This book offers an in-depth academic discourse on the convergence of AI, digital platforms, and popular culture, in order to understand the ways in which the platform and cultural industries have reshaped and developed AI-driven algorithmic cultural production and consumption. At a time of fundamental change for the media and cultural industries, driven by the emergence of big data, algorithms, and AI, the book examines how media ecology and popular culture are evolving to serve the needs of both media and cultural industries and consumers. The analysis documents global governments’ rapid development of AI-relevant policies and identifies key policy issues; examines the ways in which cultural industries firms utilize AI and algorithms to advance the new forms of cultural production and distribution; investigates change in cultural consumption by analyzing the ways in which AI, algorithms, and digital platforms reshape people’s consumption habits; and examines whether governments and corporations have advanced reliable public and corporate policies and ethical codes to secure socio-economic equality. Offering a unique perspective on this timely and vital issue, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in media studies, communication studies, anthropology, globalization studies, sociology, cultural studies, Asian studies, and science and technology studies (STS).

This open access book aims to set an agenda for research and action in the field of Digital Humanism through short essays written by selected thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including computer science, philosophy, education, law, economics, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. This initiative emerged from the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the associated lecture series. Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationships between people and machines in digital times. It acknowledges the potential of information technology. At the same time, it points to societal threats such as privacy violations and ethical concerns around artificial intelligence, automation and loss of jobs, ongoing monopolization on the Web, and sovereignty. Digital Humanism aims to address these topics with a sense of urgency but with a constructive mindset. The book argues for a Digital Humanism that analyses and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind toward a better society and life while fully respecting universal human rights. It is a call to shaping technologies in accordance with human values and needs.

A book at the intersection of data science and media studies, presenting concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture--the billions of photographs shared on social media every day, the hundreds of millions of songs created by twenty million musicians on Soundcloud, the content of four billion Pinterest boards? In Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. Drawing on more than a decade of research and projects from his own lab, Manovich offers a gentle, nontechnical introduction to the core ideas of data analytics and discusses the ways that our society uses data and algorithms.

This book brings together the work of historians and sociologists with perspectives from media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and information studies to address the origins, practices, and possible futures of contemporary machine learning. From its foundations in 1950s and 1960s pattern recognition and neural network research to the modern-day social and technological dramas of DeepMind’s AlphaGo, predictive political forecasting, and the governmentality of extractive logistics, machine learning has become controversial precisely because of its increased embeddedness and agency in our everyday lives. How can we disentangle the history of machine learning from conventional histories of artificial intelligence? How can machinic agents’ capacity for novelty be theorized? Can reform initiatives for fairness and equity in AI and machine learning be realized, or are they doomed to cooptation and failure? And just what kind of “learning” does machine learning truly represent? We empirically address these questions and more to provide a baseline for future research. Chapter 2 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

In this book, Goriunova offers a critical analysis of the processes that produce digital culture. In order to understand these processes, the author introduces the concept of the art platform, a specific configuration of creative passions, codes, events, individuals and works that are propelled by cultural currents and maintained through digitally native means. Goriunova provides a new means of understanding the development of cultural forms on the Internet, placing the phenomenon of participatory and social networks in a conceptual and historical perspective, and offering powerful tools for researching cultural phenomena overlooked by other approaches.

This book focuses on the intelligent technologies that are transforming creative practices and industries. The future of creative work will be more complicated than “the robots will take our jobs.” The workplace is becoming increasingly hybridized, with human and computational labor complementing each other. Some economic roles for the former will no doubt fade over time, while new roles are created to produce artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies and implementations for productivity. New tools for the generation and personalization of content across platforms will be as ubiquitous as the automation of repetitive tasks in content creation workflows. Cultural conceptions of what it means to be a creative worker will necessarily change as a result of these transformations in human-machine labor. The volume covers the possibilities of humans and robots developing collegial relationships, creative cybernetics as machines and artists become co-creators of art, the reconcentration of corporate power as AI transforms the music industry, the rhetoric of algorithm-driven cultural production in streaming media and how artisans provide a model of counter-hegemony to automation processes. Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists and the general reading public, will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions posed by creative labor and industry research from communication, philosophy, robotics, media, music and the creative arts, informatics, information science, and computer science and engineering.