By translating observations into numbers, quantification provides opportunities for new and important insights about the world and objects of interest. But as with any translation, making entities and phenomena countable means also losing some of their features. Quantification makes some things visible, while hiding others. To better understand this process, we have to examine how things become numbers, we have to examine measurement.

Data are crucial for the discussion of politics and digital media. Understanding the core concepts and issues arising from the quantification of social and political life and the resulting data is important for engaging in many of the subsequent controversies of the uses of digital media in politics. Digital media, devices, and sensors collect data documenting the world, society, and human behavior. This has been seen by some as a measurement revolution, providing many new avenues for the social sciences as well as new business opportunities in the economy. Perceived potentials and dangers in the increases in the volume and breadth of coverage of digital data are broadly discussed, but it is also important to examine how these new data sources relate to the social or behavioral phenomena they supposedly cover. New data riches have to be translated into meaningful measures of phenomena of interest and society.

In this episode, we will discuss core issues arising from the quantification of social and political life. Following this, we will discuss opportunities and limitations of big data.

Script: http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/data.html

Unterschiedliche Sozialwissenschaften stehen vor einer geteilten Aufgabe:

Wie können wir den digitalen Wandel und den Wandel durch das Digitale in Journalismus und politischer Kommunikation abbilden und wie können wir die zugrundeliegenden Dynamiken und Effekte erklärbar machen?

In dieser Episode diskutiere ich einige der damit verbundenen Herausforderungen und Ansätze wie sich das Feld gemeinsam dieser Aufgabe stellen kann.

Skript:
https://andreasjungherr.net/2022/10/04/keynote-digitaler-wandel-im-kaleidoskop-der-sozialwissenschaft 

The public arena is a crucial element of democratic societies, linking communication to political competition and democratic representation. It comes as no surprise then to find that the concept has inspired massive research activity. The digital transformation of the public arena has featured very prominently in recent research. The diversity of interests, approaches, and methods in studies on the contemporary digitally extended public arena mirrors the richness of the concept and its related areas.

To get a better sense of different approaches by which to examine the contemporary public arena empirically, we now turn to three studies that address related questions.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:21 - The public arena examined
01:44 - Limits to attention
07:19 - Digital shaping of behavior
13:23 - Contesting narratives
19:36 - The contemporary public arena
24:16 - Conclusion

Script:

http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/public_arena.html#the-public-arena-examined

This includes sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube that allow people and competitors within the public arena to publish information and to reach large audiences. But this also includes companies that provide the means for people to run their own sites contributing information and commentary to the public arena. This includes services that allow the comparatively cheap hosting of sites or Apps - like Amazon Web Services - allowing people to run their own sites. Or services that provide them with the opportunity to monetize information or services - like PayPal or Patreon. Also services facilitating the hosting of digital ads contribute to the digital extension of the public arena. Digital ads contribute to the monetization of sites by allowing the owner to host ads and get payed for impressions and clickthroughs. They also support the new structures by allowing their owners to run ads themselves and create easy access points to their sites and information on sites like Facebook, Google, or Twitter, where their information might otherwise not have been able to reach an interested public.

These new structures are important for the new digitally extended public arena. But in their characteristics they deviate from structures that formerly hosted the public arena, news media, and follow different rules. This raises challenges in developing normative goals and binding governance rules assuring their contribution to the public arena strengthens instead of weakens it.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:20 - Digital structures of the public arena
02:21 - Responsibilities of digital structures for the public arena
10:08 - Algorithmic shaping of user behavior in the public arena
17:12 - Geopolitics of digital structures
24:32 - Conclusion

Script:

http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/public_arena.html#digital-structures-of-the-public-arena

From the eighteenth century onward, news media have been crucial structures hosting the public arena in Western societies. They provided information, made elites visible to publics, and publics visible to elites and to each other. In this, they never functioned without fault or were completely free from power structures in society. Their role, beneficial and detrimental, in hosting the public arena and serving democracy over time and in different countries has been well established. But for our purposes here, we will focus on three features of news media that matter strongly for the contemporary public arena: 

• The role of news media as an institution; 
• The economic foundations of news; and 
• The emergence of alternative news media in the public arena.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:22 - News media as structures of the public arena
01:14 - News media as institutions
09:23 - Economic foundations of the news
16:23 - Alternative news media in the public arena
23:24 - Conclusion

Script:

http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/public_arena.html#news-media-as-structures-of-the-public-arena

The digital transformation of the public arena is one of the most important challenges democratic societies face today. Associated opportunities and hopes, but also dangers and fears, feature prominently in public discussions. In this and the following three episodes, we will discuss the public arena, its democratic functions, and challenges introduced by digital media. This discussion is just getting started, so be prepared to leave with more questions than answers.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:22 - The public arena
03:32 - The public arena defined
11:06 - The functions of the public arena for democracy
14:46 - Visibility and representation
17:22 - Group formation
18:52 - Problem solving
21:54 - Conclusion

Script:

http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/public_arena.html#the-public-arena

We have talked extensively about how digital media enable challenges to institutions. But of course this alone does not guarantee their success. Yes, digital media might help identify and document the weaknesses of institutions, their crises and conflicts. They might help challenges to form, being brought forward, and reach a broad public. But success of challenges is of course not determined by these opportunities alone. Instead, success relies on various context conditions and their specific structural embeddedness.  The other question, we repeatedly ran into was how to assess challenges. As we have seen, some challenges might be judged as strengthening democracy and empowering people, while others might achieve the opposite. Now, how can we as researchers adress this question? Without of course attributing the challenges we happen to sympathize with strengthening effects and those we dislike detrimental effects.  We will focus on these two questions in the final part of this episode.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:19 - Challenges reexamined
01:25 - How challenges fail
07:00 - How to judge the legitimacy of challenges?
13:09 - Understanding the role of digital media in the challenge to institutions
17:27 - Conclusion

Script:

http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/challenge.html#challenges-reexamined

We see parties being challenged all over Western democracies. The analytical tools discussed above help us in charting and analyzing these challenges. These tools are:  - crisis and conflict in intermediary institutions, and - emergence of new parties or factions within parties adapted to the new opportunities provided by lowered information and coordination costs.  In this episode, we will apply these tools to better understand the challenge to parties.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:18 - Crisis, conflict, and the digital challenge to parties
00:49 - Signs of crisis and conflict of parties as institutions
07:49 - Challenge through information
14:02 - Challenge through coordination
19:47 - Conclusion

Script:

http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/challenge.html#crisis-conflict-and-the-digital-challenge-to-parties

Democracies depend on structures that connect governments, political elites, and the public. They facilitate information flows between different actors and different societal levels in democracies. Institutions like political parties, interest groups, and the news media make publics visible to elites, elites visible to publics, and publics visible to each other. They enable information flows making visible or allowing for the social construction of concerns, grievances, and interests of publics to elites and governments, while making elites and governments visible and - within bounds - transparent to the public. In this function, they provide, aggregate, and filter information.

These institutions find themselves increasingly challenged by digital media enabled actors. In this episode, we discuss the mechanisms behind these challenges.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:20 - Intermediary institutions and the flow of information in democracies
09:52 - Lowered costs of information production, distribution, and access
14:50 - Lowered coordination costs
20:52 - Conclusion

Script:

http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/challenge.html#how-do-digital-media-drive-the-challenge-of-institutions