Browsing by Author "Salter LA"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Assessing Digital Threats to Democracy, and Workable Solutions: A Review of the Recent Literature
    (USC Annenberg Press, 2020-04) Kuehn KM; Salter LA
    Concerns surrounding the threats that digital platforms pose to the functioning of Western liberal democracies have grown since the 2016 U.S. election. Yet despite a preponderance of academic work in this area, the precise nature of these threats, empirical solutions for their redress, and their relationship to the wider digital political economy remain undertheorized. This article addresses these gaps with a semisystematic literature review that identifies and defines four prominent threats—fake news, filter bubbles/echo chambers, online hate speech, and surveillance—and constructs a typology of “workable solutions” for combating these threats that highlights the tendency to silo technical, regulatory, or culturally embedded approaches.
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    Communication Inequality and the Technopolitical Structure of Platform Work: Aotearoa New Zealand Platform Workers During COVID-19
    (University of Southern California, 2024-01-30) Salter LA; Dutta MJ
    Drawing on the culture-centered approach (CCA), we conducted 25 in-depth interviews with Aotearoa New Zealand rideshare and delivery drivers, demonstrating how the technopolitical structure of platform work intensified communication inequality, and resultingly, precarity, during the COVID-19 crisis. Although literature has recognized that the platform has become the place of employment, less researched is how this makes it the place of information distribution, handing power to the platform operators, while contributing to the precarity of platform workers. The concept of communication inequality has been underapplied to considering the intersections between the structure of platform work and worker precarity. A thematic analysis concentrates on 4 key themes linked to the centralization of information flows through the platform architecture: information restriction, indirect management, unilateral term-setting, and accentuated precarity. We conclude by arguing for more research on platform work from a communication perspective that foregrounds the voices of workers.
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    Digital Threats to Democracy. Literature Review Part 1: Threats and Opportunities
    (8/05/2019) Salter LA; Kuehn K; Berentson-Shaw J; Elliott M
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    Digital Threats to Democracy. Literature Review Part 2: Solutions
    (8/05/2019) Kuehn K; Salter LA; Berentson-Shaw J; Elliott M
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    #IamMetiria: A qualitative case study of agonistic welfare policy debates on Twitter
    (2022-08-01) Salter LA
    #IAmMetiria began on Twitter in July 2017, after a speech by New Zealand Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei, challenging political consensus on welfare policy. Turei confessed she lied to authorities in the 1990s, prompting a flood of supportive posts. Soon after, right-wing oppositional tweets were posted (n = 288) contesting the arguments of Turei and her supporters, and left-wing responses to those arguments (n = 214). Drawing on Mouffe’s dissensual model, this article undertakes a close, qualitative analysis of those 502 tweets, in order to move towards a method for empirically distinguishing between antagonistic and agonistic tweets, identifying the latter as putting forward arguments which can be identified by the researcher and potentially engaged with by ideologically opposed adversaries. The results show a majority of the tweets were agonistic, with implications for the future study of social media policy debates and for the online practices of scholars.
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    'Just doing their job?' Journalism, online critique and the political resignation of Metiria Turei
    (SAGE Publications, 18/03/2019) Phelan S; Salter LA
    Abstract When Metiria Turei resigned as co-leader of the Green party of Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2017, there was clear disagreement about the role played by journalism in her resignation. The controversy began after Turei confessed to not disclosing full information to the authorities about her personal situation as a welfare recipient in the 1990s. Journalists insisted they were simply ‘doing their job’ by interrogating Turei’s story, while online supporters accused the media of hounding her. This article examines the media politics of the controversy by putting Carlson’s concept of metajournalistic discourse into theoretical conversation with Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, especially their concept of antagonism. We explore what the case says about traditional journalistic authority in a media system where journalism is increasingly vulnerable to online critique from non-journalists.
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    Less talk, more action (Re)Organising universities in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (2023-01-01) Simpson AB; Salter LA; Roy R; Oldfield LD; Simpson ADJ
    Despite the growing size of the academic precariat in the tertiary sector, this exploited group of workers lacks a voice in either their universities or their national union. In this article we draw on our experiences of transitioning from a small activist group to a broader research collective with influence and voice, while forging networks of solidarity. Through reflecting on developing the Precarious Academic Work Survey (PAWS), we explore how action research is a viable way of structurally and politically (re)organising academic work. We argue that partnering with changemakers such as unions as co-researchers disrupts their embedded processes so that they may be (re)politicised towards pressing issues such as precarity. Further, we highlight how research can be used as a call to action and a tool to recruit powerful allies to collaborate on transforming universities into educational utopias.
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    The algorithmic big Other: using Lacanian theory to rethink control and resistance in platform work
    (2023-01-01) Salter LA; Dutta MJ
    Despite burgeoning literature on platform work, there has been a lack of scholarship which carefully considers what we mean by the terms control and (particularly) resistance in the context of algorithmic management. This article draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to take a step back and interrogate what exactly we mean by these terms in a setting where increasingly the entity being resisted against is an artificially intelligent machine. This approach offers a nuanced way of thinking through the subjective effects of having an algorithm as a boss, and we argue for its benefits and applicability in the age of the algorithmic episteme. Through the key concept of the Algorithmic big Other, we update Lacan’s classic concept to consider what happens when the Other no longer articulates master signifiers through discourse. What we term collective hysterical resistance, aimed at creating spaces for new forms of knowledge and subjectivity, should re-orient towards enlarging the incomputable, the blind spot of the algorithmic episteme.