Systemic Bias

Algorithms and Society

Michael Filimowicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032002576
• eBook ISBN: 9781000575828
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Systemic Bias: Algorithms and Society looks at issues of computational bias in the contexts of cultural works, metaphors of magic and mathematics in tech culture, and workplace psychometrics.

The output of computational models is directly tied not only to their inputs but to the relationships and assumptions embedded in their model design, many of which are of a social and cultural, rather than physical and mathematical, nature. How do human biases make their way into these data models, and what new strategies have been proposed to overcome bias in computed products?

Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists, and the general reading public will find a multidisciplinary approach to inquiry into algorithmic bias encompassing research from Communication, Art, and New Media.

1From “Diversity” to “Discoverability”Platform Economy, Algorithms and the Transformations of Cultural Policies

Christophe Magis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003173373-1

In a recent article in The Economist, one reads:

An irony of European integration is that it is often American companies that facilitate it. Google Translate makes European newspapers comprehensible, even if a little clunky, for the continent’s non-polyglots. American social-media companies make it easier for Europeans to talk politics across borders. […] Now Netflix and friends pump the same content into homes across a continent, making culture a cross-border endeavour, too.¹

The columnist, who further portrays European executives and politicians as conservative fighters for cultural sovereignty who need to oppose American cultural hegemony, does not find it relevant to mention how the American giants at the core of the platform economy such as Google, Facebook or Amazon have short-changed the EU countries enormous sums in tax avoidance for this so-called aid. Furthermore, while cultural platforms such as Netflix could be said to have encouraged cultural change more than politicians themselves, their algorithmic systems of recommendation are leading to major transformations in cultural policy. This chapter focuses on such a transformation in the French-speaking world. Whereas France and Québec have been active defenders of “diversity” in negotiations between the supranational institutions and in their own domestic policies, they have recently collaborated in the shift towards “discoverability”. Based on an analysis of the scholarly literature and official reports from national and supranational institutions, this chapter retraces the history of semantic shifts in cultural policy from “cultural exceptionalism” and “diversity” to “discoverability”, and demonstrates that this movement, primarily dictated by a pragmatic reaction to the importance that algorithms have acquired in cultural life, has huge consequences on the sociopolitical and socioeconomic levels. This shift can also be analyzed in correlation with the general decline in the critical theory underlying cultural policies.

“Cultural diversity”: academic and institutional history of a polysemic notion

The theme of cultural diversity has been given place of honor in political discourse on culture over the last 20 years, especially since it was proposed by supranational institutions such as UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) or the EU.² It has also been a central category in academic discourse, in many works on culture, media and communications. Indeed, as Tristan Mattelart (2011, 29) writes, “the notion of ‘cultural diversity’ appears to be self-evident. How could one be against the pluralism it implies”? But the author also points out how polysemic the term is, problematic in that it is exploited by divergent political agendas and opposing theoretical projects. This first section studies this polysemy through the analysis of its adoption in both academic and institutional discourse.

The threat posed by globalization for the cultural autonomy of many Third World countries—in particular newly independent states—has been the subject of several critical studies since the late 1960s, especially in the political economy of communication, alongside issues concerning the growing concentration of media ownership (see Magis 2020 for an overview). Drawing on several critical—usually Marxian—concepts, these studies have advocated the development of national or regional media policies to help such countries develop their own offer in a situation of unequal exchange (Emmanuel 1972) and avoid cultural homogenization (Schiller 1970, 1976; A. Mattelart 1976). More generally, they have also argued for stronger cultural industries and media regulation. It was only when the UN finally addressed the theme of the globalization of culture (beginning in the mid-1970s) that the notion of “cultural diversity” was defined.

Such relative institutionalization has led to further analysis and a broadening of theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, the notion of “cultural diversity” has legitimized other critical works on cultural dependency (notably concerning television and cinema). For example, in a 1974 report, Kaarle Nordenstreng and Tapio Väris observe how much “national” television programs consist mainly of imports from the US, especially for entertainment (Nordenstreng and Väris 1974; see also A. Mattelart, Delcourt, and M. Mattelart 1984). Subsequently, some authors have endorsed policies in favor of safeguarding “national sovereignty” in communication (Nordenstreng and Schiller 1979) or “cultural autonomy” (Hamelink 1983). On the other hand, “diversity” has also become the category in which these works have been contested, in particular by postmodernist theorists. While culture has tended to become a profitable sector of investment for the capital of investors from developed countries, postmodernist studies and reports have assimilated voluntarist and autonomist cultural policies to a protectionist nationalism leading to a more impoverished cultural offer (e.g., Pool 1977). Furthermore, a change of perspective occurred in the 1980s: the idea that cultural diversity was produced through the consumption of (global) cultural commodities. As T. Mattelart (2011, 26) observes, this change of perspective is largely associated with the development of scholarly work on television. Such discourses have aimed at countering the threat that a transnational circulation of cultural products poses to national and cultural identities by examining how the reception of the same cultural program can be regionally “diverse”:

The world capitalist system was represented in the works of critical political economy in the 1970s and in the early 1980s as producing cultural standardization. Since the late 1980s, it is increasingly described as generating cultural diversity, even if placed under the sign of commodification.

(T. Mattelart 2008, 48)

Thus redefined, “diversity” has become an important institutional category. It has been used in the construction of media indexes, such as the American Federal Communications Commission’s Diversity Index (Downing 2011), and has assumed an important place in international negotiations concerning cultural and media industries from the 1990s onwards. It has gradually replaced the rhetoric of “cultural exceptionalism”—which dominated General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT; later World Trade Organization [WTO])³ trade talks until the late 1980s—with a positive slogan articulating regional media lobbying with a narrative on indigenous cultural richness, under the auspices of UNESCO. Indeed, after the First World War, Hollywood was feared by many European governments for its economic and cultural impact, resulting in various measures to protect and stimulate domestic production. France, in particular, was a notable advocate of these measures, pursued under the policy of “exception culturelle” by the minister of culture André Malraux. The first GATT treaty in 1947 validated such measures for films (GATT Article IV), followed by regional agreements: the EU, where France has been very proactive, especially when Jacques Delors presided the European Commission and “acted as a strong policy entrepreneur, reflecting as well as shaping the views of the member states” (Burri 2015, 199) or, under a Canadian initiative, the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (1988) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994). France and Canada, both economically significant cultural producers and defenders of the French language through the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF—“International Francophonie Organization”), have then actively worked towards advancing the idea of cultural exceptionalism at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in 1998 and at the Seattle WTO summit (1999). But, as the former ambassador—and major participant in French international lobbying—Jean Musitelli (2006, 2) explains, “it became apparent that Cultural Exception[alism] was not only insufficient protection, but also a standard that did not inspire much call to action”. Furthermore:

Cultural Exception[alism] was perceived, by developing countries, as a barrier erected by Europeans against the invasion of their audio-visual and film markets by the US leisure industry. They did not feel overly concerned by this war of images among the well-to-do.

Therefore France, soon followed by Canada, suggested replacing it with the notion of “cultural diversity” in debates: “opening up the narrow field of vision of exception[alism] onto a broadened horizon”, the notion of diversity “rehabilitated the anthropological and sociological components of culture which had been ignored in commercial negotiations” (Ibid.). Like its academic counterpart, the notion was thus emptied of any normative significance (A. Mattelart 2005) and therefore of true operational scope and henceforth promoted through UNESCO declarations—especially the “Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity” (2001) or the “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions” (2005). In phase with the demands of some regional groups for better representation in global cultural programs and thus promoted as a corollary of biological diversity, the term abandoned its initial impulse to attack media concentration through the regulation of media’s economic structures (McChesney 2008). On the contrary, following the American wave of deregulation—of which the Telecommunications Act (1996) is paradigmatic—many EU discussions of the late 1990s and the 2000s argued that building European media giants capable of counterbalancing American counterparts was the best way of protecting and promoting diversity, mistaking an abundance of programs with diversity of content (Bouquillion 2008). Thus, “cultural diversity” was also welcomed by global producers: in the early 2000s, Vivendi Universal’s president Jean-Marie Messier stated: “We are now in a period of cultural diversity. What does that mean? It means we must be both global and national”.⁴ A distinctive socioeconomic feature of the cultural industries is “overproduction” as an organizational way of coping with structural demand uncertainty (Hirsch 1972; Doyle 2002); labeling this oversupply as “diversity” has thus been an easy way of promoting the major cultural producers.

Measuring diversity: democracy through the lens of cultural capitalism

As we have seen, the history of “cultural diversity” is that of an impoverishment of its critical impulses, with the rise of neoliberalism in cultural policies and of postmodernism in academic debate. Its institutionalization through supranational organizations has been realized at the expense of reforming media structures. Nevertheless, such institutionalization has also led to research interest across many disciplines. Thus, even negati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Series Preface: algorithms and society
• Volume introduction
• Acknowledgment
• 1 From “Diversity” to “Discoverability”
• 2 Modern Mathemagics
• 3 Reading the Cards
• Index