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- Convenors:
-
Donald MacKenzie
(Edinburgh University)
Addie McGowan (University of Edinburgh)
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- Chair:
-
Judy Wajcman
(LSE)
- Format:
- Closed Panel
Short Abstract:
Which digital technologies, standards and protocols prevail and which are sidelined is in a broad sense political, and hugely consequential for socioeconomic transformations. It is a crucial topic for STS. Four closely-related papers will examine how these processes play out in digital platforms.
Long Abstract:
The digital economy is material, and is a material *political* economy. Digital systems and practices can be enacted in different ways, and which technologies, standards and protocols prevail and which are sidelined is, in a broad sense, political, interweaving intimately with wider socioeconomic/sociomaterial transformations. Our four papers empirically address this “material politics” (Law and Mol 2008):
Kevin Mellet focuses on “marketing technologies” used to construct durable links between companies and customers. A customer’s electronic identity is material – "this job is plumbing," says one practitioner – and also sometimes sharply contested. Ways of materially organizing marketing technologies' “plumbing” differ considerably, sometimes highly consequentially so.
Donald MacKenzie examines the “app economy’s” central material feedback loop, which fine-tunes advertising to acquiring app users with high “lifetime value.” Apple, Facebook, Google, and smaller platforms collaborated/competed to construct this loop, which was, however, seriously disrupted by material changes made – in the name of “privacy” – by Apple in 2021.
David Nieborg and Thomas Poell examine how dominant platform companies exercise power and control over the relatively open digital advertising ecosystem, focusing directly on these changes by Apple: its 2021 App Tracking Transparency feature—a privacy setting integrated in the operating system of iOS mobile devices. They demonstrate (1) how control is nested and sits at different layers of the infrastructural “ad stack,” and (2) how different types of data shape the distribution of power in this ecosystem.
Addie McGowan expands the canvas to platforms’ interweaving with the broader sociomaterial world, in her case Airbnb and “destination cities.” To make users productive agents of Airbnb’s business goals, governance mechanisms are designed into its user interface and platform affordances. McGowan’s conversations with hosts (users) and Airbnb engineers (producers) explore the material politics of how this governance is experienced and enacted, shaping destinations digitally and materially.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Kevin Mellet (Sciences Po)
Long abstract:
In recent years, the term martech, an acronym for "marketing technologies", has come to designate a vast array of IT tools and services that businesses use to automate, streamline, and optimize their marketing efforts. From a demand side view, the term “martech stack” today refers to the assembly of software that make up a company's marketing infrastructure. From a supply side view, Martech is, next to AdTech, a representation used to identify and position the range of software technologies and digital services from which corporate marketing departments source their products and organize their marketing and advertising operations. While the AdTech label refers to third party data and digital advertising, Martech is concerned with so-called “first party data”, that is the customer datasetsthat are built and maintained by companies themselves and the related marketing operations.
The thesis defended in the article is that the process of “stack economization”, of which martech offers a perfect illustration, must be inscribed in the long term of organizations, professions, knowledge, and their material and infrastructural devices. Rather than considering martech as a set of technically and commercially accomplished innovations immediately available and operational, but eventually clashing with the human and organizational reality of companies, we must take into account the plurality economization processes, and associated technological frames, that compose the broader martech ecosystem, and the frictions caused by this plurality. From this perspective, I propose to examine martech as linked social worlds, or “linked ecologies”.
Donald MacKenzie (Edinburgh University)
Long abstract:
Drawing on 106 interviews with practitioners of digital advertising, this paper focuses on free-to-play mobile-phone games (e.g. Candy Crush), and their relations to Facebook/Instagram, which are themselves mobile apps. It investigates a crucial feedback loop, which effectively fine-tuned app advertising – especially via Facebook’s machine-learning systems – to acquire users with greatest lifetime value (e.g. big-spending ”whales’).
Apps, though, are programs running on a platform, whose owner potentially possesses a form of Mann’s (1984) “infrastructural power.” Facebook and mobile games thus faced crisis with Apple’s 2021 requirement that apps gain users’ explicit permission for tracking. If users reject tracking (the great majority do), this materially breaks the feedback loop. However, subterranean material-political-economy struggle continues via low-profile but consequential efforts to repair the loop. Hunting for whales has become less precise, but continues.
The paper makes three contributions. First, it develops a “material political economy” approach to the digital economy, highlighting the importance of where, when and how things happen.
Second, although there are burgeoning literatures of app/game studies and on digital advertising, their intersection – advertising in and of apps/games – has been largely neglected (except by, e.g., Nieborg 2017).
Third, a dominant characteristic so far of digital advertising has been the individualization of users. Apple and Google are seeking to reverse this in specific ways, de-individualizing app (and web) users in the name of privacy. The paper will discuss the consequences of this for everyday work in advertising and the public-policy problems it raises.
David B. Nieborg Thomas Poell (University of Amsterdam)
Long abstract:
At its core, app-based advertising is a prototypical two-sided market, connecting a supply- or sell-side (e.g., static display ads or videos on mobile devices) with a demand- or buy- side of corporations and institutions seeking the attention of end- users. Yet, this seemingly simple process of matching the ‘right’ set of eyeballs with a ‘relevant’ ad has spawned a global, data- driven ecosystem. This paper examines how a few large tech companies–most prominently Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple–exercise power and control over this relatively open ecosystem.
It pursues this inquiry through a case study on the 2021 introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature—a privacy setting newly integrated in the operating system of iOS mobile devices. This case study allows us to examine: 1) how infrastructural control is nested and sits at different layers of the ‘ad stack’, and (2) how the mass diffusion of mobile devices has shifted the loci of control in the broader advertising ecosystem.
To understand how ATT reshuffles power relations in the digital advertising ecosystem, we use a mix-methods approach that involves (1) analysis of developer documentation provided by Apple, (2) a review of ongoing litigation, and (3) analysis of financial disclosure forms of two ad- driven platforms Meta and Snapchat.
Addie McGowan (University of Edinburgh)
Long abstract:
Multi-sided platforms like Airbnb require the creation of a balance of users with competing interests, mediating their relationships by affordances that are designed to increase conversions between them. They invite those users to supply diverse inventory in the form of listings, yet standardise that content with tight classification systems. This messy convergence of opposing interests bids Airbnb to govern how users interact with the technology and each other, ultimately shaping their activities to support its business goals. Articulating the ways platforms control usership as a process of “user governance” can help make sense of the practices Airbnb employs to mediate, shape, and manage the relationships of users with each other and the platform.
This paper articulates how Airbnb’s governance is experienced, managed, asserted, and at times, challenged by the users who populate the platform with content. Taking a detailed empirical approach, I put interviews with Airbnb users (hosts) and producers (employees) in conversation with observations from time spent in the platform. I identify two facets of how hosts are governed: 1) by the technical platform and 2) by human relationship labor. A historical consideration of Airbnb’s biography contextualises these material and social mechanisms of governance as ongoing, durable processes that were embedded in the platform to meet its growth imperatives. I frame Airbnb’s governance as the practice of creating an environment in which power can be executed via processes of ordering and control, dispersed throughout and between social interactions between users and the platform.