User Agency Research Articles

Algorithmic logics and the construction of cultural taste of the Netflix Recommender System

This article investigates algorithms and their construction of cultural taste through a socio-technical analysis of the Netflix Recommender System. I examined the key algorithmic processes in the intersection of its technological infrastructure, cultural processes, and social relations by employing Taina Bucher’s three methodological tactics for ‘unknowing’ algorithms. Drawing from media logic and computational logic, I propose the concept of ‘algorithmic logics’ to define the assumptions, processes, and mechanisms that govern the construction of taste within the Netflix platform. I identified these four logics of taste – datafication, reconfiguration, interpellation, and reproduction – and argue that they reappropriate old apparatuses of social control and generate new capacities in engineering cultural processes. Together, these logics transform algorithms from procedural to self-generative machines in the guise of algorithmic objectivity, user agency, and post-demographic experiences. Algorithmic logics function as an ‘interpretative schema’ in making sense algorithms in their entanglement with social actors, institutions, and infrastructures.

Image Cropping on Twitter: Fairness Metrics, their Limitations, and the Importance of Representation, Design, and Agency

Twitter uses machine learning to crop images, where crops are centered around the part predicted to be the most salient. In fall 2020, Twitter users raised concerns that the automated image cropping system on Twitter favored light-skinned over dark-skinned individuals, as well as concerns that the system favored cropping woman's bodies instead of their heads. In order to address these concerns, we conduct an extensive analysis using formalized group fairness metrics. We find systematic disparities in cropping and identify contributing factors, including the fact that the cropping based on the single most salient point can amplify the disparities because of an effect we term argmax bias. However, we demonstrate that formalized fairness metrics and quantitative analysis on their own are insufficient for capturing the risk of representational harm in automatic cropping. We suggest the removal of saliency-based cropping in favor of a solution that better preserves user agency. For developing a new solution that sufficiently address concerns related to representational harm, our critique motivates a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods that include human-centered design.

From “Cool Observer” to “Emotional Participant”: The Practice of Immersive Journalism

ABSTRACT Over the past years, innovative technologies (such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR)) have become more common within news organizations. These technologies allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world. With these types of productions, the journalist tries to engage and involve the user by introducing emotional styles, often to create empathy. This does not only demand new technological skills, but also challenges the way journalist allow emotions in journalistic productions, and what role they take in relation to the story and the user. Through fifteen in-depth interviews with immersive producers and experts in renowned news organizations across the globe, this paper examines both the motivations of journalists who produce immersive stories, and how they seek to balance traditional journalistic norms and emotionality in them. The results show that journalists believe that emotions and facts can be compatible with journalistic production. Yet, they struggle with their role in relation to the user. Immersive journalism obliges journalists to carefully reconsider their relationship with their public. In sum, this study illuminates an ongoing professional debate on the role of emotionality, user agency, and journalistic control and autonomy.

Enacting Fentanyl Tests Strips for Overdose Prevention: The Socio-Material Transformation of “Suspect Technologies” into “Technologies of Solidarity”

Fentanyl Test Strips (FTS) make possible rapid visual determinations of whether or not fentanyl is present in a given drug supply. This article places FTS within the historical contexts of drug-checking for drug control, overdose prevention, and harm reduction in North America. Following Fentanyl Test Strips (FTS) as artifacts made to signify and enact possibilities other than those for which they were developed and licensed, this article contributes to socio-material theorization of drug control, overdose prevention, and harm reduction in relation to the agency, empowerment, and liveliness of drug users through enactment of the policy and practice of off-label use. The socio-materialities of FTS co-constitute their semiotics and their interpretive flexibility within prevailing forms of evidence-based reasoning that have transformed clinical practice over past decades. They offer new renderings of facticity and artifactuality, which I connect to Ludwik Fleck’s work on the Wasserman test in Genesis and Structure of a Scientific Fact. Reading both the materiality and the semiotics of FTS as artifacts provides a hybrid concept of socio-materiality attentive to the social and material relations embedded in and embodied by FTS, and those who use them in both intended and unintended ways. Such uses differ from individualized expertise and evaluation taken as contributory to the evidence base of the global North. The political work of articulating between different grounds of struggle is underway among those seeking to distribute FTS more widely. But it is their sociomaterial flexibility that makes these artifacts move into new relations that sustains the more affective and artisanal forms of political and cultural recognition characterized in this article as “artifactual” use for an alterbiopolitics.

Digital intermediation: Unseen infrastructures for cultural production

This article constructs a theoretical model of digital intermediation: a process of three key, and unseen, components for cultural production in our contemporary media environment. Digital intermediation is a content production and consumption process that incorporates the cultural characteristics of technologies, agencies and automation. First, the article describes the key components of digital intermediation that bring about the production and distribution of cultural artefacts. Second, the article describes digital intermediation as a process of production and consumption amid these three components. Third, the article articulates the problems digital intermediation creates by examining the loss of user agency over the production of and access to cultural artefacts. Finally, the article highlights how digital intermediation problems can be addressed by cultural institutions, specifically public service media, to shore up user agency within automated media environments.

Navigating Interactive Story Spaces the Architecture of Interactive Narratives in Online Journalism

Over the past decade, journalists have created in-depth interactive narratives to provide an alternative to the relentless 24-hour news cycle. Combining different media forms, such as text, audio, video, and data visualisation with the interactive possibilities of digital media, these narratives involve users in the narrative in new ways. In journalism studies, the convergence of different media forms in this manner has gained significant attention. However, interactivity as part of this form has been left underappreciated. In this study, we scrutinise how navigational structure, expressed as navigational cues, shapes user agency in their individual explorations of the narrative. By approaching interactive narratives as story spaces with unique interactive architectures, in this article, we reconstruct the architecture of five Dutch interactive narratives using the walkthrough method. We find that the extensiveness of the interactive architectures can be described on a continuum between closed and open navigational structures that predetermine and thus shape users’ trajectories in diverse ways.

Experiences of college teachers with visual disability us-ing AT and AI based solutions in India: Benefits, Issues, Challenges and Prospects

The study explores various issues related to usage of Assistive Technologies and Artificial Intelligence based solutions by college teachers with visual disabilities for teaching and academic purposes. Existing academic work indicate that these technologies have supported and transformed the lives of people with disabilities and particularly people with visual disabilities but also posed several challenges and limitations. This research examines real time issues encountered by the col-lege professors with visual disabilities using such technologies and suggest measures for implications for future development of such technologies. This study goes beyond describing, analyzing and theorizing the benefits and limita-tion of Assistive technologies and Artificial Intelligence based solutions for col-lege teachers with visual disabilities and attempt to address larger issues of acces-sibility, inclusiveness, consideration of local context for such technologies and aim to improve the agency of such users. For this purpose, a qualitative study has been undertaken to explore the experiences, concerns and suggestions regarding the research issue. I have used semi-structured interviews as tools to analyze the impact of these technologies. This study sits at the intersection of technological innovations and disability studies..

Demystifying the COVID-19 Infodemic: Conspiracies, Context, and the Agency of Users

This article presents new empirical insights into what people do with conspiracy theories during crises. By suppressing the impulse to distinguish between truth and falsehood, which has characterized most scholarship on the COVID-19 “infodemic,” and engaging with claims surrounding two popular COVID-19 conspiracies—on 5G and on Bill Gates—in South Africa and Nigeria, we illustrate how conspiracies morph as they interact with different socio-political contexts. Drawing on a mixed-method analysis of more than 6 million tweets, we examine how, in each country, conspiracies have uniquely intersected with longer-term discourses and political projects. In Nigeria, the two conspiracies were both seized as opportunities to extend criticism to the ruling party. In South Africa, they produced distinctive responses: while the 5G conspiracy had limited buy-in, the Gates conspiracy resonated with deep-rooted resentment toward the West, corporate interests, and what is seen as a paternalistic attitude of some external actors toward Africa. These findings stress the importance of taking conspiracy theories seriously, rather than dismissing them simply as negative externalities of digital ecosystems. Situating conspiracies in specific dynamics of trust and mistrust can make an important difference when designing responses that are not limited to broadcasting truthful information, but can also enable interventions that account for deeply rooted sentiments of suspicion toward specific issues and actors, which can vary significantly across communities.

Modelling Character Knowledge in Plan-Based Interactive Narrative to Extend Accomodative Mediation

In plan-based interactive narrative systems, user actions must be integrated with an ideal story structure in order to strike a reasonable balance between user agency and story quality. A process called mediation addresses this issue by selecting appropriate responses to possible detrimental user actions in a given interactive narrative plan. One way the algorithm mediates exceptional user activity is accommodation, the process of replanning future events to incorporate an unwanted action and accomplish the story's authorial goals. However, this approach is limited by an underlying assumption that the story world exists as an object outside the user's subjective experience. In this paper, we incorporate a model of user knowledge into plan-based mediation in order to widen the space of plans the algorithm may search during accommodation by allowing the process to replan past events that occur outside a user's imperfect knowledge of the story world.

Promoting Culturally Tailored mHealth: A Scoping Review of Mobile Health Interventions in Latinx Communities

This scoping review of mHealth research focuses on intervention studies that utilize mobile technologies to promote behavior change and improve health outcomes in U.S. Latinx communities. 342 mHealth articles were reviewed using PRIMSA protocols; most did not include a majority Latinx study population or did not report on an intervention. The final sample resulted in 23 articles published between 2012 and 2020. Reviewed interventions focused on conditions such as: diabetes, depression, substance abuse, obesity, hypertension, maternal health, and farmworker safety. About one-third of mHealth interventions included mobile applications, the rest were limited to texting programs. Text message reminders can help improve medication adherence and care access, especially when coupled with support from community health workers. Bi-directional text message interventions with feedback loops and personalized treatment options can build user agency. Additionally, multi-modal applications that combine texting with self-guided interactive content show promise for culturally tailored mHealth.

Sustainable product innovation and changing consumer behavior: Sustainability affordances as triggers of adoption and usage

AbstractThis conceptual paper argues that for sustainable product innovation to make a contribution to addressing sustainability issues, we need to understand not only why consumers adopt sustainable products but also what makes them use these in sustainable way. To explain how specific product features can change the ways in which consumers engage with sustainable products in the adoption and usage phase, we draw on affordance theory. Affordances refer to the potential for agentic action of users in relation to a technological object. We develop a conceptual framework that explains how sustainable product innovation can lead to the design of sustainability affordances that stimulate adoption and sustainable usage. The framework shows how three forms of agency—material, firm, and user agency—interact and together influence a product's sustainability affordances that drive adoption and a change in consumer behavior. The framework explains how trade‐offs between a product's environmental features and consumer expectations regarding desired functionalities and user experience can be overcome.

Platform playbook: a typology of consumer strategies against algorithmic control in digital platforms

ABSTRACT Digital Platforms consist of algorithms and rules that shape consumer behaviour. When faced with these embodiments of the platform’s interests, how do consumers protect their own interests? Through multi-method, qualitative fieldwork focused on commuters using ride-hailing platforms in Metro Manila, this paper shows that consumers develop strategies to achieve better terms for themselves. This paper contributes to the literature on algorithmic control and user agency in two ways. First, it proposes a fine-grained typology of consumer strategies used in algorithmic digital platforms, consisting of 5 major types and 18 sub-types. Second, the typology sheds light on the distinct characteristics of consumer strategies and their implications. Future studies into user strategies, algorithmic systems, and digital platforms will benefit from the typology and implications laid out here.

Between Journalist Authorship and User Agency: Exploring the Concept of Objectivity in VR Journalism

ABSTRACT Virtual Reality (VR) journalism has brought many changes to journalistic practice, calling facticity, accuracy, objectivity and autonomy into question. This study examines factors influencing objectivity and its significance in VR journalism from the perspective of VR content creators. The researcher conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with fact-based VR content creators. The findings showed the diverse understandings of objectivity among VR content creators and the growing acceptance of VR as a subjective experience. The 360° spherical view reduces the ability to frame the content. The different story-paths in interactive VR storytelling may add perspectives to the story. However, the VR user retains the ability to actively explore the virtual environment, deciding what to experience and what to dismiss. VR emphasises user-induced subjectivity in addition to the already existing journalist-induced subjectivity, in which the journalist chooses camera placement and provides a guided experience. Subjectivity is inescapable in VR and its impact is magnified, suggesting extra caution from VR content creators to protect users and affirming the need for the notion of pragmatic objectivity.

Online Community-based Design of Free and Open Source Software for Transgender Voice Training

This paper describes Project Spectra, a collective of open source developers that aims to build free and open source voice training technology for transgender people. We demonstrate how a design prioritizing the agency of trans users was made possible through sustained community collaboration. Using an autoethnographic approach, we discuss our community-based design process, which was documented with memos, online meetings and text conversations, sketches, and other data sources. We illustrate how we articulated our values as a group: deciding our programming framework (including a Statement of Principles), elaborating our "Experience Goals" (the feelings we wanted our design to elicit), and determining the features we wanted to implement in our app. We conclude with a reflection on the benefits and challenges of conducting community-based design research through an open-source organizational model.

The Adoption of Mobile Payment Technologies, Social Interactive Consumer-Oriented Applications, and Online Purchasers’ Decision-Making Process

Research background: This paper analyzes the outcomes of an exploratory review of the current research on the relationship between the global adoption of mobile payment technologies, social interactive consumer-oriented applications, and online purchasers’ decision-making process. Purpose of the article: The data used for this study was obtained and replicated from previous research conducted by Econsultancy and Statista. We performed analyses and made estimates regarding mobile e-commerce sales worldwide, frequency of mobile retail app usage according to U.S. smartphone shoppers, how well organizations understand the customer journey for certain audiences, share of Internet users who are likely to use mobile payments on their smartphone in the next year (by country), and time spent per mobile app category. Methods: Data collected from 6,200 respondents are tested against the research model by using structural equation modeling. Findings & Value added: The advent of smartphones redesigns the routine of shopping, thus altering the agency of users. Retailers have instant access to data on the geographical position of users that can be employed in addition to other information to regulate the decision-making process. Perceived effortlessness in utilization of the smartphone is somewhat similar for various mobile shopping application settings. The degree to which mobile purchasing applications are time critical and location sensitive may differ substantially. Mobile retailers can make public the personal, collaborative, and instantaneous buying experience that mobile shopping can offer to customers.

The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents

User agents are pieces of software that represent the user, a natural person, in their digital interactions. Examples include Web browsers, operating systems, single-sign-on systems, or voice assistants. User agents hold, due to the role they play in the digital ecosystem, a strategic position. They can be arbiters of structural power. The overwhelming majority of the data that is collected about people, particularly that which is collected passively, is collected through user agents, at times with their explicit support or at least by their leave. I propose to lean on this strategic function that user agents hold to develop a regime of fiduciary duties for them that is relatively limited in the number of actors that it affects yet has the means to significantly increase the power of users in their relationships with online platforms. The limited, tractable scope of software user agency as a fiduciary relationship provides effective structural leverage in righting the balance of power between individuals and tech companies.

Source Triangulation Skills and the Future of Digital Inclusion: How Information Literacy Policy Can Address Misinformation and Disinformation Challenges

Policy responses to misinformation and disinformation challenges should promote equitable digital inclusion supports that contribute to source triangulation practice. Source triangulation refers to information validation through research, assessment and comparison of multiple sources with the aim of finding credible commonality. As individuals learn source triangulation skills, they develop one part of a multi-layered information literacy education, which might also include learning to navigate user interfaces, search results, and big data. As a strategy for addressing misinformation and disinformation challenges, source triangulation could complement content moderation efforts by platforms, concurrently supporting user agency. One place to begin when teaching source triangulation is with Stanford University’s “Civic Online Reasoning” project, which emphasizes various information literacy skills including “lateral reading.” When online, this skill involves reading across various sources (perhaps opening multiple tabs in a browser) to assess and corroborate information before determining the credibility of any single source. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance defines digital inclusion as “the activities necessary to ensure that all individuals and communities, including the most disadvantaged, have access to and use of Information and Communication Technologies” (digitalinclusion.org). Policy efforts emphasizing connections between technology and education often prioritize access. These efforts must continue to close digital divides and should be expanded to address digital inclusion goals that include supports for individuals as they learn to use technologies. This paper offers two policy recommendations: 1) Government agencies connecting education and technology should develop a vision for the future of digital inclusion prioritizing the use of technologies (in addition to access), emphasizing information literacy supports, with a specific focus on source triangulation outcomes. 2) Complement the efforts of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance through funding that will deliver information literacy supports via libraries and schools, as well as through non/for-profit platform and infomediation programs. Policy responses should ensure a distributive justice approach to resource allocation, acknowledging the experiences of marginalized and vulnerable communities. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation challenges should be conceptualized as extending far beyond the “news,” and should also include, for example, biased data sets, algorithms, and data-driven decision-making that can contribute to big data discrimination. Policy must acknowledge and address the complexities associated with deteriorating information environments, especially for individuals most likely to experience harm. While this paper presents policy recommendations in a U.S. context, the proposals will hopefully contribute a model for efforts internationally. Indeed, as the United Nations works to close digital divides and promote connectivity that is meaningful, it is vital that international digital inclusion initiatives prioritize the vision and the funding to support individuals as they attempt to distinguish between fact, fallacy, and fake.

Falsified Incompetence and Other Lies the Positivists Told Me


 
 
 Facilitated Communication (FC) is a technique of supported communication for non- speaking people with motor movements commonly understood as spasmodic, dyspraxic, or otherwise unruly. FC is a contentious site of scientific conflict where highly circumscribed quantitative experiments have been unable to reckon with the lived reality of typers. The debate over the efficacy of FC centers around broader arguments of what counts as scientific rigor and validity. In this paper, I remind readers that experiential data is, in fact, empirical. Qualitative analysis is scientifically rigorous. Adopting technologies of analysis from Chela Sandoval’s “Methodology of the Oppressed,” I explore a rhetorics of evacuation deployed by skeptics that result in the erasure of FC user agency, testimony, and experience. I invite readers to explore how these rhetorics extend beyond FC and into the wider field of education research.
 
 

Effective control of flexible asphalt pavement cracking through quality assurance testing of extracted and recovered binders

A total of 54 asphalt binders were obtained from six different Canadian (four municipalities) and United States (two State Departments of Transportation (DOTs)) user agencies. Regular AASHTO M 320 grades, critical crack tip opening displacements (CTOD), extended bending beam rheometer (EBBR) limiting low temperature grades (LLTG), and limiting phase angles grades T(δ = 30°) and T(δ = 45°), were determined for tank-sampled and extracted and recovered materials.While nearly all binders sampled from storage tanks at asphalt plants pass regular contract quality assurance (QA) requirements with ease, enhanced test methods showed major variability for materials of ostensibly the same AASHTO M 320 grade. The CTOD provides a measure of strain tolerance in the ductile state around the freeze-thaw regime. It ranged from a low of 8.4 mm for a contract in a PG minus 28 zone—likely burdened by too much reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) and/or poor virgin binder quality—to a high of 48.4 mm for a contract in a PG minus 34 zone. The CTOD varied by as much as threefold within the same climatic zone. Tank samples graded consistently better according to the CTOD compared to recovered binders, at times in a major way.Grade losses due to cold conditioning in the extended BBR protocol, which provide a measure of durability, ranged from a negligible 0.9 °C to a very significant 9.1 °C after only 72 h of cold conditioning. The EBBR LLTG was found to be highly correlated with the T(δ = 30°) grade (R2 = 0.85), and somewhat less correlated with T(δ = 45°) (R2 = 0.74). The CTOD was found to be highly correlated with the T(δ = 45°) (R2 = 0.90), and somewhat less correlated with the T(δ = 30°) grade (R2 = 0.86). Hence, the two limiting phase angle temperatures may be used, in the future, in a more precise, accurate, and practical specification protocol for the control of cold temperature cracking.

Domesticating dating apps: Non-single Chinese gay men’s dating app use and negotiations of relational boundaries

Dating app use is prevalent among non-single Chinese gay men. Applying domestication theory, this study explores how dating apps can be accepted in gay romantic relationships. The author argues that the domestication of technological artifacts unfolds on four dimensions: the practical, the symbolic, the cognitive, and the relational. Findings show that dating apps serve a dual role: a pool of sexual or romantic alternatives and a channel to the gay community. Although the former constitutes a threat to monogamy, the latter leaves room for a couple’s negotiation for acceptable but restricted uses. This negotiation is in tandem with the negotiation of relational boundaries, which leads to either the reinforcement of monogamy or the embrace of non-monogamy. Meanwhile, one can perceive dating apps to be as unremarkable as other social media platforms. This is achieved through a cognitive process where gay men learn to debunk the arbitrary association between dating apps and infidelity. Monogamous or not, they put faith in user agency, not perceiving dating apps as a real threat to romantic relationships.