Tag: data infrastructure

Digital Assets & Ownership

ucsasa5Leave a comment

In modern life, we consume and interact with digital assets everyday. We save them for later use, like audio and video content on Spotify and YouTube, we even categories our photo albums and share them to our followers and friends. In this post my focus would be mainly expanding on our production of digital assets like this blog, online portfolios, websites, even the photos, videos and audio content that we share and upload onto our profiles in social media platforms and what they mean to us but I will also be looking into ownership of these digital assets and how we can claim ownership of them within the digital platform.

Firstly, it is important to clarify what exactly the definition of a digital asset is. Simply put a digital asset is a “collection of binary data which is self-contained, uniquely identifiable and has a value. To break this down a bit more, binary data differentiates the asset as being digital (i.e. held on a computer system and composed of numerical values which are either zero or one). A digital asset must be uniquely identifiable, otherwise it is not possible to transact upon it. The implication of the word ‘asset’ is that the entity has a value. How much, to whom and how that is expressed are separate considerations, the point is that all digital assets have value” (Windsor, 2017).  

The value of each digital asset is determined by their intrinsic and extrinsic values, which as mentioned above won’t have equal measures. For example a photograph, art or document has the intrinsic value of containing binary data which is used to view visual or textual information; a domain name has unique scarcity and enables the licence holder to direct internet traffic through thier site. Extrinsic value to these assets come from the contextualization of their uses. For content digital assets like photos, metadata are used to categorize and increase the chances of the content be found and hence increasing its value.

However, while you can pay a licensing fee for the right to use stock, when it comes to digital art and photography the big problem for artists is the ease of duplication being made and piracy of original work. It is known that “the link between content and its original author is very difficult to keep” (Pérez‐Solà and Herrera‐Joancomartí, 2019) and once the original content has been duplicated, the value of the digital asset drops significantly, so how can we claim ownership of these contents and our productions in the digital platform? Blockchain, a format commonly used with crypto-currencies like bitcoin, has been employed to introduce digital scarcity for digital art and photography. The format enables artists to issue limited copies which can be traced back to unique blocks proving ownership.

Bailey, J. (2020). The Blockchain Art Market is Here — Artnome. [online] Artnome. Available at: https://www.artnome.com/news/2017/12/22/the-blockchain-art-market-is-here [Accessed 12 Dec. 2019].

Windsor, R. (2017). Defining Digital Assets – Digital Asset News. [online] Digitalassetnews.org. Available at: https://digitalassetnews.org/assets/defining-digital-assets/ [Accessed 10 Dec. 2019].

Pérez‐Solà, C. and Herrera‐Joancomartí, J. (2019). BArt: Trading digital contents through digital assets. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience.

Mackenzie, A. (2005). Untangling the Unwired. Space and Culture, 8(3), pp.269-285.

Amazon Dash Button (2015-2019)

lucranstLeave a comment

In March 2019, Amazon announced that their Amazon Dash Button would be discontinued, almost four years after its launch in summer 2015.

In Amazon’s own words, the Dash was “a Wi-Fi-connected device that reorders your favourite item with the press of a button”. Crudely, they were small, plastic, key fob-like objects, branded for each specific product, with a single button, that when pressed, sent a pre-programmed order to Amazon, to be automatically processed, packaged, dispatched and delivered. Or, as YouTube product reviewer RadRider33 puts, an “IoT Clicky Thingy“

But for those of us that missed out, what did we miss out on, and what would an obituary of the Dash tell us about the way we consume, digital infrastructures and the wider workings of the Internet of Things?

Original image source: Amazon (now removed)

The low-res physical form of the Dash appears to align with its limited functionality. For the user, once connected to Wi-Fi and set up with a specific product and order quantity, the Dash served one purpose: to order more of that product. To help us buy detergent, coffee and toilet paper without “…even hav[ing] to think about it’,’ according to Daniel Rausch, vice president of Amazon’s smart home division. And as long as we didn’t mind a house peppered with logo-mania, the convenience of push-button shopping was worth it.

For Amazon, the benefits were less obvious, and often decoupled from what was officially declared (Easterling 2014).

The Dash secured Amazon a physical presence in a consumer’s home, ensuring return purchases and preventing competition. It also mitigated any risk of items staying in virtual baskets, un-checked-out, by simplifying the task to one action (or as Bruno Latour might suggest, by enforcing the desired program and removing the risk of anti-program (Latour 1991)).

More critically still, every time detergent was ordered, Amazon gained valuable insights, building a data-profile of the consumer’s purchasing behaviours, needs and wants (Greenfield 2017). This, when layered over data harvested from other smart devices, and coupled with that of other users, contributed to a topographical landscape of information resource.

A node in an ever-growing interconnected network of smart devices and systems, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), the Dash offered both the promise of connectivity and intelligence, as well as convenience and simplicity. But just as Adrian Mackenzie describes the “fantasy of the freedom of Wi-Fi” (2005), the promises of IoT too obscure the complex systems and structures it is predicated on and embedded within – the algorithms, privacy violations, environmental impacts, manufacturing standards, supply chains and labour conditions (Latour 1994, Star 1999).

The Dash, and many of its peers, ancestors and descendants in the genealogy of IoT, are less facile push-button, more corporate Trojan horse.

Now, the Dash buttons live digitally, outmoded by Amazon’s own product subscriptions and smarter devices like Alexa and Echo, which, with their wider reach into user data, are even harder to quantify in terms of their role in the IoT, and exploitation of technological opacity in the pursuit of maximum profit (Bridle 2018).

References:

Data infrastructure as normal: how daily passionate internet traffic making is possible

jingyun_wangLeave a comment
Pop singer Jay Chou (left) and  idol Cai Xukun (Source: Imaginechina)

This summer, an intensive internet data traffic war between fans of the famous middle-aged singer Jay Chou and 21-year-old new generation idol Cai Xukun, was happened on a Chinese social media called Weibo (微博). The trigger was the puzzlement by a user over why it is so difficult to get tickets for Chou’s concerts when he didn’t even make it onto Weibo’s Chaohua (Super Topics), which ranks stars according to their “influence”.

Reflections on the abnormal qualities of ‘normal’ infrastructure

The reason lies behind the war is the conflict between the two ideologies. For Cai’s Fans and even some people who are not his fans perceive a belief that data are taken as facts. Specifically, there should be “a foreseeable path” (Houser, 2014: 328): make data as “influence” on Super Topics, change someone’s recognition and knowledge and then produce the popularity in real-world conditions. While for Chou’s Fans, what the user doubt challenges their recognition that data chart is not everything. Because their beliefs are based on their abundant and collective memories created with Chou’s music that accompanies them from teenager to grow-up. There are multi-dimensional narratives to explain his popularity rather than something linear.

Then Chou’s Fans tried to use Cai’s Fans perceived ways to prove how ‘normal’ data infrastructure abnormal. In 4 days, though they achieved success in the end, they also realised making internet traffic is easy but not that “easy”. It needs them to combine basic-level strategy (have command of the rule of making internet traffic), middle-level strategy (learn to make internet traffic efficiently by purchasing Weibo membership or third-party services) and advanced-level strategy (use time strategy to allocate scores properly). They should choose between continuous participation or being overtaken at any time.

Steps to make internet traffic made by Jay chou’s fans

While what Chou’s fans done tried to present a reality that outside Cai’s Fans perceptual and cognitive fields, such “a quiet sea” (Navaro-Yashin, 2003: 121) is still hard to be disturbed. Since Cai’s fans are born in this normal data infrastructure, to deny the data infrastructure is to deny themselves, their existence.

Seeing is believing?

This case prompts us to ask: is seeing believing? On the internet, what we can see are data, graphs and charts, while what we can hardly see are marketing strategies and capital operation, etc. As a result, for some people, the best way to imagine what they can hardly see is to confirm what they can see as a reality by every affective moment: feeling motivated, feeling passionate and feeling deserved.

Reflect on Affect Theory

From my perspective, instead of explaining a phenomenon by using institutional knowledge, Affect Theory emphasize revealing a process of being. Such a process tends to be captured by seizing tiny affective moments. Then the question is, under what conditions can the affective moments be powerful? In Chou-Cai’s Fans case, it might enlighten us that when institutional knowledge can hardly explain the “ordinary” life, affective moments can be the sign to remind us that the normal is abnormal.

References:

Heather, H. (2014). The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations: More than Information Ecstacy? Public Culture, 26(2), pp.319-337.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2003). ‘Life is dead here’: Sensing the political in ‘no man’s land’. Anthropological Theory, 3(1), pp.107-125.

Seigworth, G & Melissa, G. (2010). ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’. Introduction to the Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Linked Resources:

SHINE News. (2019) Jay Chou fans rally to win Internet ‘battle’. Retrieved from: https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/1907238889/

PINGWEST. (2019) Chinese Millennials Are Sick of the Gen Z, They Dethroned A Young Pop Star from Social Network and Instated Their Own Favorite. Retrieved from: https://en.pingwest.com/a/2836