Series 1 - Episode 1 "The Patchwork of Platforms"
"Series 1: Freedom and the Internet"
2024-11-08 31 min
Description & Show Notes
In this episode of the ReDICo Podcast, Fergal Lenehan and Yolanda López García explore key concepts of digital intercultural communication. At the heart of the discussion is postdigitality, which highlights the merging of the analog and digital worlds.
Platforms play a crucial role in this postdigital era and are transforming our everyday reality. A major focus of the discussion is how algorithms can shape our freedom. The episode emphasizes the importance of questioning their influence critically and engaging with them consciously. We also delve into postdigital cosmopolitanism, which promotes openness to the world and solidarity across national borders. The concept of "agency" – individual power to act – is re-examined in the context of digital intercultural communication. Finally, the episode offers a preview of the next topic, where identity and culture will take centre stage.
Platforms play a crucial role in this postdigital era and are transforming our everyday reality. A major focus of the discussion is how algorithms can shape our freedom. The episode emphasizes the importance of questioning their influence critically and engaging with them consciously. We also delve into postdigital cosmopolitanism, which promotes openness to the world and solidarity across national borders. The concept of "agency" – individual power to act – is re-examined in the context of digital intercultural communication. Finally, the episode offers a preview of the next topic, where identity and culture will take centre stage.
Transcript
SPEAKER 1 - (00:00:00)
Hello, and welcome to REDICO, the podcast for digital interculturality. REDICO stands for Researching Digital Interculturality Cooperatively. It's a research and networking project that looks for the areas of intercultural communication and internet studies to come closer together. My name is Fergal Lenehan, and I'm based at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany. I'm one of the members of the project, and for the past few years I've been working on areas such as post-digital cosmopolitanism and the theory of digital intercultural communication. Joining me today is Yolanda Lopez.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:00:44)
Hi, Fergal. Thanks for inviting me today. Hello everyone. I'm Yolanda Lopez-Garcia, and I'm based at the Technical University of Chemnitz, also in Germany. My work is in the field of intercultural communication, too, which I combine with migration studies, intercultural practice, and digital culture.
SPEAKER 1 - (00:01:03)
Okay, so today we'd like to talk about some important ideas and concepts which underpin digital intercultural communications, and which I've been working on for the past few years. Yolanda has also been working on some of the same concepts and ideas, but maybe from a slightly different angle. This is also the Wissenschaftsjahr Freiheit, the scientific year centered on freedom, in Germany, and which is marked by a number of communication activities here in which German-based academics discuss the idea of freedom and how it relates to their work, and then they try to communicate this to a wider audience. Okay, so we'll keep this question also in mind when we're discussing.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:01:40)
Fergal, so we live in the so-called deep mediatization of everyday life, and linked to this it comes to the term post-digitality. Can you explain what the term means?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:01:52)
Yeah, the post-digital is something that has been very important for my work for the past few years. The post-digital is a theoretical concept that has been used for a number of years and means in its simplest form that the dichotomy between the analog and the digital is no longer valid and doesn't really make any sense anymore, as the digital penetrates the material in many different ways. So Florian Kramer, a German theorist in a very famous article from 2014, at least famous in this context, writes that the post in post-digital signals a continuation, not a rupture, not an ending, that it is the end, okay, the end of all the new media, but also marks the ubiquity of the digital. Okay, so it's not the ending of the digital, but it means the digital is everywhere and it can't really be unthought in that sense. The post-digital discussion has continued on and has actually taken many different forms. So for example, Berry in 2015 has written that being online or offline has become anachronistic with our always-on smart devices, and that this has become hegemonic, and I think the idea of the digital or the post-digital being hegemonic is important here too. So there are many things that can't be done anymore in a non-digital manner. So Knox, in an important text from 2019, suggests that digital technologies are embedded in and entangled with existing social practices and economic and political systems, and this means that our life worlds are embedded with platforms, with all of their organizational logics in terms of communication that they bring.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:03:36)
So when you say that our life worlds are embedded within platforms, can you explain deeper what exactly is a platform and how this embeddedness takes place? Can you give maybe some examples?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:03:47)
Yeah, definitely. A platform is the dominant digital architectural form which facilitates interaction between two or more users. So platforms dominate the internet in terms of both apps and the web. Social media such as Facebook and Instagram are platforms, but platforms are also online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, payment services such as PayPal. Then you have, for example, gig economy apps such as Uber and Airbnb, and streaming services such as Netflix. And these are forms of digital architecture which facilitate interaction and are very often corporate dominated, and that's sort of the central point here and a very important point. Platforms have become embedded in our life worlds, and we, as a result, have also become embedded within the system of the platform, usually agreeing to give up our data, and the platforms record our behavior and use this. So that's also an important point. The post-digitality of platforms is also to be seen in how they change our life world. So a small example is perhaps how few people have televisions now, because we have computers which are oriented towards streaming from different platforms, so there's no need for them generally. Or we have the much stronger example, of course, of Amazon, which is basically an online platform and has transformed retail in many aspects of our high street, many aspects of our physical environment. Another interesting example is dating apps, actually. They've become very embedded in people's life worlds, with people reorganizing their social lives around their algorithms, and this phenomenon is known as platformization, which should be seen as a post-digital phenomenon.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:05:33)
And you know what? Not only computers, but also we watch now probably TV shows on our cell phones, no? I mean, not only on computers or laptops, but we also, I mean, here the combination of mobility is also quite interesting, isn't it?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:05:49)
Definitely. I mean, at the end of the day, our smartphones are small computers.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:05:54)
So what about platformization? What do you mean by this?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:05:59)
Platformization is an important term now in the contemporary discussion, and the term platformization refers to how platforms transform our life worlds, okay? How they transform our daily lives in a post-digital manner. So Poel, Nieborg and van Dyck, in a very important text from 2019, offer a two-pronged definition of platformization. From a software and political economy perspective, they see platformization as the penetration of the infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life. And again, here the example of Amazon fits, which has transformed retail, as we already saw. But also often every government department has their own platform upon which you have to upload documents, get information, ask questions, and often this can only be done on the platform. So here you have the sort of the sense of hegemony, that things are digital or they're not at all, I suppose is what I mean by that. From a cultural perspective, the same authors see platformization as the reorganization of cultural practice and imaginations around platforms. I think online dating is again an interesting example here, but also actually the increased importance traditional media sources have given to their social media presence, which is now reflected in how articles are being written and how they're being presented in different contexts. The legal academic Julia Cohn has written very interestingly here, and she argues that platforms have become the core organizational structure of a new informational economic system. And that they've transformed the media industry, they've transformed the working world as reflected in the gig economy, for example, food delivery sources and also teaching to an extent. And she believes basically that globalization needs to be thought now in terms of platforms. And of course, you also have different platform landscapes in different contexts. Until now, we've been discussing chiefly the Western context, but for example, in China you have Alibaba and Tencent, which are major platforms, and there are different platform landscapes in different contexts.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:08:02)
So you describe the internet now as a patchwork of bordered platforms. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:08:09)
By that, I mean that we've given a lot of power to a small number of corporations who control the digital architecture of the internet, such as Google, Meta – which of course has Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – TikTok, and Amazon, and this has resulted in the bordering of the internet and a comparative lack of freedom on the part of the individual user. So actually here we can talk about the idea of freedom and how it relates, and it relates here fairly well. So in the 1990s, the internet was seen as a network of networks where anyone could interact, interact with anyone. It was dominated, at least at the very start, by a type of anarcho-global spatial imaginary. A cyber-utopian perspective dominated and was reflected, to a certain extent at least anyway, in the digital architecture of the time with its hyperlinks, etc., and the idea that anyone could get in contact with anyone. But interaction now takes place largely on corporate platforms, which are often exclusive and generally not interlinked with other platforms. So the interaction takes place in relation to the logic of the platform. So the platform controls greatly how the communication functions. A network would suggest an open form, but the internet is not open anymore. It's not a network of networks anymore, but a patchwork of largely bordered platforms. So platforms actually represent the closing of the internet, not an opening.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:09:36)
So you argue that agency also needs to be rethought for digital intercultural communication. What do you mean here?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:09:44)
Yeah, by this I mean that the old paradigm of person A meets person B and negotiates interculture C, which is at the center of intercultural communication, I would argue that this needs radical rethinking. And I mean, this is not a radical thought, I think, in fairness.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:10:01)
And not only in terms of the internet, no? Not only in terms of the internet. We cannot think in the offline anymore, but, you know, it is quite dated.
SPEAKER 1 - (00:10:11)
Yeah, definitely, without a doubt, without a doubt. And I think an interesting way of rethinking this is looking at the philosophy of action, okay, and the philosophy of action linked action and intentionality, okay, and argued from the beginning that an action was only an action if somebody intended it to be an action. And this is clearly no longer the case. So, for example Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde talk very interestingly in an article from 2009 about systematic agency, and about systematic agency being a system doing something by itself according to certain goals or norms within a specific environment. So what we're talking about then is systematic agents in an internet context which are non-human, but are still full of human agentive fragments. And the internet is full of agentive fragments, little pieces of historical or repetitive human doing as part of systematic agency. So for example, Hillis, in also an interesting text from 2019, he calls artificial intelligence a hybrid intelligence as it's connected to the aims and goals of nation states and corporations, okay, and I think probably corporations are dominant in terms of artificial intelligence at this stage. And that has a number of questions, okay, which we'll have to answer in the future, probably. Montemayor sees artificial intelligence, okay, in another text from 2023, he sees artificial intelligence as a type of collective epistemic agency, and that artificial intelligence is collective in its needs and motivations, and collective also in relation to its attention routines and goals. Which means that artificial intelligence is linked to human agency, at times thousands and maybe even millions of human agents if you consider the data that it's used for training in different contexts. So it's packed full of agentive fragments which come from a human context. Algorithms, and of course the difference between artificial intelligence and algorithms is artificial intelligence can create its own algorithms, but algorithms organize data according to a certain pattern. And are also, of course, a type of systematic agency rooted in historic human agency. So the Italian philosopher, Alberto Romele, sees algorithms as having hermeneutic agency, as having a type of narrativizing agency, and he sees this in the example of, the example that he uses in his book is Facebook’s Friend's Day function, which is basically an algorithmic organizing of data, but it also generates a type of narrative, and to be honest at this stage I don't even know if there is a Facebook Friend's Day function anymore.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:12:49)
Well, and how do these agentive fragments relate then to freedom? Can you say a bit more about that? It's quite interesting.
SPEAKER 1 - (00:12:58)
Yeah, certainly certain types of algorithms influence our behavior, point us towards acting in certain ways perhaps, which maybe curtail our freedom of choice. Certainly the homophilic bubbles that just contain certain viewpoints have had a polarizing effect on society, and perhaps represent themselves a risk to democracy, at least you could logically view that as such. Many think this, it isn't an original idea, in fairness, and I think anything which stops us from thinking is perhaps a risk to democracy, or at least may be seen in this way. There are also fears, of course, that artificial intelligence will make certain types of jobs redundant in the future. On the other hand, perhaps advances in artificial intelligence mean that we will have more time to do the things we want to do. So yeah, I don't know. What do you think?
SPEAKER 2 - (00:13:54)
Yeah, I just remember a meme that I saw a couple of days ago from a woman wanting artificial intelligence to do kind of the laundry and cleaning houses so that she can sit and actually write papers, and mostly in academic work. So exactly, this is probably something that could be thought or could be done, and probably in the future will take place. But yes, I mean, it's very interesting what you have said here, Fergal, and of course many thoughts come to my mind. On this topic of the algorithms, right, I think here in Felix Stalder, you know how he approaches algorithmicity, and of course there are other perspectives on algorithmicity, but I find very interesting what he says about the way how we need this sort of algorithmicity or how algorithms kind of help us to reduce complexity in our everyday life, which I find this analogy quite interesting, also combining with the life world, right? We need this kind of reduction of complexity so we can, yeah, we can do routines, we can, you know, do our everyday life without questioning every second what we need to do. And so in this term, algorithmicity plays here an interesting role, but also in the critical aspect of who are behind this, you know, this programming, and you just mentioned artificial intelligence can create their own algorithm, you know, but behind this all at the end are humans, no? So this kind of fear that, you know, artificial intelligence and algorithms will take, you know, place and we rob, or they will rob, I don't know, jobs or something, I mean, this other critical aspect to rethink, no? You know, to keep the fear a bit away. But one thing that I think is important here is at the end the role that this hegemonic aspect, this kind of coloniality that we see in this platformization and who is behind, you know, these new ways of organizing everyday life, you know, I think that's very interesting thoughts that you're bringing in and combining this with the question of power at the end,
SPEAKER 1 - (00:16:45)
right?
SPEAKER 2 - (00:16:45)
And you mentioned also the aspect of freedom, no? And at the end within this reduction of complexity and these, you know, suggestions that we might get, you know, with all these bubbles, right, that we get through our practices, this is kind of the challenge that we live in, no? How do we escape, probably, this platformization, this way of algorithmicity takes down in our everyday life and, you know, how do we handle this, no? I think these are important questions that I don't have now, you know, the big answers to this. But I think it's very important to keep all these aspects in mind. And you mentioned Alberto Romele also, and he has this interesting stand also in this way algorithms at the end have this productive imagination, you know? Like shaping everyday life, shaping realities and shaping that what we, you know, what we think or what we appreciate as reality. So we're kind of, you know, as individuals moving between these bubbles, but also the idea would be, or the question would be, how do we also escape these kind of bubbles, no? I mean, if we are so embedded in this post-digital life or post-digitality and this, yeah, platformization, no? So I don't know if you have here other ideas. And also, I think it's very interesting how you connect this with the idea of materiality,
SPEAKER 1 - (00:18:38)
right?
SPEAKER 2 - (00:18:38)
Because at the end, it's not that we are just discussing a virtual reality. At the end, you know, this connection, this continuity, yeah, are embedded also in our scene and are portrayed into, at the end, materiality or material aspects.
SPEAKER 1 - (00:18:57)
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Interesting thoughts, Yolanda. In terms of escaping algorithmicity, I don't know if we can, but we can sort of deal with it consciously and deal with it critically, I think. And I think we can sort of be a lot more conscious in our actions, which makes us sort of think about these different processes and think about these different processes on a sort of a higher level.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:19:26)
Yeah, probably not escaping, but navigating them, right? Navigating, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER 1 - (00:19:31)
Yeah, in terms of materiality, I suppose by this, I mean taking sort of a holistic methodological approach from an academic perspective, one that goes well beyond text as a site of analysis. And I think the approach taken by media archaeology is important here, which is very much influenced by the thinking of French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. And Foucault writes that the manifest discourse is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say. Okay. And discourse here, and I would include internet interactions, sort of scream with the absence of those excluded. And obviously, I mean that in a metaphorical sense, they don't actually scream. But within the presence, there is sort of an absence of those who are excluded.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:20:22)
But what do you mean by this, by those that are excluded? I mean, at the end, I can see a continuity between those included and those excluded. What do you mean by this?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:20:35)
And by this, I mean that intercultural communication, also in its digital form, needs to reorient itself towards those who are outside, towards those who are excluded, towards the intercultural contacts, which haven't taken place or are not allowed to take place. And I think the allowed to take place is sort of the central idea here. And this is what I believe anyway. For me, this is the future of intercultural communication. And I would see this in practical terms as both a macro and a micro undertaking. A macro approach could examine, for example, the hybrid intelligences of nation states and corporate cultures and their incorporation of excluding forms of systematic agency. And this would include here the banning of certain platforms in certain contexts, for example, by authoritarian states and how internet users react to and get around this. But this would also include the inclusions and exclusions of corporate cultures and the erratic behavior of Elon Musk in relation to Twitter or what is now called X is an example here, perhaps, which has changed, radically changed the culture of that platform. But this could also be done in the context of a simulation game, also going beyond text and looking at materiality, examining interactions from this perspective. And a Zoom meeting is very much a micro context. A micro context. OK, so, for example, you could have a participant who maybe wouldn't feature in the transcript at all. OK, if you're if you're looking at it from a transcript perspective, who perhaps attempted to participate, but was sidetracked by having to talk to someone behind or beside him or her in his or her material room. OK, so maybe a sister or father, a friend or something like that, while the same person's internet access keeps coming and going and stopping him or her from contributing. And thus, there are very real agentive fragments here present, both digitally in a material-digital context, which have stopped contact from being realized. I think freedom and the halting of freedom is central here. OK, and the internet was initially seen as a tool to enhance democracy. But now we need to see it in a more differentiated way, as many, of course, have argued from different different viewpoints.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:22:45)
Let me see if I understood you correctly. So you just mentioned, for instance, banning some platforms. But at the end, who decides, you know, who decides who bans or who who will have the power of doing that? What do you mean by that? Or did I understand you wrongly?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:23:08)
Yeah, no, you understood me correctly. I would see this in terms of human agency, of agentive fragments. So if you're talking about the banning of platforms and you're talking about a governmental level, you're talking to a certain extent about authoritarian streams within certain contexts. But I mean, there has been sort of other types of banning of platforms, which, you know, from a liberal democracy perspective have been absolutely correct. If you look at 4chan and 8chan there and sort of the whole series of sexist material, which is there and the different types of violent material which was there. Do you know what I mean? This was completely, completely OK. This isn't sort of a black and white issue. Freedom of speech has its limits. And when freedom of speech becomes dangerous to certain people, then it's not freedom of speech anymore. But, but I'm talking here about agentive fragments on a macro and on a micro level. OK, and it's clear that on a macro level, we're talking here about the regulation of platforms. OK, but we're also talking about we're talking in certain contexts about anti-democratic, quasi-authoritarian forces there as well. It depends on the context, though. And it is a post-digital thing that it is, you know, material as well as digital. And I mean, you can have, for example, if you look at the example of China, you have algorithms there which are created by the government to stop certain forms of speech. And you do have people who get around that, OK, who screenshot everything and then, you know, go to a different platform. There is sort of multi-platform thinking. And this is what I'm saying that we need to we need to look at this in terms of inclusions and exclusions, the contacts which aren't allowed to be realised are almost as important and almost as interesting to investigate as the contacts which do become realised. And I would argue that if we want to continue doing something like intercultural communication, if we want to see it in a digital context, then this is what we have to start thinking about.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:25:19)
So you have also worked a lot on post-digital cosmopolitanism. And what can you tell me about that? Because I think it's also pretty much related to, you know, democratic forms of participation. But can you tell us a bit about that?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:25:39)
Yeah, the term cosmopolitanism goes back to ancient Greece, the term itself. OK, but I think the idea itself is not culturally centred or based on any one context. And what the term represents is both a sense of openness to the world and the idea that we belong to something much more than the local, that we belong to a wider humanity. And this isn't just a Western concept. This isn't just a Western idea, you can find this idea in a lot of different contexts, I'm pretty sure. In academia, I would say there are three main forms of cosmopolitan thought. OK, so there is a normative philosophical perspective, which is often ethical and is often about rethinking the world in a better way. OK, so the typical philosophical perspective, which is often seen as the only perspective, but you have a lot of others. Then you have a descriptive perspective that looks at forms of solidarity beyond the national, often from sociology. It also looks at what Ulrich Beck has called banal cosmopolitanisation. OK, it looks at it in a sort of descriptive way. And then you have a notion of cosmopolitan which centres on moments of cultural openness in which one engages with the other, resulting in self-reflection, cultural opening and transformation. This has been best theorised, I think, by Gerard Delanty, the Irish social theorist. And I would argue that these conceptualisations are very useful. They're very different but they can be mapped onto the post-digital context, which can help us to think about the internet in different ways. And I argued about this in an article from 2022.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:27:12)
Coming back to this idea of cosmopolitanism. So you mentioned these different perspectives, different assumptions, and how can you see that the link of including, you know, you talk about the inclusion and exclusion. So how do you see, for instance, digital cosmopolitanism as a way of including those who remain excluding, you know? Do you follow me?
SPEAKER 1 - (00:27:40)
I do. Yeah, I suppose these are two different perspectives. OK. They're not necessarily interlinked, but at the same time, I think you can also use cosmopolitanism, especially in the descriptive perspective, because you have a type of everyday post-digital cosmopolitanism, which is structural. OK. I'm talking about sort of engagement with algorithms and with artificial intelligence, because it is engagement with agentive fragments from a vast variety of different contexts. And this type of systematic agency also has, at times, excluding properties, if you know what I mean. But I suppose this is a different perspective to what I was talking about earlier. So it's sort of a parallel perspective, if you know what I mean. It's not a universal theory as such. No, no, no, no.
SPEAKER 2 - (00:28:27)
That was clear that it wasn't universal, but putting it into the more contextual form. OK, I think for that topic, probably we need another podcast. But yeah, we can just suggest to check out that article from 2022, where you are also descriptive in some examples. And also very interesting, these different ways of approaching cosmopolitanism. So it seems that we have come to an end. Fergal, thank you very much for inviting me to this first ReDICo podcast and learning more about your insights on how a theory of digital intercultural communication is developing and what aspects are there to be thinking of. Thank you very much for that.
SPEAKER 1 - (00:29:32)
Yeah, thank you, Yolanda, for coming, for engaging with me. And thanks to all of you for listening. For more information on this and other topics relating to digital interculturality, this fascinating field, which the two of us definitely are fascinated by anyway, please check out our website, radico.eu. That's R-E-D-I-C-O, ReDICo. You should be able to find the link in the description of this podcast. On the website, you'll also find information about our activities, such as publications, videos from past conferences. There's a number of educasts there as well, and also a link to the ReDICo Hub, which can be found at hub.redico.eu. The Hub connects those interested in digital interculturality, so feel free to join. In the next episode of the podcast, Luisa Conti and Roman Lietz, researchers from the ReDICo Project, will talk about questions of identity and culture. So thank you very much, and goodbye.