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content/Section 3 - Bots/1-introduction.md
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@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ Until now we have been referring to *digital infrastructures*. However, bots are
In many ways digital infrastructures and platforms overlap in their invisibility, broad public usage, or extensibility. According to Plantin et al (2016), both ways of framing offer helpful elements for their analysis. We are witnessing a platformisation of infrastructure in tandem with an infrastructuralisation of platforms through information technologies, where on the one hand, infrastructures start to splinter into services taken over by private enterprises, and on the other hand, platforms start taking on more responsibilities which were previously managed by the government[^platin].
For the purposes of this online module, we are interested in the programmability (what can be build on top of the offered functionalities) and affordances (what is made possible through a design) of platforms combined with the public interest and responsibility of infrastructures (through established agreements and standards). However, in order to highlight the importance of optimization practices for a public interest, and not for corporate profit, we will from now on refer to platforms as *digital communication infrastructures*. Doing so avoids the ambiguity of describing the activity of repair for different kinds of interest, which could include corporate interest. We are interested in the potential of bots to repair in the benefit of one or multiple public interests.
For the purposes of this online module, we are interested in the programmability (what can be build on top of the offered functionalities) and affordances (what is made possible through a design) of platforms combined with the public interest and responsibility of infrastructures (through standards and pubic funding). However, in order to highlight the importance of optimization practices for a public interest, and not for corporate profit, we will from now on refer to platforms as *digital communication infrastructures*. Doing so avoids the ambiguity of describing the activity of repair for different kinds of interest, which could include corporate interest. We are interested in the potential of bots to repair in the benefit of one or multiple public interests.
Having just unfolded what infrastructural harms could be, we now move to exploring bots. When we say bots, we refer to software agents which automatise certain actions and can run autonomously or semi-autonomously. Some of the most mentioned examples are voice assistants such as Alexa or Siri, but they can also be web crawlers indexing the web or bots maintaining Wikipedia.