Kuvaus
If nationalism was imagined with print capitalism (Anderson, 1983), and media technologies are ”extensions of man [sic!]” that create a new environments (McLuhan 1967), how does the contemporary media environment condition, enable and restrict possibilities of imagining communities, belonging and exclusion?The paper explains how the contemporary, commodified media environment has had a profound impact in the increasing of polarization and related growth of nationalist populism, spread of conspiracy theories and the erosion of trust in Western democracies since the development of social media. As well documented by previous research, the so-called hybrid media environment (cf. Chadwick 2013; Sumiala et al. 2018, Valaskivi 2022) is transnational and -local, blurs genre boundaries and production practices, consists of data-collecting reversed tools (Couldry & Hepp 2016, Valaskivi 2022), prioritizes emotional and even provocative contents as well as creates content confusion (Einstein 2016, Valaskivi 2022). These are features that enable efficient spread of disinformation and contribute to the erosion of trust.
Using the empirical case of how commercial image recognition services provided by Amazon, Google and Microsoft categorize images on religion, the paper describes how algorithmic and self-learning AI-based systems have become a part of our meaning making environment. The paper demonstrates how the services “see” the world in ways that align with identitarian, Christianist and civilisationist populist movements (Brubaker 2017), representing the world as secular, religion as Christian, and Christianity as White and European. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the properties of the commodified, increasingly automated meaning-making environment is likely to contribute to the spread of distrust and alienation in ways that can further threaten the legitimacy of democratic governments and lead into increasingly populist and even totalitarian trends. There is an urgent need to imagine and put in place regulations, alternative technologies and social practices that can reverse these trajectories.
| Aikajakso | 12 tammik. 2024 |
|---|---|
| Tapahtuman otsikko | Conference on Media, Religion and Nationalism: Fire on the mountain |
| Tapahtuman tyyppi | Konferenssi |
| Sijainti | Boulder, Yhdysvallat (USA), ColoradoNäytä kartalla |
| Tunnustuksen arvo | Kansainvälinen |