Two new articles from CAMRI Director Graham Meikle examine platform data and the digital afterlife

CAMRI Director Professor Graham Meikle has published two collaborative journal articles this summer, both appearing in leading international media and communication journals, and both tracing how digital platforms and synthetic media reshape who gets to speak, and on whose terms.

The first, ‘The celebration of exploitation: A case study in platform promotion of users’ data’, is co-authored with Dr Isabelle Higgins of the University of Cambridge and published in New Media & Society. The article analyses more than a decade of annual Insights, or Year in Review, subjecting them to detailed content and discourse analysis. The reports, the company claims, draw on the extensive data captured about every unique visitor to the site each year.

What the analysis reveals is a platform working hard to make its own data extraction look like a public service. Through tone, form and content, the reports legitimise and celebrate a wide range of practices that exploit data gathered from users who, in many cases, have no idea it is being collected. Those practices depend both on the platform’s technical infrastructure and on the wider social media logics of shareability, novelty and comparison that make such reports so readily circulated. The result is a celebratory narrative that sidesteps the complex ethical questions raised by the data underneath it, and a reminder of how much interpretive power platforms hold over the traces their users leave behind.

The second article, ‘”This here is a true representation of who I was”: Synthetic media and the authority of the dead’, is co-written with Professor Johanna Sumiala of the University of Helsinki and published in Media, Culture & Society.

Here the focus shifts to the growing practice of resurrecting the dead through synthetic media, and to the particularly troubling cases in which victims of gun violence are recreated as deepfakes in order to speak again in public. Drawing on the longer histories of manipulated images and of communication with the dead, the article asks what kind of authority such recreations claim, and what it means for the dead to be given new words by the living.

The collaboration brings together complementary expertise. Meikle is the author of Deepfakes and of Social Media: The Convergence of Public and Personal Communication, and has written extensively on remix, visibility and synthetic media. Sumiala is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Helsinki, a media anthropologist whose books include Mediated Death and Media and Ritual, and who has led international research on digital death.

Both projects share an origin story that Graham is keen to highlight.

‘It’s interesting to me that both of these projects were collaborations with people I first met at conferences,’ he says. ‘So it’s perhaps a useful reminder, particularly to colleagues who sometimes question the value of academic conferences, that they’re not just about turning up to give a paper, but also offer opportunities for new connections and collaborations.’

It is a point worth dwelling on at a time when travel budgets are tight and the case for attending conferences is often made purely in terms of dissemination. These two articles suggest a different measure of value. Neither would exist without a conversation that happened alongside the formal programme, and both now sit in journals that will shape how the field thinks about platform power and the digital afterlife.

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash