The Media Arcane

Beyes, Timon; Pias, Claus

doi:10.1162/grey_a_00271

Cited by 20 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Viewability is an attribute of an ad impression object nested in a bid request object. The ambiguity of metrics such as viewability is hence rendered opaque and more difficult to inspect for humans and organizations by the nested makeup of data objects (Beyes & Pias, 2019). The definition of viewability has changed often in the last few years to address the cardinal issue of its reality purchase and industry relevance (see also Cluley, 2018).…”

Section: Data Objects and Fieldsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From People to Objects: The digital transformation of fields

Alaimo

2021

Organization Studies

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Digital technologies are reconfiguring organizations and their environments. Activities are increasingly distributed across fields and coordinated by data, algorithms and machines. This paper investigates data objects (objects made of data structured and aggregated under a specific template) and their role in structuring fields and field practices. It studies programmatic advertising, an automated bidding process with hundreds of participants, whereby media spaces are auctioned in real-time as individual users browse online content. To work on such a large scale, programmatic advertising must standardize existing field knowledge into data and coordinate collective action through objects, algorithms and technologies. This study shows how data, data objects and their infrastructures are involved in transforming the links between institutions and practice. The makeup and functioning of data and data objects reorient existing cognitive, normative and regulative structures, constrain the rule of engagement of actors and enable field-level autonomous interaction. The datafication of knowledge and automation of practices exposed in this paper call for a thorough rethinking of existing approaches to the concept of fields.

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Section: Data Objects and Fieldsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From People to Objects: The digital transformation of fields

Alaimo

2021

Organization Studies

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“…How are illegibility, opacity and unavailability organized? Instead of assuming accountability, publicity, and transparency as epistemological a priori, investigating the transformation of the public sphere would adopt epistemes of secrecy and opacity (Amoore, 2020; Beyes and Pias, 2019; Birchall, 2021; Walters, 2021), for instance through distinctions of secreta, arcana , and mysteria , which have informed this paper.…”

Section: The Politics Of Non-appearancementioning

confidence: 99%

Staying with the Secret: The Public Sphere in Platform Society

Beyes

2022

Theory, Culture & Society

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Investigating the structural transformation of the public sphere should reckon with the secret and its modes of organization. The expansion of secrecy effected by the infrastructures, platforms, and applications of media technology is constitutive for the emergence and transformation of ‘digital publics’. Offering a rereading of Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere that is attuned to the organizational principle of secrecy, this paper discusses current notions of mediated publics in juxtaposition with the redoubling of media-technological and organizational secrecy at work in platform society. How are illegibility, opacity and unavailability organized? Instead of assuming accountability, publicity and transparency as epistemological a priori, investigating the transformation of the public sphere would benefit from adopting epistemes of secrecy and opacity.

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“…Yet the organizational powers of digital media express themselves differently in the different ‘computings’ associated with the diverse cases presented in the contributions. The distributed, mundane and mostly invisible and intransparent (Beyes and Pias, 2019; Hansen and Flyverbom, 2015) presence of digital media’s organizational powers make a sustained engagement with the relation of media and organization all the more pressing. In this sense, this special issue can only be a map of beginnings – an operative one, we hope.…”

Section: The Digitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The organizational powers of (digital) media

Beverungen¹,

Beyes²,

Conrad

2019

Organization

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Digital media are pervasive, ubiquitous and mundane constituents of organization. Organized life relies on, and is propelled by, technologies that store, transmit and process data and are based on networked computation. How can we understand and explore the fundamental mediatedness of organization? This article contextualizes and introduces the special issue on 'The organizational powers of (digital) media' by staging an encounter between organization theory and media theory. In provoking investigations of the power and effects of technological mediation in its many guises, not least in regard to digital or computational media, this encounter ushers in a 'medial thought' of organization.

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The Media Arcane

Cited by 20 publications

References 15 publications

From People to Objects: The digital transformation of fields

From People to Objects: The digital transformation of fields

Staying with the Secret: The Public Sphere in Platform Society

The organizational powers of (digital) media

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