Public Interfaces
Ego Media’s remit has been to study the forms and practices of self-representation in digital media. The project’s name implies a focus on the individual “ego” – or first person “ego” documents – but my research on talk, in line with that of many of my colleagues, has conceived of self-presentation as an interactive process.
In my research I am particularly interested in examining collective acts of self-presentation and collective subjectivities. In my work on interviews I have demonstrated that this form has helped to constitute publics in modernity. The interview’s imagining of its audience and its enacting of dialogue has long helped to bring reading communities into existence and publics into self-consciousness.1
Today, however, it is new types of talk interfaces and forms that are shaping collective self-presentation. Certainly, we can see that the idea of the public has been overburdened with a variety of discourses in the era of digital media. Early on the internet was freighted to offer a utopic new public sphere, although Jodie Dean’s essay “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere” offers a useful pushback to this idea.2 More recently narratives around the dangers of social media manipulation for elections, or sentiment and information spread, have dominated headlines and research agendas. Given that, for example, research on Twitter has suggested the two-thirds of all links on the platform are tweeted by bots, we need to urgently reconceive of interaction and the constitution of online publics to acknowledge the role of automation and AI.3
Moreover, as researchers such as Rosie Graham have noted, algorithmically sealed information retrieval systems such as Google Search created “unimaginable communities” that prevent public self-consciousness.4 If publics are now algorithmically established but unimaginable by constituent individuals, what might the implications be for democracy, nationality, social cohesion, and, indeed, cultural memory?
In our theme essay on Interaction we discuss the manifold ramifications of this idea for our research at length.
Endnotes
- Rebecca Roach, Literature and the Rise of the Interview (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 1-32. ↩
- Jodi Dean, “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere,” Constellations 10, no. 1 (March 2003): 95–112. ↩
- Stefan Wojcik et al., “Bots in the Twittersphere,” Pew Research, April 9, 2018, https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/04/09/bots-in-the-twittersphere/. ↩
- Richard Norroy Graham, “Understanding Google: Search Engines and the Changing Nature of Access, Thought and Knowledge within a Global Context.” (Exeter, University of Exeter, 2017), http://hdl.handle.net/10871/32601. 314. ↩
Bibliography
- Dean, Jodi. “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere.” Constellations 10, no. 1 (March 2003): 95–112.
- Graham, Richard Norroy. “Understanding Google: Search Engines and the Changing Nature of Access, Thought and Knowledge within a Global Context.” University of Exeter, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/32601.
- Roach, Rebecca. Literature and the Rise of the Interview. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
- Wojcik, Stefan, Solomon Messing, Aaron Smith, Lee Rainie, and Paul Hitlin. “Bots in the Twittersphere.” Pew Research, April 9, 2018. https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/04/09/bots-in-the-twittersphere/.