Abstract
Amid a wave of critical scholarship of datafication, Mark Andrejevic’s new book, Automated Media, stands out as an exemplary theoretical critique of the fantasies of automation, starting with total-information capture and control. Even if these are never more than fantasies, they become effective in driving concerted efforts across corporate and government actors to collect and store all human activity which can be rendered into data points for later analysis, argues Andrejevic. The work of information capture presents a process of de-socializing and de-contextualizing of information to make way for automated media. Andrejevic describes current developments in data capture in terms of a cascading logic of automation: Once massive amounts of data are automatically collected, we need automated processing and measures of analysis to begin making sense of them, and automated decision-making and response to feed data-based insights back into the social world. All with possibly devastating consequences for human autonomy and subjectivity. Hence, automation is deeply political.
In the book, Andrejevic develops a coherent and productive theoretical framework of automation bias, nodding to Innis’ classic work on media and civilization. The bias of automation is examined and conceptualized in terms of operationalism and framelessness, pre-emption and environmentality, and linked to ‘an epistemological break’ that displaces social processes of knowledge production with machinic, posthuman ones (p. 30). This framework elaborates an initial invocation of the concepts in an article on automating surveillance (Andrejevic, 2019).
The framework of automation bias is applied and further substantiated through four consecutive analytically oriented chapters, each evolving around a set of core societal challenges and dilemmas. Chapter 3, on automated culture, deals with a cornerstone of democratic societies, namely the production of knowledge and opinion through informed and communal deliberation. In a reality of automated content curation, politics turns into a consumerist venture where civic judgement and communal culture, including the ability to take the perspective of the other, are eroded, we are told, with reference to filter bubbles, information glut and neo-liberal sociality. Chapter 4 deals with pre-emptive and surveillance capacities enabled by automated media, and here, Andrejevic turns his focus to predictive policing; in chapter 5 readers are presented with sensor-based data capture and smart cities as Andrejevic expands his discussion of the Foucauldian notion of environmentality, to account for the emergent forms of control and governance of urban living. Chapter 6 evolves around the aesthetics of framelessness in discussing virtual and augmented reality technologies as offering forms of representation and narrative based on fantasies of total information awareness. In the final chapter, ‘Automating Desire’, Andrejevic unpacks what he sees as the reconfiguration of subjectivity in automated media. Each of the analytical chapters, with their carefully selected and at surface highly different examples, points to similar fantasies of automation. And they undergird a convincingly argued critique of how automation presents severe threats of hollowing out subjectivity, spontaneity and intention –, the stuff that makes us human. This book is an immensely rich, comprehensive contribution to theorizing the current fetish of automation in society.
Reference
Andrejevic M (2019) Automating surveillance. Surveillance & Society 17(1–2): 7–13.