Detectives, listening devices, behavioral modification
This is the fourth edition of my newsletter on technology, media and culture.
Are our devices listening to us?
The social world is now packed full of microphones. With all these audio devices, and especially those voice controlled home systems, people are wondering if they are being listened to. Sonic data is a bit of a new frontier. There is a long read by James Vlahos asking the question about whether we are being listened to. These are issues of auditory surveillance that are here to stay. More microphones mean greater possibilities for capturing the soundscape, turning it into data and using it.
Reddit, Reddit, SubReddit…
An interesting piece by Carl Miller on Reddit in the TLS. It looks at the development and changes on the platform, how it works and its impact on publishing and content visibility. It also looks at the simmering tensions between Reddit and its users.
If you've not seen it, I'd recomend Carl's recent book The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab. There is a short review of it here.
Discussing detective fiction…
Detecting the Social: Order and Disorder in Post-1970s Detective Fiction was published by Palgrave Macmillan towards the end of 2018. In a recent podcast with the New Books network the book’s authors Mary Evans, Hazel Johnstone and Sarah Moore discuss its key themes, their collaboration and some of the arguments they make about what detective fiction can reveal. They discuss their concept of ‘social texture’ for thinking about how fiction might be used to understand social issues.
The class ceiling…
Also on the New Books podcast, Sam Friedman and Daniel Lauirson discuss their recent book The Class Ceiling. The book has been getting a good deal of attention and its arguments about the ongoing implications of class for opportunity, status and levels of earning in particular are causing some debate. In this podcast they explore some of those key arguments and the different sectors that their study included.
The reality of reality TV…
Following the recent news stories, this podcast explores the experience of appearing on a reality TV show. As well as describing the experience of being on the TV show Love Island it also includes a discussion of with the creator of the drama show Unreal, who was also a former producer of reality TV show The Bachelor.
The hidden dangers of Artificial Intelligence…
There are lots of debates about the problems, hazards and ethics of AI. This episode of the Big Brains podcast discusses some of these with Ben Zhao. It looks at what is possible, what human activities can be replicated, and what impact these might have. It opens with an example of AI writing restaurant reviews, very few of the people they asked could tell the difference between the AI and the human writing. The ability of AI to replicate is going to be one key area of future concern. Maybe AI will be able to write newsletters before long (would you be able to tell?).
A new tech book…
Beatrice Fazi's new book Contingent Computing: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics has just been published.
The means of behavioral modification…
I mentioned in my last newsletter that I’m working on a long review article of Shoshana Zuboff’s recent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Its going to take a while to work through its 700 pages. So far I’ve read the opening chapter. Amongst other things, that opening chapter explores the shift in capitalist wealth creation from the ‘means of production’ to the ‘means of behavioral modification’. This shift seems like it is important to the framing of the book and its arguments. On the surface it seems like a quite sweeping idea about a shift between different ages of capitalism. I’m going to see if that gets fleshed out a bit more as the book progresses. Its quite a useful phrase for capturing the core transformations, but what will be interesting to see is if Zuboff reflects on how different versions of capitalism overlap rather than completing usurping one another. I’m sure that will be the case. But as an opening observation on the book, the structuring of how capitalism is reshaped by data seems important. The point about how the future alteration of behaviour is central to these shifts in capitalism and to the production of value gives Zuboff’s book a pretty wide-ranging starting point.