we have four wonderful panelists like i mentioned so before we get started i will introduce our first speaker it's jacob kramer duffield phd he is a data and onions consultant and a researcher he's worked for nearly a decade in media analytics pioneering podcasts audio and audience measurement and thinking about how systems in the space are evolving his background is as a researcher in digital identities and understanding how increased usage of new communications technologies change how we conceive ourselves and relate to each other he'll be chatting with us today about the growing political economy of podcasting inseparability of their hosts that is a different time what i hope to accomplish today is to start thinking about the history and structures of the medium technology institutions and people and how they've gotten us to this moment the kinds of voices that we hear the kinds of work podcasting is an unusual communicative medium in several ways like radio or television it was in fact invented at a particular time in place but unlike them it was not a big technical breakthrough but rather a simple technical change podcasting there is a very interesting and weird story to be told about the early days of podcasting but again that's a different talk what's important for our purposes is as much about what the rss standard doesn't include as what it does on the host end of things people serving the files and setting up the theme there's very little information about the client that's transmitted the most useful are the ip address and so given that podcasting was at the same time as the web guy creepier creepier and web video try kept trying to happen and eventually did a medium that was not vulnerable to automated monetization who would choose to invest resources answers three d one first some early start of money that tried to figure out the space in the early s long story short they really didn't and there's some interesting cultural artifacts that are of a product of those efforts but for the most part it investment in the medium for a public media stick radio stations and for public media generally the value proposition was quit while their audience was previously limited to the people within range of the radio transmitter while a particular program was being broadcast media tends not to have exceptionally powerful radio transmitters it was now possible for anyone at anytime anywhere to listen to their shows and since the shows were already paid for buying a combination of member support underwriting which is the weird pseudo ads on public media that they're limited in what kinds of claims and statements they can make it in this fits the whole thing and the corporation for public broadcasting and while bandwidth wasn't free even given the limitations of underwriting and the cpm you can try from that rather than advertising shows like this american life with broadcast audiences in the millions and digital audiences also in the lower millions were able to substantially alter their fortunes and th well educated upper middle class mostly white mostly men but these were the not the only people who make podcasts while it has done a poor job of hiring the promoting people of color within its ranks public media more than many other media has long h wo main trends bias unconscious and i over how and whom podcaster marketed and grave imbalances in the distribution of compensation and workload to cut right to the chase women to public media and podcasting more broadly have long carried a disproportionate share of making male host sound good and have her for their troubles being dramatically underpaid relative even to their male colleagues with the same titles excluded from the host chair and of course sexually rest for their as something like a constantly refreshed pool of available but the arrival of larger economic movers has also created other spaces traditionally excluded voices writers and hosts with non public media backgrounds new formats and approaches to storytelling and alternate methods of financing whether it be crowdfunding creator owned networks public leading to a viability threshold so the sort of size of audience that's necessary to sustain an endeavor that substantially blow below other broadcast media there's also another pressure the gradual move to streaming with each year broadcasts broadband signals improve and more listeners are hearing podcast not in the old download and listen later model which was established with the initial use of ipods and other mp players as the default method and then money floods in along with new users never habituated to life within ipod the pressure will only increase at the cost of user privacy and so i'd like to propose an approach for thinking about the political economy of podcasting there are four major factors to consider first audience we need to consider who the audio was made for in addition to who is listening to it second production and representation what is the process by which the audio was made and who is being represented i mean representation here in several senses most obviously whose voices are literally being heard as the hosts reporters and producers but also whose views and perspectives are being represented in the overall editorial output mission the kinds of stories that are getting told and finally who is being represented as having done the work are their hosts on a pedestal with producers and engineers listed in the credits or is the  finally there's the issue there's the question of monetization which informs and interact with all the above points ad funded shows have to quantify and sell their audiences which has the effect of reinforcing a search for the kinds of upper middle class audiences we've discussed venture funded shows and studios have a pressure to follow not only on these valuable audiences but also on massive scale which dictates the kinds of stories they can can't will or won't tell distribution medium can add the further veto point a much larger better financed platform companies into the equation which again can constrain what stories are told and of course compensation which follows both the status quo ante of imbalance between hosts and producers and gender imbalances and which dictates the kinds of stories that shows can tell and what they can take these questions are just the beginning and i hope you'll come away from this talk with a more critical eye to this emerging medium and be motivated to incorporate it as a distinct and interesting part of the media spectrum in your own  you next we have margaux hanley she will be presenting alexa please i feel like i should say that alexa please i don't know there's yeah this is her talk is on emerging interaction rules between people and voice assistants margaux is a qualitative researcher finishing up her master's degree in sociology at columbia university she's interested in the social dimensions of human to robot interactions she'll be discussing with us her current research focusing on voice assistance and the emergent interaction rules between them and humans after graduating she's heading over to cornell tech world where she will be studying the spillover effects of robot to human interactions last but not least she moonlights as a  artist hi thank you for the introduction my name is margo hanley like joella said i'm a master's student columbia finishing up this spring but i'm gonna be continuing this research through this summer so you're catching me a little bit in in the mid of a work in progress as you can see by the title change as well but yeah today i'm going to be talking about this kind of emergent interaction that we're having and i say emerging you know voice interface has been around for very long time but i say emergent because of the scale at which they're kind of existing in our homes in the public discourse etc so yeah i think more broadly i'm really interested in  the social implications of of technology of emerging technology and this one particularly interesting to me because human computer interface and human robot interface these  disciplines i think do a really fine job of talking about interactions and interaction to the technology but sociology does not and certainly there are some theorists in the field that are talking about it but i think that it's really important that there's a social lens and a social perspective on these interactions that are just proliferating there as you can see as everyone knows i think voice assistants are are coming into all of our homes our friends homes probably everyone here or potentially he's interacted with one or has stories about interacting with them you know twenty five million sold in two thousand and seventeen from one and fifteen when the echo was kind of introduced and so they're growing so rapidly and with it you know kind of a we're hearing what a frenzy of weird stories of like you know what why do they all have feminine or female voices are my kids going to stop saying please and thank you am i going to stop saying please and thank you what is the point of please and thank you you know and like he's weird introspective dark moments where you're kind of questioning phatak interactions right the kind of like a small talk that we that we have to go on through the day and kind of all the things we do in normal human interactions and kind of how they're mapping onto these interactions with these devices so super interesting space to me and and yeah so i kind of i went into the field using kind of a grounded theory approach which means i had no particular research question and true qualitative research important and then tell you some kind of some of the findings that i'm seeing not as well organized i don't think but but super interesting and like i said a work in progress so yes i went into the field kind of in in the wild and device owners homes so doing ethnographic interviews kind of sitting with owners of these devices and talking about their experience with the devices as well as interacting with the device of course the device which is kind of barge in like for instant alexa i would just kind of like hear its name and then just kind of like jump in and say i don't understand that which obviously would like produce an amazing rich litany of follow up questions for me as an interviewer so very fun and similarly home pod yeah so we'll see about that and then but yeah sixteen device owners a few couples in there and four of those where individuals in the the flip side of this in a face to face social interaction one of these things is a voice assistant that is a combination of you know is an assemblage really of values and ethics and perspectives and backgrounds of you know thousands and thousands of people including you know engineers or what most people think about but it's script writers who are writing the answer to what alexa or siri says when you say i'm sad you know and they have to make these decisions scriptwriters evangelists are going around training new engineers to think about voice user interfaces this whole weird world on the back end of these devices so i went out to the west coast interviewed eleven of those people to get this kind of high level perspective of what's going on not only with the interactions themselves but what's informing i won't say mind but you know the the this this social actor what is informing what's what's what's coming out of its speaker  theoretically grounded theory is is great you know kind of gives you a lot of flexibility but similarly we want to go in the field with some kind of sociological theoretical guar is really interesting branch of micro sociology which mainly focuses on how to understand society at you know at the really small scale so how do we understand our institutions our norms how they're being produced and reproduced in face to face interactions in small group interactions paired very nicely with the the research that i want to do here founded really more by social psychologist field three main tenets here kind of all around meaning and how meaning is brought to interactions how its created through interactions and how it changes through interaction so obviously in this case i was kind of going into the field thinking this is you know a voice assistant and alexa is familiar to us through its voice interface through it speaks language it's a language as you know collection of symbols which we talk to other humans with but it's not human and so kind of how are people assimilating this thing into their lives into their homes and other private spaces and then of course how meanings are made through interaction and then how that's changing so that's the main theoretical perspective at the great chagrin of my scioscia sociology department i also included some work by clifford nass who's not a sociologists and of course disciplines hate that and he did some really awesome stuff  probably don't have much time to dig into it here but positioning computers as social actors so like i said in sociology that's still kind of a still in flux  human cue to it so in this case like a voice output will make people you know kind of use gender stereotypes or in some cases this photos from an article so this is like  sweet talk in your computer where people wouldn't want to hurt their computers feelings and so they would go out of their way to like you know to rate a computer poorly like not in front of it or something you know like these kind of experiments so it's super amazing and of course this was in  something and so now you know with these voices students it's just more and more sophisticated they're responsive they're talking to us you know they're responding directly to things we say it's not around so it's even more pronounced impacts like this and i was seeing a lot my data  and so this is clementine one of the women i was telling you about at this time in home she says and it oddly enough that pleasant female voice that they've endowed alexa with it becomes familiar and friendly and you kind of look forward to hear it i always say good morning to her and she tells me a rotten joke and returned which was funny because i interviewed someone who writes these jokes and they were like rewrite these am a king jokes and everyone loves and i was awkward so but so yeah so a lot of interesting things here right pleasant female voice is kind of fits into this narrative this big huge question right of like gender and why do these things have female voices and what is the impact of that and you know they're they're meaningful impacts of that interface of it being a voice assistant right um in in in a social hierarchy of it having a female voice and playing into these stereotypes which are talk a little bit more about later but you know you kind of see it working really effectively and the companies are aware of this they're aware female voice is being very effective they're aware of making subservient making these devices subservient being really effective and that's how they're being designed and um and it work s cool so so it's clear that people people are saying she people are saying her people are a bit more of a sizing it people are you know companionship like i just showed you with that woman clementine is one way in which people are endeared to the device there's other ones i'm kind of weird you know like people will you know one one guy interview talked about kind of how he was trying to be like kind of like makes sexual jokes with it it wasn't like being like sexual enough and it was like putting in a bad mood or something right so people are trying to get something out of these devices often in curious ways but anyways i kind of wanted to see if this she and her the pronouns anyone knows anything about this it's like intentionally subverting a social norm to to to make everyone uncomfortable to make someone uncomfortable and then to learn something from that discomfort right and to learn kind of what the contour of that boundary  super embarrassing and i and i was doing them and i sat down with like the nicest woman like self i'd like self identified midwestern or super polite it's like the end of our interview we had it's like really nice like rapport and i was like feeling all good it kind of exposing some of these latent you know orientations that people have to the device and and and and based on kind of a lot of the same social dimensions and you know  you know relating kind of this you know this this mapping of of really things that we're seeing you know we see play out day to day in in in feel this way and that people are characterizing the devices in this way and and developing expectations and assumptions of these devices in this way from like from gender and ability which i don't have as much in the data here but of the time but like here's google's you know most recent came out like a month ago i'm advertising campaign make google do it so it has a female voice and it's in your home and it doesn't have a female name but you're interacting with it you know one of the the the men i interviewed named pierce he said it about the device he objectified it every single time until the device kind of jumped in the conversation said something and then the next sentence he said she or her because you know right after you hear it makes priming you to think you know to with with this kind of social cue and it's really micro level analysis but but really you know it's it's playing out and so it's kind of emerging status relation develop it's not a surprise and then nick no one else does you know like all of the owners all of the producers saying she and this is what's excuse me getting getting built into interactions some up to try to tie it you know a little bit more concretely to what we're talking about today the voice interface is a really powerful tool and it's it's not only reflecting and mirroring kind of you know the the social issues that we're experiencing day to day but also um in some respects reproducing them in a new way with  with these devices and so here's a quote from that guy pierce i like the female voice better in general i don't know why it's just i feel like all the movies how i imagine the eyes voice i don't have a good reason for it so you know this is a  young white man right who wants a female voice these people that end up like you know like buying these these are kind of what's feeding into the data these companies using design ds not to say it's all the companies you know it's all in the companies but just to say that these kind of platforms and cultural production and  the ways in which data has become a new vehicle for the expansion of capitalism fueling a variety of platforms you've built entire business models around finding new ways to extract more and more value from cultural spaces you know most recently if we think of something like facebook especially you know cambridge analytic and all that it's pretty clear that algorithms and the data that animates them it's opening up new spheres of power and influence that you know beyond being very valuable in the advertising world fundamentally change our relationship to things like music and culture and culture more probably so while they largely come from quantifiable positivistic origins and computer science engineering and the runaway financial world frequently tied to know the tech world algorithms are deeply cultural objects following a working folks observation but the interface layer you interact with on your computer on your mobile phone etc that represents the culmination of everything collecting data data under an illusion of platform utility but also masking the introduction of recomm and engines which use algorithms grounded in this accumulation of data to produce an ever changing network of taste profiles fundamentally changing our relationship to things like taste criticism culture and others all while masking the influence of cultural actors in space so to tie it back to music specifically which is you know my focus as a journalist and as a grad student i think it's hopeful to give a bit of a historical overview on one company that's been you know incredibly successful using bay and others building new wildly popular tools enabled widespread music piracy practically upheaving the record industry and it's model for music as a saleable digital commodity itunes and others were able to negotiate you know pretty unprecedented deals at the time with record labels the record industry of course still saw a huge decline in revenue and as a as an outsider spotify grew out of this specific moment of opportunism seeking to translate the seamless experience of unlimited access through piracy to a new low cost  online so in contrast you know to something like pandora whose music genome project has long since stressed the humanistic side of classification for a while they hired phd musicology students and they were sort of tasked with determining  the sort of music halt music all logical classifications of things like the gender of the lead vocalist the tempo of the chorus the level of distortion on guitars and sort of reducing that to a thirty six page  is captured and recorded in real time so to kind of give you a glimpse of just a small portion of the data that they collect i went on the spotify web api and just scraped a slight amount for this song hey jude interpretation into the platform by design and it also feels worth mentioning specifically that this is built on the back of an advertising engine spotify has of course you know this early days pursued sponsored playlists with a variety of companies in the interest of creating engine to produce the cultural context for music in their system and musicians especially are losing a lot of or just pouring labour and time and work into creating this kind of algorithmic system   if we read music piracy is a kind of universal access at one point on free from centralized ownership and intellectual property litigation we can interpret the ads portage subscription based models of spotify and others as cybernetic extensions into the realm of cultural  production but to return to tikkun the original rise of cybernetics in the wake of world war two mirrors the rise of neoliberal capitalism instituting various methods to control the production of social groups for its own corporate use industrial management they're right after and forty five cybernetics applied capitalism with new infrastructure of machines computers and above all with the intellectual technology that permitted the regulation of the circulation of flows within society making those flows exclusively commodity flows so if we think of and so more to my point with streaming i want to argue that at every point in the spotify ecosystem each layer necessary in the production of culture is now reduced to a cog in a system of cybernetic social control but once represent a diverse variety of scenes subcultures and communities so more broadly than spotify itself much of what's been made of new platform services and the gig economy more broadly is the ways in which they've used the convenience of mobile applications to tap into the latent value of ownership so we're trying to add fins what one he writes in terms of labor and surplus value what the algorithms of uber airbnb and their cohorts capitalized on is the slack infrastructure of modern consumption indy cars unused homes and underemployed people viewed more broadly the interface layer colonization of the quiet backwaters for contemporary capitalism the remobilize ation of goods and spaces after they have already been consumed or deployed so i think it makes sense to extend this critique the cognitive labor of content creation of all types you know whatever your status is on and other platforms i think at each level cultural workers are not only has to break even financially themselves but also forced into this weird messy ever changing agreement with the platform to provide surplus value in exchange for just a simple place in the on the platform  for discussing the relationship between flat form platforms and content creators rather than surplus value alone for creative industries especially platform monopolies extract a cognitive rent as media corporations simply exploit the copyright of artworks that virtually no cost in the reproduction and his reading rent as a parasitic income and owners can just by possessing an asset or net word money and google specifically which is his focus on google places like spotify trying to game the system and and working how deals with record labels places like companies like filter which is now and by sony digster which is now and by warner top safai which is now owned by universal  these these are a way for firms to funnel resources normally gambled on branding publicity and others in the music industry to a more promising playlist in the spotify ecosystem but you know at the same time the sovereign thick layer hasn't been completely conquered and i still think there's a few people working in the space who are particularly attuned to the politics of platforms you know to return to cybernetic hypothesis suggests that there's um there's a potential be like disrupt a cybernetic system which  i think in a lot of readings for people working with machine vision they talk a lot about using like i'm printing on the time but uh yeah this is oh this is to say that platforms are um lastly we have jack webster he'll be talking about taste in the digital age how music how our music streaming services shaping the relationship between taste consumption and class identity jack is a final year phd student at the web science center for doctoral training at the university of southampton jack's research deals with issues relating to how digital platforms are shaping the production and consumption of culture he also has experience working in the recorded music industry conducting research on behalf of major record curated content these transformations advice consider if and how using music streaming services is disrupting the social dynamics of consumption so let's do a quick survey how many of you in the room use a music streaming service  are based on twenty semi strips interviews i conducted with individuals from different class backgrounds my data collection analysis use a narrative approach which aimed to explore the develop of my participants biographies over time and how using streaming i shaped their relationship with music research at the end of this presentation i'm going to limit myself to two contrasting vignettes about how using spotify is shaping how to individuals jamie and sean perform class identity through the consumption of music the story of jamie okay so we've got like five minutes or so for questions would anyone like to start us off you maybe the biggest challenge for spotify is to mediate what they want and mediate what users want immediate what musicians want and they're kind of playing this cat and mouse game trying to make everyone happy but i'm not sure i think that how like tech savvy they were and how like there was so many like you how these people use the device in the same way right or would interact in the same way or had the same kind of like something i'm looking at it's like how transparent or opaque  selected group of people that chose to speak with me so there was that kind of bias playing in something that was really interesting so i like learning those kind of things was right it was it wasn't as much of a comparative studies i thought it was gonna be but was kind of the unique devices can be used for these disease for communities and there was someone at the retirement home who had low vision and couldn't hear that well but had the device read the bible to her every day and and with the alexa voice not with some other  also kept on our arguing about whether or not it was a female or male voice so really it was hard of hearing but was still really commit you know was still really interested in committed to using the device so just kind of the it to some extent the level really of just having a device present or around the level of not true companionship these people cup but just kind of like saying good morning having routines based around it but being there was was more about the ways that they when they're in group settings will you know kind of like whisper who are like serb she's like you know like we're talking about like i'm talking about amazon and like i'll say it quietly so i don't say the name or something so it pops in so that stuff again like all this stuff's on a spectrum of kind of interesting there for interrupting is i don't think right now we're to please tech like from a technical perspective but there's a huge question of whether or not we should be able to interrupt the device or the device should be able to interrupt us r t going by tying in this whole question of gender and assertiveness like along with personality not only what it says and how it says it right the cadence which it says things but also kind of like with turn taking and stuff it's also another  way of there you know there's gender and power dynamics and kind of how we even just have conversations and so barging in is something that i might go back when i'm finished with kind of this research and kind of dig into i'm sure there's way more interesting