MATERIALS OF AI: AN ONTOLOGY OF THE MATERIALS REQUIRED TO MAKE ALGORITHMS
Maggie Mustaklem, Ana Valdivia
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
What are the materials needed to make algorithms in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry? This paper investigates the material reality of AI in order to dismantle the immaterial narrative built around this technology. The focus on AI’s immaterial roles obscures the important role materials have in powering AI. This perceived immateriality greatly benefits the AI industry by obfuscating its dependency on natural resources such as copper or water (Hu, 2015; Monserrate-Gonzalez, 2022). With the growing importance of AI, it is crucial to better understand the dependency of AI infrastructure with material elements. This research takes a comprehensive, global view of the material, physical and embodied elements required to make and deploy current AI technologies. To resolve this question, we will synthesize expert interviews from five material domains: mines, chip factories, undersea cables and data centres. While these infrastructural domains have been scrutinised independently by media scholars, to date, minimal work has connected this fragmented literature. This paper will offer an ontology of the materials that comprise AI, synthesizing domain expert’s interviews to build a systematic review of AI materials. This contribution will shed light on the concrete materials required to build AI infrastructure.
An anatomy of value orientations on social media
Limor Shifman, Tommaso Trillo, Blake Hallinan, Saki Mizoroki, Rebecca Scharlach, Avishai Green, Paul Frosh
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
In recent decades, social media has emerged as a central arena for the construction of values. Artifacts such as YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and tweets reflect and shape what people across the globe consider important, desirable, or reprehensible. However, seminal value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and do not account for new communication-related values that have emerged in this environment. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework to study value expression on social media, comprising three general and four communicative value orientations. We demonstrate the framework’s utility through an analysis of TikTok videos related to the 2022 Qatar World Cup. In conclusion, we discuss three potential contributions of our model, focusing on its primary components, the patterns of their expression, and the associations between them.
Innovating (and performing) on the shoulders of 5G
Natalia Orrego
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
When 5G arrived in Chile, it became a call to innovate and create entrepreneurship in the name of development. Within this context, the paper will illustrate how a 5G innovation is recognized as such inside a lab that emerged after the call. The reflections are part of doctoral research about the network rollout in the country from a historical and ethnographic perspective, with the paper using observations from daily life in the lab. A key finding is that innovating on top of this infrastructure changes the focus from making an independent technology to creating an integrated technology to the internet, including all of its protocols but also its promises and dreams. To follow this argument, the analysis will focus on the lab’s setup to merge the material with the discursive. For example, ¿where are the antennas, and how are they presented?
Performativity seems to be an important component of 5G, an idea that reinforces what has been studied from a communicational vein for other systems (Montaño, 2021; Ureta, 2015; Starosielski, 2015) and, of course, mobile internet (Mukherjee, 2020). The paper ends with the proposal of adding infrastructuring as a core theoretical device to understand digital systems, in particular, to amplify the current weight given to technologies-in-use to strengthen notions like technologies-in-discourse, performance, and mediatization. The role of performativity for mobile internet has the potential for further exploration. Finally, several questions arise: ¿How are innovation and entrepreneurship understood in other digital systems? ¿What is beyond performativity in internet infrastructure?
Transient-Platform Paradigms: Narratives Of Blockchain Experiments For Social Media Platforms
Ashwin Nagappa
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
This paper develops the concept of transient-platform paradigm by closely examining a blockchain technology experiment for a social media platform. To do so, this paper presents partial findings from the platform biography (doctoral thesis) (Burgess & Baym, 2020) of one such BSM, DTube. DTube aspired to provide a fair and transparent alternative creator economy built without the foundations of an advertising revenue model (unlike YouTube). It relied on the critical affordance tokenization or cryptocurrency to overcome the economic challenges. The research was conducted in three phases and followed various ethnographic methods. This research is motivated to articulate the emergent "structures of feeling" or the "social experience which is still in process" (Williams, 1977, p. 132). It aims to comprehend the imaginaries of a future Internet / Web that experiments like DTube are trying to articulate.
DTube represented an emergent system since it introduced "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships" (p. 123) in a social media system. The discourse of rewarding social interactions was a definitive characteristic in this emergent culture's new meanings and practices. In the process, it shaped a new paradigm that this paper calls a 'transient-platform paradigm', where dispersed initiatives attempt to recreate social media platforms for users by the users.
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