Abstract
In media coverage and discussions of politics and public events there is increasing discussion of optics, a term referencing concern with how events and actions are perceived by audiences. However, though this view of optics is reflective of the zeitgeist, it obscures the more historically rooted definition of optics as the study of how light emerges. An optic is a lens through which we see. Optics are the ways light moves, emits, and diffuses. Optics indeed help govern how social life is made visible and seen, in material ways that are commonly obscured or taken for granted. In The Digital Prism Mikkel Flyverbom provides a framework that powerfully links these two definitions of optics—how visibility is managed and what we think we see—to provide a framework for how changes in digital technologies alter the governance of social society.
The central thesis of this book is straightforward: Processes through which information and communication become visible to others are always managed. Concerns with ways organizations negotiate, materialize, and constitute the visibility of their practices are not new in organization studies (see Stohl & Stohl, 2011; Schoeneborn, Kuhn, & Kärreman, 2019). Scholars have noted the ways digital media and associated increases in available data alter the scope, diversity, and volume of information that is potentially visible and the consequences—intentional and unintentional—this has in shifting ways of organizing (Saifer & Dacin, 2021; Zuboff, 2019). Flyverbom argues that the centrality and scale of digital media fundamentally alters expectations and possibilities regarding what we “see, know, and govern” (a triumvirate repeated throughout the book). If what we see is what we get, then those able to effectively manage visibility wield tremendous power. Accordingly, if we direct our attention only to representations of communication, then we risk overlooking the ways that communication visibility is produced.
Flyverbom sets out to challenge what he terms “the transparency formula,” the idea that the solution to questions, criticisms, and demands regarding transparency can be addressed through the provision of more information. Instead, he argues that transparency is always managed, and as such should be understood not as offered or withheld, but instead as negotiated, incomplete, and asymmetrical. When transparency is reconceptualized as an ongoing process of visibility management, as opposed to a state, it opens up questions regarding who has the means to govern what we see and how behaviors are concealed or exposed. The metaphor of the digital prism is not merely evocative, but instructive in calling scholars to describe the ways visibility is always mediated, that what we see is always obscured, obfuscated, or altered in some way. Efforts to study ways technology manages communicative presentations commonly invoke Goffman’s dramaturgical framework (Ringel, 2019), adopting an analytical vocabulary of copresence, discrete moves, and a material front- and backstage. However, as Pinch (2010, p. 409) notes in describing our need to transcend the false dichotomy of online and offline worlds, interactions are always “materially and technologically framed, staged, and mediated.” Flyverbom argues that this mediation, made manifest through processes of visibility management, merits its own program of study.
The first chapter reminds readers that although digital media allows actors to engage in communicative activity that was previously impossible, the terms of production and distribution of this communication are largely subject to the rules or restrictions of private technology companies. The result is an ecosystem in which the more users of digital media engage with platforms, the more they are ceding the management of visibilities to others. Digital infrastructures are different from physical structures in that they are more dynamic and designed specifically to both sustain information access and support the production and use of ever-increasing information. Because the platforms through which we view information are designed for ongoing optimization, the primary concern is not with providing a complete or unbiased representation of data (i.e., what is perceived by users as information), but rather with practices of data sorting and categorization that provide some benefit to the organization making information visible (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2020). We take for granted that when we use a search engine, an online encyclopedia, or news site, we will have access to relevant information, but Flyverbom discusses how these everyday acts are intensely value-laden processes in which choices have been made regarding what is seen.
Chapter 2 seeks to introduce a new analytical vocabulary that centers visibility management and encourages us not to merely accept existing states of visibility as inevitable, inherent, or determined. This framework highlights visibility management as a means by which power is both exercised and resisted, and differences in the ability to manage visibilities shape power imbalances. Visibility is treated as the root affordance of organizing, materializing the main ways in which our action possibilities are expanded, and the use of digital technologies as the central means by which we experience and enact these possibilities. This analytical frame offers a reconceptualization of transparency, not as information that is made available, but rather as a communicative phenomenon in which choices are made and actions are taken in an effort to perform something to others. This vocabulary replaces binaries of presence and absence with a focus on ordering that examines how transparency is managed and administered. Transparency is performed such that it doesn’t exist in opposition to power, but serves in and of itself as an exercise of power. Transparency is not provided or withheld, but exists in multiple directions that are “asymmetric and strategic” (p. 56).
Chapter 3 engages with the pervasive tension that exists between people’s desire to share and access communication and the desire to control the privacy and ownership of personal information. Flyverbom recognizes the double bind users of digital technologies confront. Individuals increasingly have opportunities to manage their digital presence; however, at the same time, every digital action makes visible other forms of data and information that may never be known to users. And it is this visibility of human activity, in the form of information only available to entities with the means and resources to access it, that makes individuals quantifiable and turns social activity into a commodity (Zuboff, 2019).
Communication in today’s digital world is reimagined as an exercise in curation in which actors make choices about what they make visible and to whom, and observers make assessments about those choices—often acting with dubious assumptions about the intent of the other party. For example, Flyverbom notes the rise of cybervetting, a modern digital dance where employers surreptitiously browse the online activity of prospective employees, and potential applicants, aware of this surveillance, create fake, hidden, or flattering accounts to portray themselves favorably. These competing efforts at curations are influenced by technical skills and digital literacy, conferring advantages to those with the knowledge and resources to engage in more rigorous forms of management.
Chapter 4 addresses the demands and expectations for transparency faced by contemporary organizations, and how this transparency is often evaluated in terms of the volume of information shared. Some organizations are pushed to be transparent by governments, regulators, or activists, whereas others profess that transparency is part of their organizing ethos. This performative valuing of transparency is most prominent among technology companies who simultaneously evangelize transparency as a societal good, while holding tightly to secrets and intellectual property related to how they govern and utilize information. Flyverbom argues that in championing the value of transparency these organizations center themselves as sources, arbiters, and essential tools for processes of visibility management. By setting the terms and context of what is seen, managed visibility is positioned as constitutive of organizational culture. But the book also describes a potentially insidious side of treating transparency as an organizational value in that pushing back against the revealing of information becomes more difficult. When treated as a value, transparency becomes prioritized, and any concealment is seen as driven by nefarious motives.
Chapter 5 pulls our analytical lens back further by discussing the inherent link between transparency and societal development. The constant production of globally distributed information provokes questions about what we should share, and what should be held back. This, in turn, invites debate about how best to monitor transparency efforts and how to keep organizations and institutional actors accountable. Governance, in the formal sense of nation-state policies and the informal sense of determining the rights and legitimacy of social actors, increasingly involves the use of algorithms in making decisions as diverse as who is released from prison, who is granted a loan, or who receives healthcare treatment. Flyverbom argues that we lack a vocabulary to assess ways algorithms order information and visibility. As scholars, we know that when we lack words to describe a phenomenon, it’s more likely we will underestimate its far-reaching consequences. Current discourses regarding transparency follow a problematically rational belief that providing more insight into the operation of algorithms will help address related social problems; it is the digital equivalent of looking under the hood of the car and thinking we can credibly evaluate the quality of a vehicle. If you are a trained mechanic that might be useful, but otherwise you are likely to walk away with little insight and the misleading belief the owner has nothing to hide.
There is always a danger in building a scholarly argument around a metaphor—that the comparison will be stretched too far, treated as all-encompassing, and lose its meaning. However, the goal of the digital prism framework is not to explain why information is more or less visible, but to direct our attention to which questions to ask about processes of transparency, visibility, and disclosure. Invoking the prism is incredibly useful in describing processes of managing visibility because the mediation of communication both exists naturally through sociomaterial conditions, and it can be wielded strategically or inadvertently to filter and negotiate what we see.
Though not an explicit focus of the book, the perspective advanced, and vocabulary developed, in The Digital Prism complements contemporary critical organizational studies that question power structures as given and reflect upon ways information is used to reinforce dominant ideologies. Flyverbom largely eludes judgments regarding the value of managed visibilities, positioning our focus on transparency as both driver and product of a sociomaterial context that makes information abundant and access attainable. However, there is a consistent recognition that those with the resources and positionality to manage visibilities are not only imbued with greater power than others, but also incentivized to pursue efforts to retain that power (Noble, 2018). One potential limitation of adopting an analytical vocabulary that centers on visibility management is that it risks treating actors as more agential or strategic than they are in practice. Questions of curation or management are predicated on assumptions of a certain thoughtfulness and intent that may not exist in a world where digital communication becomes routinized and mundane. However, the framework Flyverbom presents is equally relevant in contexts where actors have explicit, overt goals for making information visible or invisible, or environments where actors have no distinct plan for how they are seen or by whom.