Sunday 26 February 20:00
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun at Sonic Acts 2017, photo by Pieter Kers
by
Olivia Grubenmann
As soon as
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun starts her talk, the audience look up from their smartphones and stretch their necks. There is a silence in the room. No-one wants to miss anything. Her clear voice carries the audience. Chun, professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, discusses some of the main ideas of her recently published book
Updating to Remain the Same, shifting the focus away from the new and disruptive, and towards our habits. In other words, how things are laid. She does this by referring to the dominant concept of our time: Networks.
Networks
Chun connects our habits to the networks we are embedded in. Networks can be seen as the maps of civilization, the maps of our time. These maps help us to navigate the complexity of the modern world. Everyone is linked to other people, be it family, friends, workmates, or others, and we leave traces of these links to other people. The interactions with other people make us a part of an ever-denser growing network of relationships and dependencies. Chun gives an example for these connections in an interview after her talk. She refers to US department store Target, who apparently came up with a pregnancy detector. “If you for example buy an unscented lotion, suddenly they think you are pregnant. As a consequence, you are being put in a row with other pregnant people.”
It becomes clear that apparently anonymous actions are not. Every action links us to other people, so that we become a node in a network of people. Network science claims that networks help us to orient ourselves, by reducing the complexity of the world and contracting it to the map. The network prescribes what is going to happen: it predicts our future decisions and actions, by studying our behavior in the past and present. Whether we are buying something in a store, traveling to Thailand, or messaging someone, we are being tracked. Our ties (our connections) to other nodes (i.e. people in the network) are adjusted. Our position in the network changes constantly, as new ties between people develop.
New media
Crisis + Habit = Update. New media and their apparent influences on our lives are some of the most discussed topics of today. New media allegedly moves fast and changes constantly. However, it is just as important to think about the influence media has once we have gotten accustomed to it, once the initial excitement wears off. Chun argues that history and politics are embedded in our individual action and habits. So, it is more important to look at how things remain in the long-term, than to look at the viral and disruptive.
Homophily
Chun mentions in her talk that at the heart of network science lies the principle of ‘homophily’. Homophily is the tendency to bond with people who are similar to ourselves in terms of personal history, religious or political preferences, and social status. Homophily underlies collaborative filtering, groups people, structures networks, and makes them searchable.
Homophily is why we are comfortable only being exposed to things that are in line with our own norms and values. It is more reassuring to read articles that emphasize our point of view, than to read an article that takes a contrary. The problem is, says Chun, if we see see homophily as a natural condition of networks, we maintain existing segregations in society. She explains that this segregation will only increase because the algorithms we have today contain inbuilt bias. Algorithms calculate what we want and need according to all the choices we make and the actions we take. We are pushed into a cluster in which we are exposed to only the things we seem to like. Eventually, we become trapped in a bubble of sameness. But, is this comfort really what we want? As Chun points out, some people like dissonance and difference.
New algorithms
Chun suggests that we combat segregation, not by simply condemning network science, but rather by imagining a different network science. We should develop new algorithms infused with critical theory and critical studies. As she says in her presentation: “We can transform these algorithms.”
Chun argues for the development of democratic search engines. Search engines that don’t simply show us the most read articles, or trending content. “What if we got the least read articles rather than the most read?” she asks. “How would that challenge assumptions that power laws are natural, meaning the rich getting richer and the poor always remaining poor?”
How could our world change, if we could introduce new, critical, and unbiased algorithms? According to Chun we should not see the status quo as natural, instead realizing that we have agency with which we can change our habits and networks. “The gap between model and reality, that is the space for political agency," she says. "Space to create new habits, new worlds, and new networks.”
