Six - Media: Telling Stories

Summary

The stories we tell about technology are important. The legitimacy of the process of trustification is built on stories of quantification, extraction and power. These stories are spread by states, companies and academia, but they find their expression repeated, performed and measured in the media.

Narratives and discourses mediate and are mediated by technology companies and platforms. They are performed on platforms about platforms. From persistent forms such as the press, advertising and film to each new social media company, media act as the stage and frame for constituting our collective discourse of technology. Measured in clicks, likes and shares – or on a different level in reach, ad revenue and market share – trust is extracted in and through media. Narratives are built and challenged around the conflicting and shifting loci of trust in media assemblages. The apparent depoliticization of quantified trust belies the highly political nature of the way such systems render trust little more than a metaphor for operationalizing the engagement of populations to legitimize power. Every minute spent scrolling performs the conditions of trust in media regardless of whether trust even enters the equation.

Examples of these shifting narratives are everywhere, each one contributing to the constituting of wider discourses of technological solutionism in different ways, in different contexts, to different audiences. Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia (2021) write of the differences in power and privilege that can transform the perception of surveillance technologies into both a tool of oppression used against the marginalized or a luxury item for the wealthy. Devices that collect obscene amounts of personal data are repackaged as high-end consumer items desirable for features that would rightly scare others, all based on the perception of branding and media that justifies the costs (both financial and social).

Even when companies like Apple make grand gestures about user privacy, it comes at a cost few can afford and still places data into the hands of that one trusted luxury brand. The same technologies are felt differently by different groups. Embedded within sociotechnical systems and discourses, these affective qualities create wildly unequal effects. A 2009 Apple iPhone advert popularized the phrase that whatever you need, ‘there's an app for that’. The way this became trivialized as a joke conceals the combination of lifestyle, brand and utility narratives that normalize a data economy as the dominant understanding of complex informational ecosystems.