Análisis de los datos

Lunenfeld (2011) describes the digital computer, the dominant structural technology of the past few decades, as ‘the first media machine that serves as a mode of pro- duction, means of distribution, and site of reception. It is the twenty-first century’s culture machine.’ The components necessary to create the global ‘culture machine’ are more extensive however, as an extensive network of connected computers is re- quired. The development of computing machines (Hodges, 1983) and the history of the Internet are well documented (Abbate, 1999), as is that of the web (Berners-Lee and Fischetti, 1999). What began as a military research project (the Advanced Re- search Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET) brought forth, among other things, email, FTP and (after implementing the concept of hypertext (Nelson, 1965)), what

can be called Web 1.0, or the pre-social media era. This is also the era when the In- ternet first entered the public consciousness. We now have the participatory, social media environment that encapsulates much online activity.

Schroeder (2018) believes that in order ‘to understand the role of the internet (and social change generally), it is simply the case that different parts of society work dif- ferently: politics, where legitimacy and inputs are bounded and authoritative; mar- kets, where sellers and buyers are connected via diffuse and extensive exchanges; and culture, with its plural worlds of symbols and sources of information’. However, these factors are inseparable in any real sense. The discourse around the Internet today is largely about power, globalisation, and capitalism; these are the pillars upon which it is built. Like most technological development within a capitalist industrial economy, large corporate entities define, rather than respond to, the Internet agenda. Sand- vig (2013) states, in opposition to the commonly held belief that the Internet is in some sense a societal leveller (Thelwall, 2013), that ‘[c]oincident with the rise of the Internet, infrastructures of all kinds became “splintered” and unbundled, relying on competition, market mechanisms, and segmentation of users into the privileged and the less privileged who were offered different services.’ The logic of the Internet now forms the ‘mental model used to think about the future of other systems.’ (Sandvig, 2013).

The Internet is primarily a Western technology and, although the imperialistic read- ing of globalisation is potentially problematic, it is entirely relevant in this context. Taylor (2001) argues that ‘[t]he relatively recent rise of digital technologies... cannot be separated from... globalization’, and Pieterse (1995) writes that ‘it should be called Westernization and not globalization.’ The Internet and the information society that it supports are considered by Castells (2000) when he states that ‘the rise of the in- formational, global economy is characterized by the development of a new organi- zational logic which is related to the current process of technological change’. The inference is that mindset comes before technology, and many aspects of the current networked society are extensions of the industrial capitalism that preceded it. Indeed, many of the aspects of society brought to the fore by the Internet pre-date it; as Can- clini (1995) states, ‘[i]ndustrialization and urbanization, generalized education, and union and political organizations have been reordering social life... since the nine- teenth century’.

emerge by accident. Rather, they evolved from two historical ideas: the idea that a person can be signified by a static object or set of such objects (such as portraits, per- sonal ads, and sculptures), and the idea that one can represent human relationships as discrete person-to-person connections.’ These ideas seem obvious, but ‘one may just as easily suggest a world in which relationships are defined primarily by one’s association with a well-bounded group... and a culture where... any contact other than face-to-face contact is to be regarded with suspicion or painted as inauthentic.’ (ibid.) Fuller and Goffey (2012) write that ‘manipulating people, processes, and things as symbols and ciphers opens up questions about the production of information.’ So- cial networking platforms, argue Hogan and Wellman (2014) ‘are the confluence of database technologies and cultural logics of how to represent both the self and the connections between selves... Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk exhibit a networked individualistic way of organizing relationships based on person-to-person contact.’ They consider the social media to be ‘an evolution of cultural ideas and technolo- gies‘, while reminding us that cultural evolution is ‘neither deterministic, nor neces- sarily progressive... [N]ewer media will arrive as extensions to existing ideas and con- straints (both social and technological).’ This echoes ideas relating to remediation; as McLuhan (1964) wrote, ‘the content of any medium is always another medium.’ Bolter and Grusin (1999) argue that ‘new media’, by re-rendering earlier media (such as photography, film, or television) achieve their own cultural significance. They also note that earlier media have undergone the remediation procedure: photography, for example, remediated painting.

Lunenfeld (2011) comments that ‘[s]ystems theorists have characterized the emer- gent Web as displaying robust architectures of participation, having evolved into a truly social software’, and current users of the Internet are more numerous than the entire global population in 1960. If, as Ihde (1993) posits, ‘technologies in ensemble are probably more like cultures than like tools’, then the ensemble of technologies that instantiate the Internet, together with the vast numbers of social agents that in- habit it, justify thinking of it as a culture. This culture has given us these social media, and has brought about a ‘culture’ of online self-presentation, and the shifting of au- thorship from a professionalised class to what Keen (2008) has called ‘The Cult of The Amateur’. Much of the media content now found on the web has been made, and uploaded into the system, by the users. Keen has a somewhat pessimistic viewpoint on the topic, claiming that the users of social media ‘are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.’ On the subject of YouTube, he writes that it ‘is a portal of ama-

teur videos... [that] eclipses even the blogs in the inanity and absurdity of its content.’ He sees Web 2.0 as ‘decimating the ranks of our cultural gatekeepers’ and thinks that ‘[t]ruth... is being flattened, as we create an on-demand, personalized version that reflects our own individual myopia.’ We live in the time of ‘do-it-yourself biographies’ according to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2001) when the self has become a ‘reflexive project’ (Giddens, 1991).’ As McLuhan (1964) noted, ‘[w]hat we have today, instead of social consciousness... is a private subconsciousness of individual “point of view”’. Atop these ‘points of view’ we find the connections between the networks of these ‘selves’. Strong network ties are maintained via a diversity of content, both profound and banal (Bearman and Parigi, 2004).

The affordances of the network determine what will be permitted to occur within it. Beer (2013) states that ‘[m]etadata tags order culture,’ indicating that by pre-defining the structures of our technical systems it may be that this pre-definition will influence our cultural production. Only some of the ‘agents’ traversing these technical systems are human users. Beer (2013), referring to Mackenzie (2006), states that the global net- work incorporates ‘algorithms as powerful social actors... suggesting the far reaching effects of algorithms in the social world.’ The power relationships inherent to the net- work are inextricably tied in with the technological architecture of the information society, and Mackenzie himself, in his examination of software as social agent, de- scribes how code ‘becomes an involuted nexus connecting people, platforms, reading and writing conventions, power, law and creativity, distributed in time and space... it ties people together, but not seamlessly, effortlessly or without tensions.’ (Mackenzie, 2006). The processes of society are enveloped within this system-of-systems, some- times beyond the perception of human actors; ‘[algorithms] operate. . . in the ‘tech- nological unconscious’ (Thrift, 2005) - indeed, the lack of awareness or visibility of these powerful algorithmic processes has been something of an area of consensus.’ The increasing influence of the algorithm in society, together with this ‘prescriptive’ nature means that ‘[a]lgorithms. . . can no longer be seen as neutral problem-solving devices. . . it is necessary to view algorithms both as part of the social fabric and as a part of a network of interrelated social processes. Algorithms are both a product and a part of these increasingly software dense environments.’ In a direct reference to, ar- guably, the biggest player in the social media universe he describes how ‘algorithms are central to the operation and behaviours we might find on Facebook, which, given its population, reveals just how deeply embedded algorithms are in everyday cultural practices and interactions.’