"The Beatles with the Lower Score, it Breaks my Heart": Framing a Media Education Response to Datafication and Algorithmic Recommendations in Digital Media Infrastructures

Grosman, Jérémy;Jacques, Jerry;Collard, Anne-Sophie
(2022) Learning to Live with Datafication Educational Case Studies and Initiatives from Across the World — ISBN: [9780367683078], p. 236, accepted/in-press

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  • Grosman, JérémyUNamur
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  • Jacques, Jerryorcid-logoUCLouvain
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  • Collard, Anne-SophieUNamur
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Abstract
The digital platforms now mediate most of the actions we take when reading news, watching videos, buying goods, finding ways, chatting people, etc. The growing influence of some, such as Google, Amazon or Facebook, raises both hopes (e.g. freedom, economy, etc.) and concerns (e.g. competition, surveillance, etc.). These tensions propel us to invent better ways to discuss the recent and rapid transformations brought by such platforms. The challenge is, both, to make sense of the main social and technical processes that shape these digital platforms and to design situations in which their consequences become discussible, for anyone concerned. Thus, with the hope of addressing these issues, we sought to bridge recent research led in digital media education, about digital literacy and critical education, as well as in science and technology studies, about engineering practices or digital infrastructures. We decided to focus on the recommender systems at the core of most of these digital platforms. They promise to provide, both, a unique algorithmic technique for enabling users to orient themselves amidst the wealth of available information and a unique business strategy to keep users engaged with the platforms’ contents and advertisements. They need to be approached, both, as technical infrastructures, which foster interactions between specific users and specific items, and as media interfaces, which partly automate the editorial process. The tension between, on the one side, the opaqueness of their functioning due to technical complexity and business confidentiality and, on the other side, the significance of these systems for the information we exchange and the actions we take, need public debate. The educational challenge lies in making sense of how these social and technical dimensions mingle. To address this problem, we devised an educational activity, titled “In the shoes of an algorithm”, that would enable people to understand and critically discuss the problems they thought were raised by recommender systems. The pen-and-paper game (or simulation), designed in close collaboration with two media educators, offered participants the opportunity to think and act like an engineer, designing a recommender system and like an algorithm, following the engineers’ instructions. The shift in perspective would enable participants, we believed, to better reflect on the socio-technical decisions that shape recommender systems and their experience of them – departing, for instance, from more common understandings of privacy issues or technical progress. This chapter presents the results of qualitative analyses of the observed and recorded sessions of the educational activity, in order to account for its educational effects on participants. We draw three main conclusions. Firstly, the analysis shows that the activity succeeded in helping participants to articulate important technical features shared by most recommender systems. Secondly, it show how the educational activity succeeded in enabling participants to critically discuss the social values embedded in the technical infrastructures, even sometimes imagining alternative ways. Thirdly, the overall initiative shows the value of experiential learning approaches for bringing participants to reflect, at one and the same time, about their media practice and digital infrastructures.
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Grosman, J., Jacques, J., & Collard, A.-S. (2022). “The Beatles with the Lower Score, it Breaks my Heart”: Framing a Media Education Response to Datafication and Algorithmic Recommendations in Digital Media Infrastructures. In Luci Pangrazio & Julian Sefton-Green (ed.), Learning to Live with Datafication Educational Case Studies and Initiatives from Across the World (p. p. 236). Routledge. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/223198