The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Category: Media

  • The roaring 2020s and their spectacular picture palaces

    Blank screen, auditorium to yourself, can’t lose. Photo by me, 18 April 2024.

    I took myself off to the movies lastnight. First time since 1917. The Sam Mendes film I mean, uh, obviously.

    Having gone on my little Godzilla binge earlier in the year, I thought it fitting that I take myself out to the latest instalment. The film itself was fine. Good loud dumb fun. Exactly the same formula as the others. A great soundtrack. Rebecca Hall being her wonderful earnest self. Dan Stevens being… whatever he is now (though he’ll always be Matthew to me). Content to one side, though, it was just great to be in the cinema again. For someone who allegedly studies the stuff from time to time, I don’t watch as much as I’d like; and I certainly don’t go to the cinema often at all. Lastnight showed me I probably should change that.

    I’ve often ruminated, in text and in brain, about the changing media landscape. I’m far from the only one, and recently Paris Marx put up a post about his quest to find Dune: Part One on home media. This story resonated with me. I have a sizeable physical media collection; it’s a dear asset and hobby, and one I am constantly surprised is not even close to mainstream nowadays.

    The production of physical has shifted considerably as demand has waned in the streaming era. DVDs are still, somehow, fairly popular; mostly due to an ageing and/or non-discerning audience (though that last bastion of DVDs, the supermarket DVD section, seems to have died off, finally). Blurays maintain a fair market share, but still require specialist hardware and are region-locked. Despite 4K Blurays being region-free and, with even a semi-decent TV, utterly gorgeous, they hold next to nothing of the market, being really only targeted at huge AV nerds like me.

    During COVID, the streaming platforms cemented their place in the homes and lives of everyone. I am certainly no exception to this. It was insanely convenient to have pretty much the world’s media output at the touch of a button. It was a good time: subscription prices were still relatively low, and the catalogues were decent enough to be worth having more than one or two services on the Apple TV at any given time.

    Netflix, Stan (an Aussie streaming service), and Prime Video were staples. They were also producing their own content, so in a way, they were modelling themselves on the megalithic studios of yore — as producers, distributors, marketers, even as archivists of popular culture.

    Things change, of course. They always do.

    Post-COVID, catalogues were culled. Most streaming services were operating, if not at a loss, then at least just breaking even with the equation of producing original content and/or buying distribution rights to older properties, or just other stuff in general.

    Then the original producers (in some cases the original studios) figured out they could just do it themselves. Disney+, Paramount+, Sony Core (aka Columbia); their own catalogues, their own archives, their own films straight from the cinema deal to the home media deal with no pesky negotiation.

    Prices for all streaming services have steadily risen over the last few years. For your average household, hell, even your above-average household, having all subscriptions active at one time simply isn’t feasible. It’s usually a question of who’s got what content at what time; or employ our house’s strategy and binge one or two platforms in one- or two-monthly bursts.

    Finding something specific in a given streaming catalogue is not a given. So you either pay Apple or Google or whoever to rent for a day or two or a week or whatever; or you pay them to ‘lease’ a copy of the film for you to view on-demand (they call this ‘buying’ the film). If giving money to the megacorps isn’t what you had in mind, maybe your brain would turn to the possibility of buying a physical copy of said media item for yourself.

    So you load up a web browser and punch in your best local media retailer. In my case, it’s a loud yellow behemoth called JB Hi-Fi; for more obscure titles or editions, it’d be something like Play DVD. These places are thin on the ground and, increasingly, even thin in the cloud. But JB’s physical media collection is dwindling, and has been for years. Their DVD/Bluray shelves used to occupy half of their huge stores; now they have maybe half a dozen tucked down the back, with the old real estate now occupied by more drones, more influencer starter kits, more appliances or pop culture paraphernalia.

    It struck me lastnight, as I headed into the cinema, that perhaps the film experience could see a bit of a bump if streaming services continue to fracture, and if physical media stock continues to disappear. If it’s a specific film that you want to see, and you know it’s on at the cinema, it’s probably more efficient overall to go and see it then and there. There are no guarantees any given film will be put up on a given streaming platform, nor that it will even get a physical media release any more. And if it does appear in either form, what quality will it be in? Would the experience be somehow diminished?

    There’s also something to be said for the sheer ubiquity and disposability of media in our current moment, particularly within the home, or home-based clouds. If I spot something on Netflix, I’ll add it to my List. I may watch it, but 7 times out of 10, I’ll forget it existed; once Netflix changes their catalogue, that item just floats away. I’m not notified; I’m not warned; unless it’s something on my watchlist on Letterboxd, or in a note or something, it just vanishes into the ether. Similarly with home media; if there’s a sale on at JB for Blurays, I might pick up a couple. They’ll then go on the shelf with the many, many others, and it might take years until I eventually get to it.

    There’s an intentionality to seeing a film at the cinema. In general, people are there to be absorbed in a singular experience. To not be distracted. To actually switch off from the outside world. I don’t claim any media superiority; I am a big old tech bro through and through, but there is something to the, ahem, CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE that really does retain the slightest touch of magic.

    So yes, perhaps we will see a little hike in moviegoing, if the platform economy continues to expand, explode, consume. Either that, or torrents will once again be IN for 2025 and beyond. Switch on that VPN and place your bets.

  • Blinded by machine visions

    A grainy, indistinct black and white image of a human figure wearing a suit and tie. The bright photo grain covers his eyes like a blindfold.
    Generated with Adobe Firefly, prompts by me.

    I threw around a quick response to this article on the socials this morning and, in particular, some of the reactions I was seeing. Here’s the money quote from photographer Annie Leibovitz, when asked about the effects of AI tools, generative AI technology, etc, on photography:

    “That doesn’t worry me at all,” she told AFP. “With each technological progress, there are hesitations and concerns. You just have to take the plunge and learn how to use it.”1

    The paraphrased quotes continue on the following lines:

    She says AI-generated images are no less authentic than photography.

    “Photography itself is not really real… I like to use PhotoShop. I use all the tools available.”

    Even deciding how to frame a shot implies “editing and control on some level,” she added.2

    A great many folx were posting responses akin to ‘Annie doesn’t count because she’s in the 1%’ or ‘she doesn’t count because she’s successful’, ‘she doesn’t have to worry anymore’ etc etc.

    On the one hand it’s typical reactionary stuff with which the socials are often ablaze. On the other hand, it’s fair to fear the impact of a given innovation on your livelihood or your passion.

    As I hint in my own posts3, though, I think the temptation to leap on this as privilege is premature, and a little symptomatic of whatever The Culture and/or The Discourse is at the moment, and has been for the duration of the platformed web, if not much longer.

    Leibovitz is and has always been a jobbing artist. Sure, in later years she has been able to pick and choose a little more, but by all accounts she is a busy and determined professional, treating every job with just as much time, effort, dedication as she always has. The work, for Leibovitz, has value, just as much — if not more — than the product or the paycheck.

    I don’t mean to suddenly act my age, or appear much older and grumpier than I am, but I do wonder about how much time aspiring or current photographers spend online discussing and/or worrying and/or reacting to the latest update or the current fad-of-the-moment. I 100% understand the need for today’s artists and creators to engage in some way with the social web, if only to put their names out there to try and secure work. But if you’re living in the comments, whipping yourselves and others into a frenzy about AI or whatever it is, is that really the best use of your time?

    The irony of me asking such questions on a blog where I do nothing but post and react is not lost on me, but this blog for me is a scratchpad, a testing ground, a commonplace book; it’s a core part of my ‘process’, whatever that is, and whatever it’s for. This is practice for other writing, for future writing, for my identity, career, creative endeavours as a writer. It’s a safe space; I’m not getting angry (necessarily), or seeking out things to be angry about.

    But I digress. Leibovitz is not scared of AI. And as someone currently working in this space, I can’t disagree. Having even a rudimentary understanding of what these tools are actually doing will dispel some of the fear.

    Further, photography, like the cinema that it birthed, has already died a thousand deaths, and will die a thousand more.

    Brilliant4 photography lecturer and scholar Alison Bennett speaks to the legacy and persistence of photographic practice here:

    “Recent examples [of pivotal moments of change in photography] include the transition from analogue film to digital media in the late 20th century, then the introduction of the internet-connected smart phone from 2007,” they said.

    “These changes fundamentally redefined what was possible and how photography was used.

    “The AI tipping point is just another example of how photography is constantly being redefined.”5

    As ever, the tools are not the problem. The real enemies are the companies and people that are driving the tools into the mainstream at scale. The companies that train their models on unlicensed datasets, drawn from copyrighted material. The people that buy into their own bullshit about AI and AGI being some kind of evolutionary and/or quasi-biblical moment.

    For every post shitting on Annie Leibovitz, you must have at least twenty posts actively shitting on OpenAI and their ilk, pushing for ethically-sourced and maintained datasets, pushing for systemic change to the resource management of AI systems, including sustainable data centers.

    The larger conceptual questions are around authenticity and around hard work. If you use AI tools, are you still an authentic artist? Aren’t AI tools just a shortcut? Of course, the answers are ‘not necessarily’. If you’ve still done the hard yards to learn about your craft, to learn about how you work, to discover what kinds of stories and experiences you want to create, to find your voice, in whatever form it takes, then generative AI is a paintbrush. A weird-looking paintbrush, but a paintbrush nevertheless (or plasticine, or canvas, or glitter, or an app, etc. etc. ad infinitum).

    Do the work, and you too can be either as ambivalent as Leibovitz, or as surprised and delighted as you want to be. Either way, you’re still in control.

    Notes ↩︎

    1. Agence France-Presse 2024, ‘Photographer Annie Leibovitz: “AI doesn’t worry me at all”’, France 24, viewed 26 March 2024, <https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240320-photographer-annie-leibovitz-ai-doesn-t-worry-me-at-all>.
      ↩︎
    2. ibid. ↩︎
    3. See here, and with tiny edits for platform affordances here and here. What’s the opposite of POSSE? PEPOS? ↩︎
    4. I am somewhat biased as, at the time of writing, Dr. Bennett and I currently share a place of work. To look through their expanded (heh) works, go here. ↩︎
    5. Odell, T 2024, ‘New exhibition explores AI’s influence on the future of photography’, RMIT University, viewed 26 March 2024, <https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/all-news/2024/mar/photo-2024>.
      ↩︎

  • Godzilla: King of the Franchises

    If you like what’s going on here at The Clockwork Penguin, if you appreciate the cut of my particular jib, as it were, buy me a coffee!

    A film still from Godzilla vs Kong (2021), featuring Godzilla filling the frame from the torso up. It is raining heavily, so we can't see much detail of Godzilla's face, but we can clearly see blue lightning running along the spines on his back.
    Godzilla with the spicy lightning as depicted in Godzilla vs. Kong (2021).

    The 2014 reboot/continuation/expansion of the Godzilla franchise opens with the standard mystery box. A helicopter flies low over a jungle landscape, there are low minor chords from a rumbling orchestra: dissonance, uncertainty, menace. Helicopter Passenger #1 turns to Helicopter Passenger #2: “They found something.”

    This is the germ of what is now a multi-film franchise, with a spin-off TV series that debuted in late 2023. A few weeks ago, I re-watched Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot, as well as the sequel films I hadn’t seen, Godzilla II: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.

    It was a bit of fun, obviously, a last hurrah before I went back to the very serious business of media academicking, but as is wont to happen, it’s been stewing ever since. So here: have some little thoughts on big monsters.

    Last week I Masta’d1 up some speculations as to why Argylle has flopped. The first and most obvious reason that a film might tank is that it’s just not a very good film, as this may well be true of Argylle. But in a time where cinema is dead and buried and a media object is never discrete, we can’t look at the film in a vacuum.

    I have thoughts on why #Argylle flopped. I haven’t seen it, so I won’t go into any great depth, but suffice to say there are two major components:

    1) Marvel killed transmedia storytelling, jumped around on the corpse, drove a steamroller over it, then buried it in a nuclear waste facility.

    2) Camp doesn’t hit like it used to. Big ensemble campy treats aren’t as sweet now; in an age of hyper-sensitivity, broad knowledge and information access, they taste a little sour. Ain’t no subtext anymore.2

    The marketing machine behind Argylle decided they’d play a little game, by teasing a novel written by a mystery author (both in terms of them not being well-known, but also an author of actual mystery), with the film being quickly picked up for production. This was fairly clumsily-done, but leaving that to one side: okay, cool idea. The conceit is that the author runs into the real-life equivalent of one of their characters who whisks them away on an adventure. Cue ideas of unreliable narration, possible brainwashing, or whatever, and there’s the neat little package.

    The concept overall is solid, but Universal and Apple made the mistake of thinking they could shoehorn this concept into a campaign that ‘tricked’ the audience into thinking some of it was factual, or at least had some tenuous crossover with reality.

    Basically, they tried an old-school transmedia campaign.

    Transmedia storytelling has always been around in some form or another. It dovetails quite nicely with epistolary and experimental narratives, like Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, and discussions of transmedia also work well when you’re thinking about serial stories or adaptations. The term is most often attributed to Henry Jenkins, a wonderful and kindly elder scholar who was thinking about the huge convergence of media technologies occasioned by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

    Jenkins’ ur-example of transmedia is The Matrix franchise, “a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.”3 The idea is that in order to truly appreciate the narrative as a whole, the audience has to follow up on all the elements, be they films, video games, comic books, or whatever.

    “Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption.”4

    This model is now far from unique in terms of marketing or storytelling; with the MCU, DC Universe, the Disneyfied Star Wars universe and others, we have no dearth of complex narratives and storyworlds to choose from. This is maybe now partly why transmedia is seen as, at best, a little dated, old hat, and at worst, a bit of a dirty word, when it comes to narrative, media, or cinema studies. Those still chipping away at the transmedia stoneface are seen as living in the past or worse, wasting their time. I don’t think it’s a waste of time, nor do I necessarily see it as living in the past; it’s just that transmedia is media now.

    Every new media commodity, be it a film, an app, a game, a platform, novel, has a web of attendant media commodities spring up around it. Mostly these are used for marketing, but occasionally these extraneous texts may relay some plot point or narrative element. The issue is that you need to conceit to be front and centre, you need some idea of the full narrative; you can’t expect the audience to want to do anything. The producers of Argylle made this mistake. They did transmedia the old-fashioned way, where narrative elements are spread across discrete media objects (e.g. book and film), and they expected the audience to want to fill in the gaps, and to share their excitement at having done so… on social media, I guess?

    But like transmedia storytelling, social media ain’t what she used to be. Our present internet is fragmented, hyper-platformed, paywalled; city-states competing for dominance, for annexation (acquisition), for citizens or slaves (subscribers). Content is still king, but the patrician’s coffers care not as to whether that content is produced by the finest scribes of the age, or the merchant guild’s new automatons.

    Viral is still viral, popular is still popular, but the propagation of content moves differently. Hashtags, likes, views don’t mean much anymore. You want people talking, but you only care as much as it gets new people to join your platform or your service. Get new citizens inside the gates, then lock and bar the gates behind them; go back to the drawing board for the next big campaign. The long tail is no more; what matters is flash in the pan attention attacks.

    The producers behind the Godzilla reboot clearly envisioned a franchise. This is clear enough from how the film ends (or more accurately, where it stops talking, and the credits are permitted to roll). Godzilla apparently saves the world (or at least Honolulu and Las Vegas) from another giant monster, then disappears into the sea, leaving humanity to speculate as to its motivations.

    It’s also apparent that the filmmakers didn’t want a clean break from the cultural history, themes or value of the broader Godzilla oeuvre; the title sequence suggests that the 1954 Castle Bravo tests were actually an operation to destroy Godzilla5. And in the film’s prologue, this wonderful shot is presented with virtually no context.

    A film still from Godzilla (2014), with a Lego model of the Saturn V rocket in the foreground, and a poster of Godzilla in the background.
    American triumphalism meets Japanese… er, monster promotions?

    What struck me most, though, is the lack of overt story-bridges, particularly in the first film. Story-bridges are parts of the plot, e.g. characters, events, images, that allow the audience to jump off to another part of the narrative. These jumping-off points can be explicit, e.g. an end-credits sequence, or a line of dialogue referring to a past/future event, or they can be implied, e.g. the introduction of a character in a minor role that may participate more prominently in other media.

    As media franchises become more complex, these points/bridges are not as often modelled as connecting branches to nodes around a centred point (a tentpole film, for instance), but as a mesh that connects multiple, interconnected tentpole media. In some of my academic work, with my colleagues Vashanth Selvadurai and Peter Vistisen, we’ve explored how Marvel attempts to balance this complexity:

    “[Marvel] carefully balances production by generating self-contained stories for the mass audience, which include moments of interconnectivity in some scenes to fortify the MCU and thereby accommodate the fan base… [T]he gradual scaling up in bridge complexity from characters to storyworld to a cohesive storyline is integrated into a polycentric universe of individual transmedia products. These elements are not gathered around one tentpole event that the audience has to experience before being able to make sense of the rest.”4

    In Godzilla, the story-bridges are more thematic, even tonal. The story remains consistently about humanity’s desire to control the natural world, and that world’s steadfast resistance to control; multiple times we hear the scientist Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) speak about ‘balance’ in nature, the idea of a natural equilibrium that humanity has upset, and that Godzilla and his kin will restore. There is also a balance within and between humanity; corporate greed, political power struggles, individual freedoms and restrictions, all vie to find a similar kind of equilibrium, if such a thing is possible. The resulting tone is one that feels universal but prescient; topical and relevant to the contemporary moment, despite the presence of enormous monsters.

    This tone is carried over into Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The monsters multiply in this instalment, and an extraterrestrial element is introduced, but in general Godzilla’s animal motivation is about preservation of self, but also of Earth and its biology. I should also note that there are more explicit bridges in this film, like the characters of Dr. Serizawa and his colleague Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins). But the true connecting thread, at least for me, is this repeated theme of humans and our puny power struggles playing out against the backdrop of a deep time, a history, forces and powers so ancient that we can never really understand them.

    This macro-bridge, if you like, allows the filmmakers to then make tweaks to the micro-elements of the story. If they want or need to adjust the character focus, they can. If the plot of a single film seems a little rote, maybe, or they want to try something different, they’ve given themselves enough space in the story and the story-world to do that. This may not necessarily be intentional, but it certainly appears as an effective counter-model to the MCU/Disney mode, where everything seems over-complicated and planned out in multi-year phases, and everything is so locked in. The MonsterVerse approach is one of ad hoc franchise storytelling, and the result is a universe that feels more free, more open: full of possibilities and untold stories.

    The point of all of this, I suppose, is to let us see what works and what doesn’t. As a storyteller or creative type, it helps me to model and test approaches to storytelling of all scales and budgets, as I think about what kinds of narratives I want to develop, and in which media form. Beyond that, though, I think that as we move into a contentscape that muddles the human-made with the computer-generated, this kind of analysis and discussion is more essential than ever.

    Notes & References

    1. Still working out the vernacular for the new social web. ↩︎
    2. Me, on Mastodon, February 6, 2024. ↩︎
    3. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press, p. 95. ↩︎
    4. Jenkins, Convergence culture, p. 96. ↩︎
    5. The first Godzilla film, directed by Ishirō Honda, was also released in 1954 ↩︎
    6. Selvadurai, V., Vistisen, P., & Binns, D. (2022). Bridge Complexity as a Factor in Audience Interaction in Transmedia Storytelling. Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 7(1), 85–108 (quote from pages 96-7). https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.7.1.0085 ↩︎

  • Critics and creation

    Photo by Leah Newhouse on Pexels.

    I started reading this interview this morning, between Anne Helen Peterson and Betsy Gaines Quammen. I still haven’t finished reading, despite being utterly fascinated, but even before I got to the guts of the interview, I was struck by a thought:

    In the algorithmised world, the creator is the critic.

    This thought is not necessarily happening in isolation; I’ve been thinking about ‘algorithmic culture’ for a couple of years, trying to order these thoughts into academic writing, or even creative writing. But this thought feels like a step in the right direction, even if I’ve no idea what the final output should or will be. Let’s scribble out some notes…

    If there’s someone whose work we enjoy, they’ll probably have an online presence — a blog or social media feed we can follow — where they’ll share what they like.

    It’s an organic kind of culture — but it’s one where the art and vocation of the critic continues to be minimised.

    This — and associated phenomena — is the subject of a whole bunch of recent and upcoming books (including this one, which is at the top of my to-read pile for the next month): a kind of culture where the all-powerful algorithm becomes the sole arbiter of taste, but I also think there is pressure on creatives to be their own kind of critical and cultural hub.

    On the inverse, what we may traditionally have called critics — so modern-day social media commentators, influencers, your Booktubers or Booktokkers, your video essayists and their ilk — now also feel pressure to create. This pressure will come from their followers and acolytes, but also from random people who encounter them online, who will say something like “if you know so much why don’t you just do it yourself” etc etc…

    Some critics will leap at the opportunity and they absolutely should — we are hearing from diverse voices that wouldn’t otherwise have thought to try.

    But some should leave the creation to others — not because they’re not worth hearing from, they absolutely are — but because their value, their creativity, their strength, lies in how they shape language, images, metaphor, around the work of others. They don’t realise — as I didn’t for a long time — that being a critic is a vocation, a life’s work, a real skill. Look at any longer-form piece in the London Review of Books or The New Inquiry and it becomes very clear how valuable this work is.

    I’ve always loved the term critic, particularly cultural critic, or commentator, or essayist… they always seemed like wonderful archaic terms that don’t belong in the modern, fragmented, divided, confused world. But to call oneself a critic or essayist, to own that, and only that, is to defy the norms of culture; to refuse the ‘pillars’ of novel, film, press/journalism, and to stand to one side, giving much-needed perspective to how these archaic forms define, reflect, and challenge society.

  • Shift Lock #3: A sales pitch for the tepid take

    After ‘abandoning’ the blog part of this site in early 2022, I embarked on a foolish newsletter endeavour called Shift Lock. It was fun and/or sustainable for a handful of posts, but then life got in the way. Over the next little while I’ll re-post those ruminations here for posterity. Errors and omissions my own. This instalment was published May 5, 2022 (see all Shift Lock posts here).

    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

    Twitter was already a corporate entity, and had been struggling with how to market and position itself anyway. Not to mention, its free speech woes — irrevocably tied to those of its competitors — are not surprising. If anything, Mr. Musk was something of a golden ticket: someone to hand everything over to.

    The influx/exodus cycle started before the news was official… Muskovites joined/returned to Twitter in droves, opponents found scrolls bearing ancient Mastodon tutorials and set up their own mini-networks (let’s leave that irony steaming in the corner for now).

    None of this is new: businesses are bought and sold all the time, the right to free speech is never unconditional (and nor should it be), and the general populace move and shift and migrate betwixt different services, platforms, apps, and spaces all the time.

    What seems new, or at least different, about these latter media trends, issues, events, is the sheer volume of coverage they receive. What tends to happen with news from media industries (be they creative, social, or otherwise) is wall-to-wall coverage for a given week or two, before things peter out and we move on to the next block. It seems that online culture operates at two speeds: an instantaneous, rolling, roiling stream of chaos; and a broader, slightly slower rise and fall, where you can actually see trends come and go across a given time period. Taking the Oscars slap as an example: maybe that rise and fall lasts a week. Sometimes it might last two to four, as in the case of Musk and Twitter.

    How, then, do we consider or position these two speeds in broader ‘culture’?

    Like all of the aforementioned, Trump was not a new phenomenon. Populism was a tried and tested political strategy in 2015-16; just, admittedly, a strategy that many of us hoped had faded into obsolescence. However, true to the 20-30 year cycle of such things, Trump emerged. And while his wings were — mostly — clipped by the checks and balances of the over-complex American political system, the real legacy of his reign is our current post-truth moment. And that legacy is exemplified by a classic communications strategy: jamming. Jam the airwaves for a week, so everyone is talking about only one thing. Distract everyone from deeper issues that need work.

    This jamming doesn’t necessary come from politicians, from strategists, from agencies, as it may once have done. Rather, it comes from a conversational consensus emerging from platforms — and this consensus is most likely algorithmically-driven. That’s the real concern. And as much as Musk may want to open up the doors and release the code, it’s really not that straightforward.

    The algorithms behind social media platforms are complex — more than that, they are nested, like a kind of digital Rube Goldberg machine. People working on one section of the code are not aware nor comprehending of what other teams might be working on, beyond any do-not-disturb-type directives from on high. As scholar Nick Seaver says in a recent Washington Post piece, “The people inside Twitter want to understand how their algorithm works, too.” (Albergotti 2022)

    Algorithms — at least those employed by companies like Twitter — are built to stoke the fires of engagement. And there ain’t no gasoline like reactions, like outrage, like whatever the ‘big thing’ is for that particular week. These wildfires also intersect with the broader culture in ways that it takes longer-form criticism (I would say academic scholarship, but we often miss the mark, or more accurately, due to glacial peer review turnarounds, the boat) to meaningfully engage and understand.

    Thanks partly to COVID but also to general mental health stuff, I’ve been on a weird journey with social media (and news, to be fair) over the past 3-5 years. Occasional sabbaticals have certainly helped, but increasingly I’m just not checking it. This year I’ve found more and more writers and commentators whose long-form work I appreciate as a way of keeping across things, but also just for slightly more measured takes. Tepid takes. Not like a spa but more like a heated pool. This is partly why I started this newsletter-based journey, just to let myself think things through in a way that didn’t need to be posted immediately, but nor did I need to wait months/years for peer review. Somewhere beyond even the second trend-based speed I mentioned above.

    What it really lets me do, though, is disengage from the constant flow of algorithmically-driven media, opinion, reaction, and so on, in a way where I can still do that thinking in a relevant and appropriate way. What I’m hoping is that this kind of distance lets me turn around and observe that flow in new and interesting ways.

    Below the divider

    At the end of each post I link a few sites, posts, articles, videos that have piqued my interest of late. Some are connected to my research, some to teaching and other parts of academia, still others are… significantly less so (let’s keep some fun going, shall we?).

    Reed Albergotti (2022, 16 April), ‘Elon Musk wants Twitter’s algorithm to be public. It’s not that simple.’ Washington Post.