and social imaginaries incorporate the affordances of our surroundings in our sense of the possible. Stephen J. Cowley and Frederic Vallee-Tourangeau (2013), describe this, in part, as thinking beyond the brain, wherein one’s immediate surroundings provide “a crucial scaffolding and support” (p. 9) for cognitive processes, in ways that enable increased concentration and environmentally mediated ratiocination. Even basic forms of extended/distributed cognition incorporate in our background capacities a range of skills, habits, and expectations, that center on and make useful these external tools and technologies. Martin Heidegger described this surrounding manifold of technological apparatuses and related capacities  as the equipment context.

44 

T. DUNN

Cornelius Castoriadus, who first explored the role of social imaginary in the creation of our shared institutions, identified at its core an identitary and ensemblist logic, which together involve two underlying protoinstitutions/operations: legein, “the ineffaceable component of language and of social representation” (1987, p. 175), whose ontological schema of separation results from the “distinguish-choose-posit-assemble-countspeak” operation (1987, p. 223), determines the collection of objects and entities that exists in a given world; and teukhein, “the ineffaceable component of social doing” (1987, p. 175), whose underlying operation of “assembling-adjusting-fabricating-constructing…separates [the] ‘elements’” identified by legein and “fixes them as such, orders them, combines them, unites them into totalities and organized hierarchies of totalities within the field of doing” (1987, p.  260). In other words, whereas legein identifies that which exists, teukhein instrumentalizes the resulting entities, subsuming them within recognizable aims and enterprises. With respect to people, teukhein also imposes, in the course of their socialization, all of “the codifiable attitudes, postures, gestures, practices, comportments and know-how” available in (and required by) a given culture (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 261). For Castoriadis, the social imaginary is radically indeterminate—though it leans on the material substratum, it is largely hereditary, the result of one’s socialization in a particular culture. Moreover, it builds into our collective psyche what N. Katherine Hayles (2012) calls a “technological unconscious” (p. 98), an internalized techne, or tool sensibility, derived from the technical manifold. To make the preceding reflections a little more concrete, and to weave together the various theoretical threads, let us consider the modern social imaginary in the context of both media technologies and the public sphere. As Taylor (2004) explains, “modern” persons understand themselves primarily as private individuals, whose moral, psychological, and religious experiences are independent of the wider, impersonal entities to which they belong—the state, the economy, the public. Moreover, these impersonal entities are thought to operate in accordance with objective laws, on the basis of which we structure our interactions within them. Michael Warner (2005) focuses on the last of these impersonal entities— the public—and frames it as a particular mode of address, as a commonsense notion in the background that is fundamentally “motivating, not simply instrumental” within this particular mode of address (p.  12). In other words, “[t]o address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social

3  INSIDE THE SWARMS: PERSONALIZATION, GAMIFICATION… 

45

world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology” (Warner, 2005, p. 10). The public, then, is something a speaker presupposes, a particular type of relationality among indefinite strangers, but also something the speaker calls into being through these acts of address, but only if the discourse she offers finds an audience that takes it up and enters it into circulation (Warner, 2005, pp. 11–12). Print plays a critical role in this process; it is, in fact, the underlying technology that drives the creation of publics, which engage with its full array of linguistic and rhetorical affordances (e.g., idiolects, speech genres, and intergeneric references) to create the world (Warner, 2005, p. 106). Importantly, these affordances extend beyond mere rational-critical discourse into the expressive and poetic aspects of languages; sub-cultures are defined as much by their style of discourse as their common interests. It should now be evident that Benkler’s vision of the NIE was inherently Habermasian—as a “network for communicating information and points of view” (2006, p. 181), it facilitated mutual understanding, and allowed geographically distributed individuals to “coordinate their plans for action by coming to an understanding about something in the world” (Habermas, 1987, p.  297), primarily by way of linguistically mediated interactions (speech acts), for which the NIE could serve as a largely neutral infrastructure. In the course of these interactions, moreover, Benkler presumed the “participants [would] overcome their at first subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement” and thereby generally move toward a “decentered understanding of the world” (Habermas, 1987, p. 315). In doing so, however, he misunderstood the role of the public as a motivating factor in social communication—for Benkler (and Habermas), a unitary lifeworld necessarily results from the impulse toward rationally motivated agreement; but as Warner (2005) demonstrates, a speaker’s sense of the public “selects participants by criteria of shared social space (though not necessarily territorial space), habitus, topical concerns, intergeneric references, and circulating intelligible forms” that “inevitably have positive content,” and thereby necessarily exclude a range of potential participants (pp. 106–107). In other words, publics are multiple, and there is no guarantee that a unitary sense of the lifeworld will always result, or that discourse will take the form of rationalcritical debate directed at some ideal, decentered understanding. Furthermore, Benkler minimizes the potential impacts of information overload and network centralization on public discourse, viewing these

46 

T. DUNN

threats to the network’s affordances as merely potential trajectories that careful shepherding of the NIE (preserving its decentralized internal structure, defined by writable, static web pages hyperlinked in a roughly bow-tie structure) could prevent.

II Unlike the early NIE, the Social Web is now search-driven and personalized. Both innovations use algorithms—artificial agents of machine intelligence that determine the relevance, importance, and reliability of online content—to address the problem of information overload. Both consequently reintermediate the Internet by inferring from a user’s past activity her current interests. A number of authors, most notably Eli Pariser, Cathy O’Neil, and Frank Pasquale, explain this process in detail, but here is the basic picture: as we surf the Internet, an extensive array of programs constantly monitor what we do (according to Pariser (2011), “the top fifty Internet sites, from CCN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 dataladen cookies and personal tracking beacons each” (p. 6)); based on our “click signals” (as well as our likes, comments, and purchases), these programs develop extensive profiles of our indicated likes and interests (Pariser, 2011, p. 9). Acxiom, an online data vendor, has “an average of 1,500 pieces of data on each person on its database—which includes 96 percent of Americans—along with data about everything from their credit scores to whether they’ve bought medication for incontinence” (Pariser, 2011, p. 7). For websites, these profiles are valuable because they enable “narrowcast” advertising—or the possibility that, based on continuous feedback, advertisers can fine-tune campaigns in real time, zeroing in “on the most effective messages,” which they can microtarget to specific audiences, and deliver at precisely the right times to provoke the desired outcomes (O’Neil, 2016, p. 75). For users, however, such tracking enables ongoing customization and personalized search results, whose supporting mechanisms are conceptually simple: based on your data profile, statistical “prediction engines” filter what you see to reflect your established likes and interests (Pariser, 2011, p. 9). In consequence, the query “proof of climate change” will produce on Google vastly different search results for environmental activists and oil company executives, and for each user, the set of ranked results will become, over time, “increasingly biased to share [her existing] views” (Pariser, 2011, p. 3). Such personalization is now at work across the Internet, from Yahoo News to the New York Times; websites consistently tailor and rank their content to suit their visitors.

3  INSIDE THE SWARMS: PERSONALIZATION, GAMIFICATION… 

47

In many ways, such personalization is immensely helpful—it reduces the chaos of the Internet and makes the online world feel more familiar (websites remember your past and your preferences); at the same time, however, it builds for us customized worlds that limit our access to the Internet’s full range of information, constraining our sense of the larger domain. Pariser (2011) calls this the “you loop,” wherein “[y]our identity shapes your media,” and then that media shapes your identity by changing your view on the world, reducing your sense of the available options; this feedback loop functions like a self-fulfilling prophecy (pp.  112–113). Benjamin H. Bratton (2015), in similar (though much more behaviorist) terms, describes this loop as a form of “disciplining,” through which the user’s perpetually reinforced prior behavior shapes what an algorithm “shows, hides, allows, or prohibits,” thereby delimiting the user’s future potential (p. 342). The reason for this can be stated simply: because algorithms produce simplified, cartoon models of who we are, and use those models to determine what content we see, the world becomes correspondingly simplified—a cartoon version of itself. More specifically, this filter bubble “surrounds us” with familiar ideas, “making us overconfident in our mental frameworks” and reinforcing what cognitive psychologists call confirmation bias (Pariser, 2011, p. 84). In terms of extended cognition, we no longer actively impose on the world our own sense of order, in ways that reflect specific cognitive needs; but, rather, we outsource that to the recommender systems, impairing the development of critical schemata. This changes our sense of the world—we come to be believe that what we know is everything there is to know; our information gaps become invisible (Pariser, 2011, p. 91). Furthermore, a paradox lies at the heart of such personalization: individual profiles only make sense based on aggregate data. As a result, we are not truly viewed as individuals, but as “members of tribes”—as members of distinct classes identified through obscure correlations in behavioral market data (O’Neil, 2016, pp.  159–160). Even though “most of the variables [involved in these designations] will remain a mystery” (O’Neil, 2016, p. 173), we are nonetheless stuck with these designations, which have lasting impacts on our financial, professional, and social options (O’Neil, 2016, pp.  159–160). For Taylor (2004), the modern social imaginary involves a “shift from ‘network’ or ‘relational’ identities to ‘categorical’ ones” (p. 160), but such categories are supposed to be socially meaningful (race, gender, nationality, etc.), and to make sense analytically because they reflect how individuals see themselves in the larger world.

48 

T. DUNN

Statistical models, in contrast, utilize their own ad hoc categories that, without our conscious knowledge, align our interests with assigned categories based on partial data and pseudoscientific proxies. These “tribes,” moreover, reflect “types” of people with similar temperaments, interests, and behavioral profiles; we can only be legible to these Bayesian models as specifics types. And here we see a different sense of what Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2012) calls “sub-individuals”—whereas he understands this term as reflecting a reduction of personal agency, in favor of impulsive, preconscious reflexes, informed by the technical infrastructure, that generate behavioral “swarms,” I understand it as a new trajectory in the social imaginary (by no means uncontested or uniformly distributed—at least not yet) wherein the individual (a general category through which persons relate to the separate, impersonal entities of the state, the public, and the economy) becomes reconceived through specific sub-types. In other words, the system understands us, not as universal individuals, but as economic, political, and social demographics that frequently overlap, and derive from seemingly stable (and formerly private) sets of psychological tendencies. Because these tribes form the actual basis for personalization, what Pariser calls the “you loop” involves a consensus imperative; it incentivizes tribalization by nudging our ideas and interests, against our knowledge, into alignment with others supposedly like us, with sometimes alarming results (and here I am thinking of the rapid descent one experiences on platforms, such as YouTube, from innocent, everyday queries into underworlds of conspiracy theory and religious extremism). The more we collectively adopt these assigned categories, which in the language of Dynamic Systems Theory, might be understood as attractors (states of equilibrium toward which the complex ecosystem of human-computer coupling tends), the more they fragment and distort legein, changing not just the scope, but also the texture, of the worlds in which we live. Each tribe begins to identify in the same material substratum a distinct and unique set of schematized entities. Ontological taxonomies become catalogs, internally consistent inventories that multiply terms within specific domains, based on a set of asymptotically finer distinctions. At the same time, however, adjacent domains become courser, more generalized; gaps in knowledge become less evident, because those domains are poorly rendered. In other words, the world we know grows smaller, but appears more detailed; this richness masquerades as breadth, while it  actually reflects increased myopia.

3  INSIDE THE SWARMS: PERSONALIZATION, GAMIFICATION… 

49

III The commodification of user data changes the governing imperatives for technical innovation. Though many of the Social Web’s interactive and personalized features also resolve inherent problems in the NIE (such as information overload, which Benkler thought would resolve itself), the current priority is user engagement; increased interaction generates more and more salable user data. As Tung Hui Hu (2015) explains, twenty-first century media is “structured to entice and reward (if not compel) participation” (p. 50). It aims, more than anything else, to be “sticky” (as measured by the amount of time a user spends on a website), and to hold the attention of the over-stimulated (Hu, 2015, p. 41). Yves Citton (2017) calls this arrangement—the provision of free services in exchange for data—playbor, “an inextricable combination of playful pleasure and productive labor” that makes of the Internet a “disconcerting mixture of playground and factory” (p. 65). As the Social Web’s dominant profit model, it tends to prioritize bare engagement over civic, psychological, or ethical considerations. Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former Vice-President of User Growth, admitted to an audience at Stanford that the platform’s interface targets “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops” that activate the same neural pathways as sex, food, and gambling (Vincent, 2017, para 11). The result is what HCI researchers call “gamification”—our interactions with online platforms are structured according to the logic of entertainment (and often outrage, since that generates maximum user engagement); when successful, they produce psychologically powerful rewards (in the form of likes, followers, comments, and shares) that further incentivize ongoing use. Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, explains this gamification in terms of a “social-validation feedback loop” (Vincent, 2017, para 12). To understand how this process of gamification affects our sense of the public, and the social imaginary, we must focus on their common participatory mechanisms—what Lev Manovich (1995) would call their general techniques, or commands—and, more specifically, the following features: friending, sharing, commenting, and liking. I have selected these mostly because they align with the “social signals” Lotan identifies as contributing factors in polarized online spaces and opposing narratives, and also because they are the primary instruments of online social exchange; they are the main tools that structure how we express ourselves on Social Networks. Other features certainly matter—this selection is neither

50 

T. DUNN

exhaustive nor exclusive—and yet, I believe these instruments sufficiently explain most emergent features of social networks, at least in the context of gamification. Moreover, all of these interactive features are what Ian Bogost (2008) would call unit operations: “abstract formal containers” (p. 131), “programmatic representations” (p. 39), and logical operations that “model things, relations, and events in the material world” (p. 131). In the course of their execution, unit operations take “one or more inputs and perform…transformation[s] on it” as a means of “purposeful action” (Bogost, 2008, pp. 7–8). Notice the parallels here with mental models and recursive operations—both illustrate how larger systems (the psyche and simulated digital environments) emerge from the interactions of smaller units; and both shift the focus of analysis from top-down, rule-based systems to the bottom-up, dynamic interaction of discrete procedures. Accordingly, I would like to suggest that all of these operations (unit operations; mental models and recursive procedures) overlap, in ways that map these unit operations back onto the personal and social imaginaries, making them “part of how we understand ourselves, others, and the world” (Bogost, 2008, p.  118). In other words, the infrastructure of online communications, by informing what Castoriadis called the protoinstitution of teukhein, comes to influence both “our general cognitive strategies” and “the culture at large” (Bogost, 2008, p. 118). While Tony D. Sampson (2017) explains this in terms of Pavlovian conditioning—as behaviorist training focused on our unconscious, impulsive reactions—I prefer Norbert Elias’s concept of figuration, which explains how “an increasingly complex social world” is built up from “accumulated relations of meaning” (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, p. 60), as opposed to merely reflex behaviors. Within these relations of sense-making, “feedback loop[s]…of interlocking practices” act “back on themselves” (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, p.  65) to produce “more or less stable interaction[s] of individuals” (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, p. 63), in the form of socially meaningful actions and institutions. In other words, they simulate different styles of social interaction that alter our sense of the public, and of the background assumptions/capacities that structure social action. Friending, following, and other forms of network instantiation reintermediate the Social Web by establishing filtering infrastructures, many of which claim to reflect our actual social relations. To some extent, this reimposes on the modern social imaginary a relational or network identity, in ways that run counter to our suppositions of privacy and more categorical forms of identity. Moreover, the operation of friending centers affinity

3  INSIDE THE SWARMS: PERSONALIZATION, GAMIFICATION… 

51

within online social networks (instead of less personal or emotional criteria, such as professional membership), in a way that collapses important distinctions between its multiple valences (a feeling of natural liking; kinship by other than blood; inherent likeness or agreement; of or relating to persons who share the same interests). Affinity becomes in consequence a general tendency toward homophily. In contradistinction to hyperlinks, which lead to specific content, friending links users; in other words, friending essentially curates a network of curators. In doing so, friending assembles a growing set of “attentional clichés”—“sensory filters which make certain saliences appear in our environment” (Citton, 2017, p. 37) and incorporate routinized modes of response (what cognitive theorists would call “scripts”)—“the ways in which we react to [phenomena],” and “our manner of referring to them in communication with our fellow human beings” (Citton, 2017, p. 37). Our online friends become role models— they illustrate (and perform) different ways of being in the world, and different perspectives that one can adopt toward a range of social phenomena; as well as the possible roles one can assume in online social discourse. Sharing requires a pre-existing network, through which information and content can be distributed. At the same time, however, it supplements that content, which otherwise might be addressed to a public of indefinite strangers, with editorial meta-content aimed at particular subpublics. In other words, manifest positive content (a network of known associates) alters the nature of discourse, subsuming shared content in the stylized discourse of specific sub-groups. Since most people now get their news through Facebook, this has lasting consequences for public discourse; content shared through the network comes to incorporate differential stances with “affective charge” (whether “hipness, normalcy, hilarity, currency, quaintness, freakishness,” or so on) not present in the original content (Warner, 2005, p. 102). Furthermore, content shared on the network involves at least two additional forms of implicit motivation. The first pertains to the sharer’s performative identity—how she wants to be known in the network, and thus her ongoing practice of social self-fashioning. (One communicates with the network, at least in part, through the props and proxies of shared content, and for this reason memes, video clips, and images are particularly effective tools.) The second involves the network’s collective identity, its sensibility. One shares an experience, idea, or event because one thinks it will be of interest to its recipients (it will inform or entertain them). This makes sharing a form of socializing—a form of ingroup bonding designed to solicit response. While this also applies to

52 

T. DUNN

public discourse, discourse directed at subgroups typically involves a further level of “vernacular performance” based on the speaker’s past experience with the collective idiom (Warner, 2005, p. 102); this becomes, in itself, a motivating factor for communication that further decenters rational deliberation. At the same time, the sprawling nature of most social networks, which incorporate both immediate family and passing acquaintances, as well as their frequently changing privacy settings, blurs the distinction between a subpublic and the public. This makes it increasingly likely that users will confuse the opinions of their local networks with those of the larger public (in ways that reflect what psychologists call the bias of false consensus, in which we believe that most other people think and believe as we do). Commenting, a now ubiquitous feature of the Social Web, does not imply the existence of a network. Rather, commenting offers direct and immediate feedback to prior acts of public (or semi-public) discourse, in a way that often suggests that all modes of address, and all propositions, are equally subject to lay validation. Commenting, furthermore, models all discourse on real-time public debate, privileging unfiltered first impressions over more careful and extended deliberation. This typically instigates escalating cycles of incitement and argument, in all of its trolling, call-out, and clap-back varieties, within which opportunistic point scoring and the rote deployment of standardized language games frequently dominate, with little incentive for rationally motivated agreement, or decentered understandings of the world. Liking, or reacting, expands the possibilities of discourse by supplementing (and often supplanting) the exchange of propositional content with comparatively minimal affirmations of interest. This also decenters rational discourse (which actively interrogates individual propositions through a process of verification and analysis) from social exchange, in favor of affect, which becomes the primary currency of social discourse. Importantly, no matter the specific affect expressed (anger, amusement, sadness, etc.), it publicly signals, to both the creators of that content and the algorithm that determines its visibility, individual and collective interest. This engenders a feedback loop within which these affective metrics— the intensity of feeling that discourse inspires (as opposed to its accuracy, relevance, or reliability)—determine its salience, and thereby encourage the creation and dissemination of similar content. In essence, then, reacting charges online spaces with feeling—they become more emotional, enlisting their participants in collective, vicarious paroxysms of outrage

3  INSIDE THE SWARMS: PERSONALIZATION, GAMIFICATION… 

53

and hilarity—what Tony D.  Sampson (2012) describes as affective contagions. Though I have discussed these features separately, gesturing when necessary toward their mutual implications, they typically function in concert; each takes the other’s output for input, in a kind of mutual reinforcement. And that is the point of this gamification—when deployed together, these operations create a system whose dynamics become addictive, and whose rules can be mastered in a specific kind of social acumen. One frequently hears, for instance, how so-and-so just “won the Internet,” and how soand-so’s “Instagram game is on point,” and both expressions indicate the extent to which we perceive the Social Web as something one can be good at. Based on these features, however, and on the incentives that emerge from their algorithmically mediated interactions, how does one win? These winning criteria become evident if one looks at the users who most profit (economically, financially, and professionally) from their interactions with social media. Essentially, one engages in marketing: one brands oneself; one identifies what the network likes (or hates) and gives it that, in exchange for comments, likes, shares, and followers. In the course of this game, distinct social, economic, and technical logics begin to merge. Though one can of course play it differently—tools can always be hacked, enlisted in goals and actions that go against their stated aims, and many people invest far less energy and interest in these online social platforms— my point concerns the game’s incentives, the poetics of its underlying design. Importantly, though social networks are structured as games, that is not their relevance frame (within figurations, relevance frames are common  orientations and shared purposes that orient an activity’s participants), and people frequently take their online social interactions seriously. In other words, these simulated social spaces fundamentally alter the presumed “laws” of public discourse based on the logics of games. As Warner (2005) explains of the bourgeois public sphere, its verbs of collective agency reflect its dependence on reading and print; the public “may scrutinize, ask, reject, opine, decide, judge, and so on,” and “nothing else” (p.  123); in the Social Web, the verbs of collective agency shift in the direction of friending, sharing, commenting, and liking. Moreover, we come to imagine that social and political discourse are activities that we can win, simply by making phenomena visible, or by garnering the most reactions—by inciting outrage, or laughter, or other forms of immediate affect—even though such visibility rapidly fades, without having

54 

T. DUNN

mobilized actual change. Finally, we come to imagine that people we disagree with can be blocked and ignored, and thereby excluded from the sphere of political action. And yet, the seemingly continuous temporality of these interactions seems to approximate, not those of politics and government, but those of the market—corporations are frequently more responsive than the state. In other words, these new forms of social actions seem to be more economic than political.

IV The phenomena discussed above—personalization and gamification— warrant additional comments. In the context of social networks, their joint influences create a strange dynamic that cannot be explained simply as the fragmentation of the public sphere. In polarized online spaces, the entrenched narratives of opposing subpublics share a common, seemingly contradictory rhetorical feature: though both, like dominant publics, “take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy” (Warner, 2005, p. 122), they also describe themselves as dominated countercultures, under siege by hostile establishments; in other words, they “invent and circulate counterdiscourses” that “formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Warner, 2005, p. 118). Consider, for instance, the emergence of white identity politics, and the conservative deployment of social justice discourse to articulate their respective self-understandings. Bracketing the legitimacy of these maneuvers, they illustrate the extent to which online subpublics increasingly understand themselves as counterpublics, and indicate the destabilizing effects of the Social Web on the contemporary social imaginary. As Cathy O’Neil (2016) and others have argued, invisible algorithms that leverage our personal data increasingly administer the operations of the state, the economy, and the public; such algorithms function opaquely in the background, generating results that feign objectivity, but fundamentally embody the biases, prejudices, and erroneous suppositions of their creators, as well as blind imperatives toward optimization, profit, and efficiency, in ways that consistently target and exacerbate social, economic, and political inequality. This situation closely resembles Deleuze’s control society, “in which subjects are governed by invisible rules and systems of regulation, such as…credit scores, web history, and computer protocols”

3  INSIDE THE SWARMS: PERSONALIZATION, GAMIFICATION… 

55

(Hu, 2015, p. xiv). Ironically, however, because these regulatory systems involve “fewer explicit institutional spaces, or rules to restrict the subject’s behavior,” they “are often experienced as freeing” (Hu, 2015, p. xv). And yet, the above disturbances in our social imaginary suggest, perhaps, that latent feelings of oppression persist; that behind our feelings of freedom we sense that, behind the scenes, absurd, opaque, and baroque rules inexplicably limit our lives. In describing the emergence of the modern social imaginary, Taylor is clear that a certain idea of the self, which first originated within a very specific milieu of individuals, eventually spread through the social world and became adopted within its background assumptions. In similar fashion, a technocratic imaginary, which strongly resembles that of enlightened despotism (wherein agency is exclusively personal, and systems are governed objectively by science) (Taylor, 2004, p.  165), has become embedded in our technical infrastructure, in ways that disrupt existing notions of public and private, as well as distinctions between the social, economic, and public spheres. Is it possible, then, that within our mutating social imaginary, we sense these impersonal despots at work? If so (and here I am only speculating), it seems that we bring them to consciousness, and express them in our shared imaginaries, through the figure of a world besieged—a world that is being colonized and subverted, threatened with extinction from outside, by aliens. And so, it seems, we resist; we close ranks; we grant our allegiance to strong men, and to social movements, that promise to shore up our crumbling worlds and to make them, once again, ascendant.

References Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Berardi, F. (2012). The uprising: On poetry and finance. New  York, NY: Semiotext(e). Bogost, I. (2008). Unit operations: An approach to videogame criticism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bratton, B. H. (2015). The stack: On software and sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, C. (1987). The imaginary institution of society (K.  Blamey, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Citton, Y. (2017). The ecology of attention (B. Norman, Trans.). New York, NY: Polity Press.

56 

T. DUNN

Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2017). The mediated construction of reality. New York, NY: Polity Press. Cowley, S.  J., & Vallee-Tourangeau, S. (2013). Cognition beyond the brain: Computation, interactivity and human artifice. New York City: Springer-Verlag. Habermas, J. (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity (F. Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hayles, N. K. (2012). How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hu, T. H. (2015). A prehistory of the cloud. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Johnson-Laird, P.  N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lotan, G. (2016). Fake news is not the only problem. Points. Retrieved from points.datasociety.net/fake-news-is-not-the-problem-f00ec8cdfcb#.kwlym0syx Manovich, L. (1995). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meyer, R. (2018). The grim conclusions of the largest-ever study of fake news. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2018/03/largest-study-ever-fake-news-mit-twitter/555104/ O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. New York City: Broadway Books. Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the internet is hiding from you. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Pasquale, F. (2015). The Black Box Society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sampson, T.  D. (2012). Virality: Contagion theory in the age of networks. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sampson, T.  D. (2017). The assemblage brain: Sense making in neuroculture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vincent, J. (2017). Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society. The Verge. Retrieved from https://www.theverge. com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society Warner, M. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.

CHAPTER 4

The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Networks: Heterogeneity in the Effect of Technology on Collective Action Mobilization Mathew Jenkins

Introduction The diffusion of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has exponentially increased the speed of communication and human interaction. In the realm of collective action, these changes have been heralded as ushering in a new era of citizen-oriented politics, wherein people are no longer bound by hierarchical political organizations. In their place a far more fluid crowd-sourced version of citizen activism has emerged, a horizontal activism that can begin with a single individual and spread across the face of the globe in hours, minutes, or even seconds. This is the activism of the Arab Spring and the “Occupy” protests that swept the globe in 2011; it is collective action that has been freed from the shackles of organizations, in part or in whole. This type of collective action has variously been referred to as “connective action” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013), “horizontal organization” (Piven, 2013), and “digitally-enabled” activism M. Jenkins (*) Saint Martin’s University, Lacey, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Jones, M. Trice (eds.), Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36525-7_4

57

58 

M. JENKINS

(Earl & Kimport, 2011). What all of these terms have in common is that they draw on the observation that digitally mediated social networks constitute one of the predominant forms of power in modern society. This insight, popularized by scholars such as Castells (2000, 2011) and Van Djik (1991), has helped scholars understand the dynamics of collective action in the digital age. Accordingly, while all of the above terms certainly have applications to which they are particularly appropriate, I will here use the somewhat broader term “networked collective action” to refer to action that is driven in part or in whole by horizontal networks of digitally connected citizens. What has been lost in this enthusiasm over networked collective action is the fact that the ultimate effect of technology on society and politics is the product of a dynamic process that is shaped by culture, path dependence, and political institutions. Many theorists of networked collective action have at times written with a technological determinism-inflected voice, assuming a linear path from Social Networking Service (SNS) diffusion to crowd-sourced democracy (See, e.g., Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Earl & Kimport, 2011; Howard & Hussain, 2013). In particular, Bennett and Segerberg’s (2013) widely influential theory of connective action implies that digitally networked mass action is not bounded by culture and context given that the universal nature of digital media. In contrast to this optimistic view, I provide evidence that suggests that political culture sets bounds on the extent to which technology has this transformative effect on collective action. I do this by drawing on a case comparison of Japan and South Korea, two countries in which the effect of technology on collective action ought to be similar but is not. Drawing on an original quantitative analysis, I show that Twitter use is highly correlated with protest in South Korea but not in Japan. I follow up the presentation of the results of the main analysis with a discussion of some contextual differences that may be underlying the different uses of technology in the two countries. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for collective action theory.

Explaining Collective Action Collective action can be broadly defined as the spontaneous action of individuals for the purpose of achieving a commonly held goal. For some authors, collective action entails taking group action “in pursuit of members’ perceived shared interests” (Marshall, 1998). In this chapter, I will

4  THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF DIGITAL NETWORKS: HETEROGENEITY… 

59

focus on contentious collective action, which Beissinger (2002) describes as collective action that challenges authority or “existing practices” (Beissinger, 2002, p.14). Examples of contentious collective action include protests, strikes, boycotts, and petitions. The difficulty in generating collective action lies in the fundamental collective action dilemma, otherwise known as the free-rider problem. Participation in collective action is costly to the individual, but the benefits of collective action—higher wages, reduced income inequality, etc.—cannot usually be restricted only to individuals who bore the cost of the action; that is, the goods generated by collective action are public goods. Hence, there is an incentive to “free ride” on the efforts of others, since anyone can receive the benefit of the collective action without participating. When a sufficient proportion of those who would otherwise be inclined to participate decide instead to free ride collective action fails to occur. According to Olson (1965), the primary means by which the collective action is overcome is through the establishment of an organization capable of punishing free-riders or rewarding participants, such as a labor union or a social movement organization (SMO). Scholars have expanded and modified Olson’s theory to include a range of factors that influence the success of collective action. These various strands of literature have been organized into what is known as Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT). According to RMT, collective actions succeed to the extent that organizations and their leaders are able to accumulate and effectively manage resources, construct and propagate an appealing group message or theme, and take advantage of openings in the political opportunity structure (McCarthy & Zald, 1977). One potential downside of organization-­ driven collective action is that organizations tend to be hierarchical (Fromson, 2003), such that modes of participation are largely defined by organization leaders. This results in tension between the trend toward a preference for more personalized modes of participation, especially amongst citizens of advanced democracies and traditional organization-­ led collective action (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2002). The Promise of Networked Collective Action The advancement and diffusion of digital ICT in the late 1990s and early 2000s ushered in a new era of collective action, in so far as it has made spontaneous mass mobilization far easier than in it was in the pre-digital era (Karpf, 2012; Earl & Kimport, 2011; Bimber, 2017). This is so for

60 

M. JENKINS

two reasons. First, ICT lowered the transactional costs associated with participating in and organizing collective action (Shirky, 2008). With regard to organizing collective action, ordinary citizens linked to each other through social media can coordinate actions quickly and cheaply. Horizontal citizen networks can now organize and carry out political tactics without the guidance of formal movement organizations (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Piven, 2013); I hereafter refer to this type of action as networked collective action, since it is collective action that is driven by networks rather than organizations. Second, ICT permits a wide variety of participatory styles that did not exist in the pre-digital era, redefining what it means to participate in collective action (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2012). This is partly a consequence of the characteristics of social media platforms. As Carr and Hayes (2015) maintain, social media are “Internet-­ based channels that allow users to opportunistically interact and selectively self-present, either in real-time or asynchronously, with both broad and narrow audiences who derive value from user-generated content and the perception of interaction with others” (Carr & Hayes, 2015). Social media permit a form of interaction that enables users to choose which version of themselves they present to an audience. With regard to collective action, then, social media increases the personal benefits to gained from participation since it gives people some influence over the way a given collective action comes into being, in addition to providing them more opportunities to define their role in it. One of the most prominent explanations of this phenomenon is the theory of connective action proposed by Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2012, 2013), who argue that it is a result of a combination of technological and sociocultural trends. Bennett and Segerberg (2013) point out that the rise of networked collective action has coincided with a general turn away from institutionalized politics in industrialized democracies, as people increasingly seek to engage with politics through non-­ institutional channels. They further note the work of Dalton (2008), who argues that democratic citizenship norms in industrialized democracies have shifted from duty-based norms, according to which the ideal citizen is one who obeys the law and participates in politics through traditional institutional channels, to an “engaged” norm, wherein the good citizen is instead seen as engaging in extra-institutional politics, eschewing institutional politics as being too rigid to meet the demands of today’s self-­ actualizing citizens. And, while SMOs once existed mostly outside of the realm of mainstream institutional politics, in most advanced industrial

4  THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF DIGITAL NETWORKS: HETEROGENEITY… 

61

democracies SMOs have largely become part and parcel of the democratic machinery (Goldstone, 2003). According to this view, citizens of democratic countries are increasingly seeking out alternatives both to institutional political participation and organization-led activism, preferring instead forms of activism that permit a higher degree of personal expression, and focus on issues rather than mainstream politics (Giddens, 1991; Micheletti, 2003). Networked collective action can thus be thought of as a means of meeting public demand for this type of political engagement. As evidence of this shift toward networked collective action, Bennett and Segerberg (2013) point to the increased prominence and frequency of large-scale digitally networked collective actions in Western democracies, like Occupy Wall Street in the United States and Los Indignados in Spain, political movements that developed spontaneously through digitally mediated networks. In some cases, formal movement organizations still play a role in facilitating networked collective action, but they are not pre-­ requisites for it, nor do they necessarily play the sort of leadership role that organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) played in the civil rights movement in the United States. Rather, organizations play a variety of roles, sometimes taking a leadership role alongside horizontal citizen networks, other times playing a supporting role. In many cases, organizations themselves have become “hybridized”, meaning that they increasingly resemble fluid horizontal citizen networks (Chadwick, 2006). Moreover, the line between the off-line and on-line worlds is becoming increasingly fuzzy. As Vaccari (2010) notes, the diffusion of smart phones and other mobile technology has increased the extent to which people experience the world through digital media. As evidence of this ontological fusion, Vaccari points out that people increasingly tend to experience reality through connected devices, such as when concert goers live stream the concerts they are attending, or perhaps even discuss the concert on social media as it is happening. Some scholars argue that we should abandon the online/offline distinction all together. Instead, these authors argue that we should simply view collective action as occurring in a digitally mediated environment (Bimber, 2017). In this sense, all collective action can be considered networked to some degree or another. This is a promising development for democracy, since it signifies the emergence of a powerful means by which ordinary people can exert an influence on politics and the policy making process, one that is theoretically possible in any democracy in the world.

62 

M. JENKINS

The Empirical Challenge: Searching for Evidence of Cross-national Convergence in Collective Action One of the implications of theories regarding networked collective action is that it should be expected to develop in any industrialized democracy with a high degree of digital media penetration. Bennett and Segerberg (2013), for instance, connect the emergence of networked collective action—or what they call “connective action”—to broader social and political changes in post-industrial societies, such as the loosening of social ties, weakening partisan identification, and other such sweeping social changes. It is this shift away from fixed identities linked to institutionally linked forms of representation to more fluid political identities and a preference for individual-centered forms of political expression, when combined with digitally mediated networks, should be expected to result in collective action. According to this logic, then, any post-industrial society with sufficient internet penetration should exhibit salient instances of networked collective action. Howard and Hussain (2013) go somewhat further, arguing that the example of digitally organized resistance groups in the Arab Spring suggests that culture or national-level variables will not significantly bound or restrict networked collective action. If this is the case, we should expect to see a convergence in rates of collective action around the world, as citizens take advantage of the shift toward a digitally mediated environment. In reality, however, the picture is far more mixed. While there are a few notable instances of networked collective action outside the West, collective action in other parts of the world is still low, especially in East Asian democracies. In order to show this difference empirically, I undertook an analysis of survey data from Wave 5 and Wave 6 of the World Values Survey (WVS). Figure 4.1 shows the average proportion of respondents that participated in a peaceful gathering, such as a protest or a sit-in. The country-level proportions are averaged by region; here, I look at three regions: The West, South America, and East Asia. Looking at Fig.  4.1, we see that Western countries (the United States, Germany, Sweden, etc.) have the highest average proportion of respondents reporting that they have participated in a peaceful gathering, with South America close behind them. Indeed, we do see some convergence between the West and South America, as theory would suggest. By contrast, however, East Asia is far below both regions in each wave of the survey. This difference is statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Moreover, in contrast to the implications of networked collective

4  THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF DIGITAL NETWORKS: HETEROGENEITY… 

63

Fig. 4.1  Percent of respondents reporting participation in peaceful gathering. (Note: Vertical bars indicate 95% confidence intervals)

action theory, not only is there a lack of convergence, protest actually seems to be on the decline in East Asia. What explains the low level of collective action in East Asia? One possible explanation of the collective action gap between East Asia and the West is that it is a result of cultural differences. All three of the East Asian countries exhibit collectivist cultures. Collectivism is a set of cultural norms that is historically connected to Confucian thought. Collectivist cultures tend to place a high importance on social order,

64 

M. JENKINS

hierarchy, in-group cohesion, and obedience (Dalton & Shin, 2006; Hui & Triandis, 1986). Following from this, one logical explanation for the lack of convergence in collective action is that these collectivist values do not lead to the preference for self-actualizing forms of political participation, such as those offered by social media and networked collective action. However, a closer look reveals that these between-region discrepancies obscure important within-region variation that cannot logically be explained by collectivism alone. South Korea, in particular, stands out as having a strong and consistent stream of networked collective action, such as the candle light protests of the late 2000s and the recent anti-Park protests that resulted in the ousting of former President Park Geun-hye in 2017. Empirically, we can see this difference in Fig. 4.2, which shows the proportion of the population that has participated in a peaceful gathering for just the three East Asian nations in the sample. Although the 95% confidence intervals partially overlap in Wave five, in Wave six we see clearly that South Korea has the highest proportion of respondents reporting participation in a peaceful gathering, with 11.4% of South Koreans reporting participation, a figure that is far closer to the rest of the countries in the sample. By contrast, at about 3% Japan has the lowest self-reported participation rate, the lowest rate amongst all countries. Twitter and Protest: Comparing Japan and South Korea In this section I compare the effect of Twitter use on collective action in Korea and Japan in order to identify differences in the relationship between social media use and collective action. The Korea–Japan comparison presents an intriguing contrast. Both countries have collectivist cultures rooted in Confucian norms of obedience and loyalty (Hui & Triandis, 1986). There are also other important similarities between the two countries. Korea and Japan have both been directly and heavily influenced by the United States, they both have mixed-member electoral systems, and they have similar levels of socio economic development, as revealed by their Human Development Index (HDI) scores (0.91 and 0.90, respectively). Yet, their collective action profiles are polar opposites. In the remainder of this chapter, I compare the relationship between social media use and collective action in these two countries. These two cases are chosen in order to minimize the influence of contextual variables. By doing so, I can narrow down the list of potential explanatory variables that are impeding cross-national convergence in networked collective action. The main

4  THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF DIGITAL NETWORKS: HETEROGENEITY… 

65

Fig. 4.2  Percent of respondents reporting participation in peaceful gathering (East Asia only). (Note: Vertical bars indicate 95% confidence intervals)

analysis is followed by some speculations about the underlying cause of differences in networked collective action between the two countries.

Data and Methods I isolate the effect of social media use on collective action as follows. First, I identify the number of Tweets posted on Twitter by citizens of each country on each day of 2015 and 2016. Twitter data is chosen because the

66 

M. JENKINS

two countries have almost identical population adjusted Twitter usage rates, making it an ideal medium of comparison (Mocanu et al., 2013). I choose these years because they mark a significant time of popular foment in both countries. In 2015–2016, Japan experienced a surge of protest in opposition to Shinzo Abe. In 2016 Korea was shaken by the aforementioned anti-Park protests. By comparing the extent to which conversation on Twitter is correlated with protests, we can get a sense of the way activists are using technology to engage in collective action. The extent of collective action in each country is given by daily protest counts as recorded by the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS), which uses machine coding to extract a list of all collective action events for various countries (Boschee et al., 2015). If networked collective action optimists, such as Bennett and Segerberg (2013), are correct, we should expect to find that Twitter use has roughly similar effects in the two countries, or at least that its effect is not obviously asymmetrical. To the extent that such convergence is not observed, we can make use of the paired comparison to search for sources of difference that have not yet been accounted for in the literature.

Results Before delving into the main analysis, I first present some descriptive statistics in order to illustrate the broad contours of the data. According to the ICEWS data, there were almost twice as many protests in Korea as in Japan between 2015 and 2016. The total number of protests in Korea during the period is 1066, whereas in Japan there were 534 protest actions recorded. A difference in means test was conducted in order to show that the difference in the average number of actions across the period is statistically significant. In order to look for differences in the effect of Twitter use on protest between the two countries, I regress daily protest counts on the total number of Twitter posts that occurred on each day of the two-year span between 2015 and 2016. Because the protest data have a wide range of variability I use negative binomial regression, a particular type of generalized linear regression models that is specifically designed for this type of data. The results of Dickey–Fuller tests showed that both sets of tweet counts are stationary, so all analyses were performed on un-differenced data. Tweet counts are logged in order to produce regression coefficients that are more readily interpretable. This did not affect the results. The

4  THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF DIGITAL NETWORKS: HETEROGENEITY… 

67

Table 4.1  Main regression results Dependent variable: Protest count

ln (Tweets) Korea Constant Observations Log likelihood

Pooled model

Korea

Japan

1.423∗∗∗ (0.282) 2.843∗∗∗(0.521) −24.020∗∗∗(4.959) 471 −1080.586

1.405∗∗∗ (0.298)

1.626 (1.035)

−20.891∗∗∗(4.711) 285 −679.162

−27.589 (18.223) 186 −401.824

Note: ∗ = p