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29 Jun 2022
Lecture Podcast, Teaching Permalink

Challenge to institutions

2022/06/29

The fifth lecture in the lecture series Digital Media in Politics and Society is online. It is available here and wherever you get your podcasts.

Link to script:
http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/docs/challenge/challenge_intro.html

All over the world, we see people using digital media to question and challenge authorities, organizations, norms and behaviors they perceive as dysfunctional or unjust. Digital media are therefore an important element in the challenge of established social institutions, sometimes even enabling these challenges in the first place.

Some of these challenges are aimed at expanding social representation and strengthening democratic participation. We find examples of this in the use of digital media by social movements, such as Black Lives Matter in the US. Other challenges aim to restrict representation and participation, as the example of the use of digital media by various right-wing populist movements and parties shows. Digital media can therefore contribute to strengthening societies and democracies as well as to weakening them.

In this chapter, we will discuss this role of digital media in politics and society in detail.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction
00:19 – Digital media and the challenge to institutions
01:23 – What are institutions and what do they do?
13:30 – Digital media as staging area for challenges to institutions
21:28 – Conclusion

In this episode, we will focus on the mechanisms through wich digital media allow challenges to social institutions.

Democracies depend on structures that connect governments, political elites, and the public. They facilitate information flows between different actors and different societal levels in democracies. Institutions like political parties, interest groups, and the news media make publics visible to elites, elites visible to publics, and publics visible to each other. They enable information flows making visible or allowing for the social construction of concerns, grievances, and interests of publics to elites and governments, while making elites and governments visible and – within bounds – transparent to the public. In this function, they provide, aggregate, and filter information.

These institutions find themselves increasingly challenged by digital media enabled actors. In this episode, we discuss the mechanisms behind these challenges.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction
00:20 – Intermediary institutions and the flow of information in democracies
09:52 – Lowered costs of information production, distribution, and access
14:50 – Lowered coordination costs
20:52 – Conclusion

In this episode, we will focus on digitally enabled challenges to political parties.

We see parties being challenged all over Western democracies. The analytical tools discussed above help us in charting and analyzing these challenges. These tools are:

– crisis and conflict in intermediary institutions, and
– emergence of new parties or factions within parties adapted to the new opportunities provided by lowered information and coordination costs.

In this episode, we will apply these tools to better understand the challenge to parties.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction
00:18 – Crisis, conflict, and the digital challenge to parties
00:49 – Signs of crisis and conflict of parties as institutions
07:49 – Challenge through information
14:02 – Challenge through coordination
19:47 – Conclusion

In this episode, we will focus on how digitally enabled challenges fail and how to assess their legitimacy and impact on democracy.

We have talked extensively about how digital media enable challenges to institutions. But of course this alone does not guarantee their success. Yes, digital media might help identify and document the weaknesses of institutions, their crises and conflicts. They might help challenges to form, being brought forward, and reach a broad public. But success of challenges is of course not determined by these opportunities alone. Instead, success relies on various context conditions and their specific structural embeddedness.

The other question, we repeatedly ran into was how to assess challenges. As we have seen, some challenges might be judged as strengthening democracy and empowering people, while others might achieve the opposite. Now, how can we as researchers adress this question? Without of course attributing the challenges we happen to sympathize with strengthening effects and those we dislike detrimental effects.

We will focus on these two questions in the final part of this episode.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction
00:19 – Challenges reexamined
01:25 – How challenges fail
07:00 – How to judge the legitimacy of challenges?
13:09 – Understanding the role of digital media in the challenge to institutions
17:27 – Conclusion

Link to podcast site:
https://tech-and-politics.letscast.fm

Link to YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNyEFI8ZU5LUC-04pNoTcOw/featured

28 Jun 2022
Publications Permalink

New article: The Extended Reach of Game Engine Companies

2022/06/28

New article out in Social Media + Society: In The Extended Reach of Game Engine Companies Damien Schlarb and I discuss the growing importance of companies developing game engines like Epic Games and Unity Technologies.

Game engines feature in areas well beyond gaming and are set to become influential actors in all social and economic arenas that start to rely on game engines for the provision of software or services. In the article, we illustrate this through three arguments:

Game engine companies have successfully positioned their engines outside of gaming. They have become platforms in various fields by providing the basis for augmented and virtual reality applications and drive the large-scale digitization of work, entertainment, and services.

Games run by game engine companies offer examples for cross-platform and cross-IP storyworlds. Those provide templates for future non-game services and future cross-platform, cross-media story- and brand worlds beyond gaming.

Game engine companies are set to become identity hubs, verifying users’ identities in interactions with others and managing payments. They can grow into contenders in the competition over which companies will be able to manage users’ identity, payments, and their social graph.

The emergence of game engines as platforms for the increasing digitization of economic, social, and political life and the growing prominence of extended reality applications represent a shift in digital infrastructures and needs to be accounted for in platform studies.

The various uses of Epic Games and Unity Technologies offer rich opportunities for interdisciplinary research to broaden our understanding of the diverse roles of platforms in society.

Abstract: Game engines have come to feature in areas well beyond gaming—such as architecture, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, public planning, and film and television production. Accordingly, companies developing, providing, and maintaining game engines—such as Epic Games or Unity Technologies—are set to become influential actors in all social and economic arenas that start to rely on game engines for the provision of software or services. This makes them an important subject to the study of platforms as they provide increasingly crucial building blocks in the digitization of economic, political, and social life. In this article, we present three dimensions demonstrating platform functions of game engines beyond gaming. We rely on the example of two important game engine developers: Epic Games and Unity Technologies. The dimensions are (1) the growing area of extended reality applications, (2) cross-platform and cross-media story- and brand worlds, and (3) the management of user payments, identities, and social graphs. The article shows how companies providing game engines challenge the current balance of power between established platform companies, demonstrating that game engines have emerged as an important new type of platform that demands academic and public attention.

  • Andreas Jungherr and Damien Schlarb. 2022. The extended reach of game engine companies: How companies like Epic Games and Unity Technologies provide platforms for extended reality applications and the metaverse. Social Media + Society. 8(2): 1-12. doi: 10.1177/20563051221107641.
    • 15 Jun 2022
    Publications Permalink

    New Working Paper: Negative downstream effects of disinformation discourse

    2022/06/15

    For a new working paper Adrian Rauchfleisch and I ran a survey-experiment in the US on the downstream effects of warnings against disinformation. In the paper “Negative downstream effects of disinformation discourse: Evidence from the US” we show that indiscriminate warnings against disinformation increased respondents’ perception of disinformation as a dangerous societal threat and carried negative downstream effects.

    Indiscriminate warnings against disinformation lowered democratic satisfaction and heightened support for restrictive regulation of digital communication environments.

    In contrast, balanced accounts – containing information about the presence and dangers of digital disinformation but also information about its limited reach and persuasive appeal – did lower threat perceptions and carried no negative downstream effects.

    This shows that it matters how scientists, journalists, and politicians discuss the dangers of digital disinformation. Of course, it is not an option to ignore dangers of disinformation when they are real. But indiscriminate warnings also carry dangers.

    Instead, in discussing disinformation public communicators should do so based on the full scope of reliable scientific evidence. In Western democracies, this means accounting for evidence indicating digital disinformation’s limited reach and persuasive appeal.

    By exaggerating the dangers of digital communication environments for democracy, we might end up damaging the very thing we wish to protect. The stories we tell about digital media and their role in democracy and society matter. We need to choose well and choose responsibly.

  • Andreas Jungherr and Adrian Rauchfleisch. 2022. Negative downstream effects of disinformation discourse: Evidence from the US. SocArxiv. doi:10.31235/osf.io/a3rzm
    • 02 Jun 2022
    Lecture Podcast, Teaching Permalink

    Data and algorithms in society

    2022/06/02

    The fourth lecture in the lecture series Digital Media in Politics and Society is online. It is available here and wherever you get your podcasts.

    Link to script:
    http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/docs/data-algos/data-algos_intro.html

    In this and the following episodes, we will be talking about data and algorithms with a special focus on their uses in and effects on politics. In this episode, we start with data.

    Data collected with and on digital devices make new phenomena, objects, and behaviors visible to those with access to that data. Digital technology has extended the amount and depth of data on human behavior and social systems. This has been seen by some as a measurement revolution for the social sciences and as providing many new avenues to knowledge as well as new business opportunities. Still, these data riches have to be translated into meaningful measures of phenomena of interest and society. Without meaningful interpretation these new data remain noise machines, potentially even hiding the signal one is looking for in order to gain understanding or improvement.

    Chapters:

    00:00 – Introduction
    00:21 – Data and algorithms in society
    04:17 – Data and measurement
    08:37 – Big data
    14:10 – Data and control
    19:46 – Metrics
    24:53 – Conclusion

    In this episode, we will talk about algorithms, what they are, how they work, and concerns they create once applied broadly and in scale across society.

    A computer algorithm provides a computationally executable series of steps with the goal of solving a given task or problem. Algorithms are shaping people’s option spaces in various areas of social life. This has given rise to broad concerns that are part of public debate but also of academic research. Concerns focus on the opaqueness of the uses of algorithms, their inner workings, and their effects; the fairness of their outcomes; and fears of unintended consequences once algorithms are rolled out in scale. This makes algorithms, their uses, mechanisms, and effects a prominent topic for social scientists engaged in understanding the use of digital technology in society.

    Chapters:

    00:00 – Introduction
    00:21 – Algorithms
    10:57 – Concerns
    11:48 – Opaqueness
    15:34 – Fairness
    19:38 – Unintended consequences
    24:26 – Conclusion

    In this episode, we will be looking at how the uses of data and algorithms change political campaigning.

    One area in politics where we find pervasive uses of data and algorithms are political campaigns. Campaigners, candidates, and campaign organizations use data to see the electorate, populations of interest, and their volunteers. They use metrics to monitor their progress and measure their success. They sometimes even use algorithms in order to identify who to talk to and how to best approach them. While data and quantification play an increasing role in international campaigns, their use and contribution in campaigns in the USA is most pronounced and merits specific attention if we want to understand the principles of their use and effects.

    Chapters:

    00:00 – Introduction
    00:20 – The uses and effects of data and algorithms in political campaigns
    09:16 – How to keep volunteers engaged?
    14:31 – How can we learn about the use of data an algorithms in campaigns?
    20:39 – Conclusion

    In this episode, we will be looking at how the uses of data and algorithms change journalism.

    Another field heavily impacted by the uses of data and algorithms is journalism. Journalists and editors see themselves facing new opportunities for the measurement of the success and reach of their pieces with audiences by counting clicks on their sites and interaction metrics provided to them by platform companies used by them to steer audiences to news pieces. Algorithms also play a role in the way people are steered toward journalistic content. By the increasing dependency on digital platforms – like Facebook, Instagram, or Google – news media are subject to the algorithms these platforms use to prioritize or de-prioritize journalistic pieces. Accordingly, figuring out the mechanisms behind these algorithms and adapting one’s pieces accordingly may come to matter. Finally, and potentially most disruptively, algorithms are increasingly used to produce journalistic pieces automatically, raising fears about the future of journalism as an occupation. Journalism offers a promising window into the field-specific impact and transformations driven by the increasing availability and uses of data and algorithms.

    Chapters:

    00:00 – Introduction
    00:18 – Data and algorithms in journalism
    08:36 – The use and perception of metrics in newsrooms
    18:27 – Effects of metrics on audiences
    22:40 – Uses and effects of data and algorithms in politics and society
    25:55 – Conclusion

    Link to podcast site:
    https://tech-and-politics.letscast.fm

    Link to YouTube Channel:
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNyEFI8ZU5LUC-04pNoTcOw/featured

    16 May 2022
    Lecture Podcast, Teaching Permalink

    Artificial intelligence and democracy

    2022/05/16

    The third lecture in the lecture series Digital Media in Politics and Society is online. It is available here and wherever you get your podcasts.

    Link to script:
    http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/docs/ai/ai_intro.html

    We encounter AIs daily, be it in the voice assistants in our homes and phones, through automation in our workplace, or as the drivers of policing or credit decisions. In this and the following episodes, we focus on the impact of AI on democracy.

    AI is a largely invisible feature of our daily lives with clear consequences for us as citizens and consumers. Examining the workings and real-world consequences of actually existing artificial intelligence is important. To do so, we first start with a discussion of what artificial intellence is and is not.

    Chapters:

    00:00 – Introduction
    00:21 – Artificial intelligence and democracy
    04:52 – What is artificial intelligence?
    12:46 – Narrow artificial intelligence versus artificial general intelligence
    24:51 – Conclusion

    In this episode, we will be talking about the conditions for the successful application of artificial intelligence across different areas.

    Going forward, we will be focusing on the uses and effects of narrow AI on politics and democracy. To do so, we first need to figure out what it is exactly that AI changes in these areas. In other words, what is AI good at? What becomes cheaper or easier to do? And, for which types of problems does this work?

    Chapters:

    00:00 – Introduction
    00:56 – Predictions
    08:08 – Machine readable
    11:30 – Abundant outcomes
    15:45 – Stability over time
    19:58 – Reinforcing structural inequalities
    23:55 – Conclusion

    In this and the following episode, we will be talking about artificial intelligence and its impact on democracy. In this episode, we will start by discussing AI’s role in elections and its impact on people’s informational autonomy.

    AI raises questions with regard to the integrity of elections as an adjudication process for the conflict between political factions. In the age of the perceived predictability of people’s political attitudes and behavior, can there be free and fair elections in which each faction conceivably might rise to power?

    Is it still plausible that people are able to make political and societal decisions? For one, are information environments shaped by artificial intelligence based on the preferences of people still adequate to the task of creating informed publics able to form political opinions according to their interests? Going further, are scenarios provided by AI to experts about the future of complex issues not better decision makers than the people following their passions and their interests? How does democratic decision making hold up against this new environment.

    Chapters:

    00:00 – Introduction
    04:46 – Artificial intelligence and elections
    14:09 – Artificial intelligence and people’s informational autonomy
    15:45 – Free expression
    19:02 – Access to information
    21:28 – Manipulation
    23:30 – Expert rule
    26:49 – Conclusion

    We continue our discussion about artificial intelligence and its impact on democracy. In this episode, we focus on AI’s impact on equality and the competition between societies, some democratic, some not.

    Can we still meaningfully speak of equality of rights and representation among people, if AI-based systems discriminate against minorities or the underprivileged? How do the known biases inherent in AI systems translate to democratic politics?

    Even more fundamentally, what does equality even mean when AI contributes to massive power imbalances between the companies running and developing AI and everyone else, including the government?

    To some commentators AI might also provide an opportunity for autocracies to get a leg up on democracies in the detection and solution to societal and political challenges. Traditionally, democracies were seen to be better at soliciting information about the state of their societies or the effects of interventions compared to autocracies. This information benefit was seen as one reason for democracies being able to outperform autocracies. AI might offset this benefit and allow autocracies to pass democracies by.

    Chapters:

    00:00 – Introduction
    00:29 – Artificial intelligence and equality
    08:31 – Artificial intelligence and power shifts between societies
    17:53 – Artificial intelligence and democracy: The road ahead
    23:38 – Conclusion

    Link to podcast site:
    https://tech-and-politics.letscast.fm

    Link to YouTube Channel:
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNyEFI8ZU5LUC-04pNoTcOw/featured

    27 Apr 2022
    Lecture Podcast, Teaching Permalink

    Digital media in politics and society

    2022/04/27

    The first lecture in the lecture series Digital Media in Politics and Society is online. It is available here and wherever you get your podcasts.

    The goal of this lecture series is to help you to make sense of digital media, the changes it brings, and the challenges it presents. In order to do so, we look at some of the biggest controversies about the uses of digital media in politics and society. We look beyond the headlines and see what kind of scientific evidence is available, how this evidence is produced, and what it does tell us about the role of digital media in politics and society. This podcast will introduce you to the best available evidence on ongoing controversies, enable you to ask better questions on the role of digital media in politics and society, and show you the tools that allow you to answer them. Digital media are hear to stay. No matter how much some people might wish, there is no way back to a time and politics before. So, we’d better start figuring out how this works.

    Introduction – Defining digital media – Characteristics of digital media – Digitization and Digitalization – Lowered information costs – Interactivity – Networks – A (very) brief history of digital media – Cultures – Housekeeping – Coda

    Link to episode:
    https://tech-and-politics.letscast.fm/episode/digital-media-in-politics-and-society

    Link to script:
    https://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/docs/introduction_intro.html

    Link to podcast site:
    https://tech-and-politics.letscast.fm

    02 Feb 2022
    Publications Permalink

    Book Review: Regina Lawrence reviews Retooling Politics

    2022/02/02

    For an upcoming edition of The International Journal of Press/Politics, Regina Lawrence [@lawrenceregina] reviews our book Retooling Politics: How Digital Media are Shaping Democracy. Gonzalo, Daniel, and I are very grateful for her thoughtful engagement with the book and her kind verdict:

    A strength of Retooling Politics is how well and explicitly it combines theoretical perspectives and findings from across the fields of communication and political science. For example, the book offers equally well-developed chapters on digital media’s effects on individuals’ knowledge, attitudes, and political behaviors (Chapter 4) and on political organizations (Chapter 6). Each chapter leverages a broad swath of extant research to examine how fundamentally (or not) digital media are impacting politics. Chapter 4, for example, features an excellent discussion of the empirical hazards in rapidly proliferating research on various subgroups and micro-effects across an expanding array of digital platforms; of the Internet as increasingly a field of accidental, not just purposeful, exposure to political messages; and of misunderstandings about the extent of political polarization and the Internet’s role in it; capping off the chapter is a pages-long examination of the 2016 Cambridge Analytica story to show how fears and hype around psychometric targeting and voter manipulation were overblown.

    Overall, Retooling Politics offers a simple and effective model for thinking systematically and cautiously about the effects of digital media on contemporary politics. It would be an excellent addition to advanced seminars in political communication. And it effectively primes the kinds of future research the authors want to see more of: That the fields of communication and political science combined “develop a sustained interest in communicative institutions, organizations, and practices” (p. 67) deeply grounded in decades of previous research from both fields and guided by a common sense and contingent model of the impacts of digital media.

  • Regina Lawrence. (2022) Book Review: Andreas Jungherr / Gonzalo Rivero / Daniel Gayo-Avello (2020): Retooling Politics. How Digital Media are Shaping Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. International Journal of Press/Politics. doi:10.1177/19401612221073994 (Online First).
    • 31 Jan 2022
    Interviews, Videos Permalink

    Interview: The Dissenter

    2022/01/31

    Recently, I spoke with Ricardo Lopes for his YouTube Channel The Dissenter. We chatted about online political discourse, digital media and politics, and misinformation – so basically all the good stuff.

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    13 Jan 2022
    Publications Permalink

    New Book: Digital Transformations of the Public Arena

    2022/01/13

    “Digital Transformations of the Public Arena,” my new book with Ralph Schroeder is live (and free to read for 3 weeks)!

    We present a new framework for thinking through how digital media have changed politics, public discourse, and contestation. To understand these changes, we must focus on the nature, drivers, and effects of digital communication infrastructures that provide the public arena.

    To do this well, we need to compare how structures host and shape discourses in different contexts. We analyze the transformation of the public arena in China, Germany, and the US, three countries with different constellations of media, political, and economic systems.

    The public arena consists of the media infrastructures that enable and constrain the publication, distribution, reception, and contestation of information that allow people to exercise their rights and duties as citizens.

    These infrastructures mediate the relation between citizens or civil society on the one hand and political elites or the state on the other.

    In the past, predominantly print or broadcast media provided societies with the public arena. Today, these traditional structures are challenged in their importance – if not downright replaced – by digital media that have transformed the public arena as we knew it.

    Changes brought about by digital media have led to a set of tensions that actors in the public arena must navigate: Traditional gatekeepers find themselves challenged or replaced. New processes that shape the limited attention space create anxieties and demand for transparency and public negotiation.

    The rules governing the visibility and reach of actors and content in the public arena need to get (re)negotiated or newly developed considering the affordances of new communication infrastructures.

    We also must account for the increasing importance of the geopolitical aspects of companies (most of them based in the US or China) providing digital infrastructures to many different countries with widely diverging cultures, discursive norms and practices, and political systems.

    All of this happens while the legitimacy of structures providing the public arena and actors shaping it is increasingly contested by sizeable minorities.

    Understanding these changes and tensions within the public arena is of great importance. Societies face grave challenges. Causes and solutions to challenges provided by climate change, globalization, or pandemics are all discussed in the public arena.

    Societies’ ability to answer challenges like climate change, globalization, or pandemics depends on the workings and legitimacy of communication infrastructures that provide and shape the public arena and through it discourses.

    We are very excited and humbled to feature and build on prior work by so many amazing scholars. One of the most gratifying features of working on the impact of digital media on society is the vibrant and highly supportive community of researchers sharing these interest and concerns!

    We hope to provide a window to the rich discussion on the impact of digital media and to offer a helpful framework for future work. Understanding the underlying questions is deeply important to positively influence contemporary societies.

    This work has just begun!