Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation Occasional Seminar
“Fake News” as Infrastructural Uncanny
Jonathan Gray, Liliana Bounegru, Tommaso Venturini
12:30 – 3:00pm, Tuesday 2nd April 2019 (with lightly catered lunch)
Room G.10, Drummond Library (Geosciences) High School Yards,
Drawing on the Public Data Lab’s work on the Field Guide to “Fake News”, this talk will examine how the social disturbance precipitated by “fake news” can be viewed as a kind of infrastructural uncanny. We suggest that the threat of problematic and viral junk news can raise existential questions about the routine circulation, engagement and monetisation of content through the web and social media. Prompted by the unsettling effects associated with the “fake news” scandal, we propose methodological tactics for exploring;
(i) the link economy and the ranking of content,
(ii) the like economy and the metrification of engagement, and
(iii) the tracker economy and the commodification of attention.
Rather than focusing on the misleading content of junk news, such tactics surface the infrastructural conditions of their circulation, enabling public interventions and experiments to interrogate, challenge and change their role in reconfiguring relations between different aspects of social, cultural, economic and political life.
Biographies
The Public Data Lab seeks to facilitate research, democratic engagement and public debate around the future of the data society. More about its recent projects and activities can be found at publicdatalab.org and @PublicDataLab.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
Liliana Bounegru is a new media, digital methods and digital journalism researcher and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. She is also a researcher at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam), where she previously acted as a Managing Director. She is also a co-founder of the Public Data Lab and a research associate at the Sciences Po Paris médialab. More about her at lilianabounegru.org and @bb_liliana on Twitter.
Tommaso Venturini is researcher at the Center Internet and Society of the CNRS. He is also associate researcher of INRA and of the médialab of Sciences Po Paris and founder of the Public Data Lab. More about him at tommasoventurini.it and @TommasoVenturin on Twitter.