Introduction to Special Forum on Digital Culture and Society

Abstract

The 10 essays in this special forum were based on presentations at two recent conferences. The essays by Min Jiang and Francis Lee were their keynote speeches delivered at the preconference on “Social Media, Algorithms, News, and Public Engagements in the Asia-Pacific and Beyond” of the 2020 annual conference of International Communication Association. The other essays were presented at the “Symposium on Social Justice and the Remaking of Technological Cultures” organized by the Center on Digital Culture and Society at University of Pennsylvania.

The 10 essays in this special forum were based on presentations at two recent conferences. The essays by Min Jiang and Francis Lee were their keynote speeches delivered at the preconference on “Social Media, Algorithms, News, and Public Engagements in the Asia-Pacific and Beyond” of the 2020 annual conference of International Communication Association (ICA). This preconference was jointly organized by the College of Media and International Culture of Zhejiang University, the Department of Communication Arts of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. I would like to thank Zhongdang Pan and Wei Lu, who were the main organizers of the preconference.

The other eight essays were presented at the “Symposium on Social Justice and the Remaking of Technological Cultures” organized by the Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. I am especially grateful to Rosemary Clark-Parsons for her indispensable role in organizing the symposium and to Craig Calhoun for delivering the keynote speech at the symposium.

The CDCS symposium took place on April 3, 2020, the ICA preconference on June 8, 2020. Both events were originally planned as in-person occasions, but had to rapidly switch to virtual platforms due to the lockdowns and travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although this abrupt change of plan entailed an enormous amount of work for both the organizers and the participants, the digital infrastructures, specifically the virtual platforms of Zoom and DingTalk, were already in place. It would be hard to imagine changing in-person conferences abruptly to virtual events without the infrastructures. In other words, our two conferences took place at a time of highly developed digital culture and technologies as well as a time of great social uncertainty. This is the historical context in which our authors in this special forum examine digital culture and society.

The 10 essays are diverse in the issues they cover, ranging from digital labor and online activism to new ethnographic methods, the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), fake news, “cancel culture,” and more. They converge on three broad arguments, which represent the collective vision of this special forum for the study of digital culture.

The first argument is that digital culture has a history and studying that history is essential for understanding contemporary digital culture. The essays by Meredith Clark, Min Jiang, and Lin Zhang focus squarely on history. In her essay on the etymology of “cancel culture,” Meredith Clark traces the practice of the social media call-out on Black Twitter to its roots in Black vernacular tradition as a form of activism and agency. Yet in the digital age, this practice has been appropriated by the elites, and the acts of calling out by disempowered social groups have been harnessed in social media spaces. Clark argues that only a perspective that prioritizes the communication histories and practices of disempowered people can adequately decipher the phrase’s use as a tool to delegitimize the dissension that echoes from society’s margins.

In recent years, China’s social credit system has caught the fancy of Western media for its novel potential for total digital surveillance. In her essay, Min Jiang shows that China has a long history of population and personnel management dating back to imperial times and running throughout the modern and contemporary periods. The social credit system is not a new invention. Furthermore, as Jiang’s discussion of the failed “morality files” experiments shows, these management systems do not always work well. In short, a historical perspective provides alternative narratives of the social credit system. Lin Zhang’s study of entrepreneurial labor in Beijing’s high-tech district situates the changing labor practices and subjectivities of a new generation of IT entrepreneurs in the longer history of the post-Mao, post-socialist evolution of labor and entrepreneurship. She shows both continuities and reinventions of historically situated local labor practices.

The second theme of this forum is the centrality of algorithms to digital culture. Brooke Duffy argues that the processes and logics of platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. She argues that in the platform economy, cultural producers’ conditions and experiences are wrought by their understandings and anticipation of the ever-changing algorithmic systems. Critical scholarship must engage with and expose the conditions and consequences of this “algorithmic precarity,” a new form of capitalist exploitation. Angèle Christin outlines an approach to the ethnographic study of algorithmically mediated platforms, which she calls “algorithmic ethnography.” Her tool-kit for researchers to examine how computational systems structure online activities may also be viewed as a tool-kit for analyzing Duffy’s “algorithmic precarity.”

The final main argument in these essays is that with all their disembedding tendencies, digital technologies are embedded in broader social, political, and economic conditions. This thesis runs across all the essays in implicit or explicit forms. Based on reflections on historical and contemporary forms of injustices against marginalized populations, Moya Bailey argues for the need to foster an ethical digital culture that includes the digital humanities taking a more political approach to our research. An ethics of pace in digital cultural studies, according to Bailey, refuses to allow capitalism to be the driving force of human endeavors. Scholars can make decisions to push back on expectations of overwork through the way we design and assess research and scholarship. Ezekiel Dixon-Román and Luciana Parisi raise important questions about the ethics and politics of AI, calling for the need to examine techno-social systems in relation to the conditions of data capitalism in which they are embedded. Francis Lee’s study of the politics of fake news and rumors in the 2019 Anti-ELAB movement in Hong Kong demonstrates that the roles, consequences, and normative desirability of fake news and rumors need to be examined in terms of how they are embedded in the power relationships and interactional dynamics of the movement concerned as well as a political culture of polarization. For Jen Schradie, the anti-quarantine protests in the United States are neither new nor as idiotic as they may appear. Rather, they are the product of a long-standing and tightly networked conservative eco-system of grassroots groups, political institutions, and news outlets. Last but not least, Benjamin Shestakofsky’s study of the impact of AI on work challenges popular discourses about how AI will allow employers to replace human workers with robots. He argues that there is nothing natural or automatic about the impact of AI. Instead, structural features of societies, specifically the structure of ownership, influence a firm’s technology choices.

Taken together, the 10 essays in this special forum chart new approaches and new agendas for the study of digital culture and society, with a special emphasis on the role of history and social conditions for understanding the multiple manifestations of digital culture. They are a plea for treating digital media and technologies not as autonomous from, but as deeply embedded in politics, society and economy.