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This is the repository for the online module Bots as Digital Infrapuncture, commissioned by the Utrecht University
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Title: Introduction: Bots Slug: 01-s3-introduction Date: 2020-11-01 12:00 Summary: What type of bots are being made?

Until now we have been referring to digital infrastructures. However, bots are often contextualised as acting platforms. What is the difference between these terms and where do they overlap?

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. Here we find, 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 government1.

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 public 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 applications that automatise certain tasks and can run autonomously or semi-autonomously. Some of the most popular examples include voice assistants such as Alexa or Siri, but they can also be web crawlers indexing the web or even bots maintaining Wikipedia.

The particular bots we are interested in for this online module are those that interface between digital platforms and human users. This phenomenon Andreas Hepp terms "communicative robots"2, robots that "are defined as autonomously operating systems designed for the purpose of quasi-communication with human beings to enable further algorithmic-based functionalities – often but not always on the basis of artificial intelligence" (1410).

In this section, we will introduce Andreas Hepp, professor of media and communications at the ZeMKI, University of Bremen.


Footnotes

  1. Plantin, Jean-Cristophe. Lagoze, Carl. Edwards, Paul N. Sandvig, Christian. "Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook" New Media and Society Volume 20 (2016): 293-310. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444816661553 ↩︎

  2. Hepp, Andreas. "Artificial companions, social bots and work bots: communicative robots as research objects of media and communication studies" Media, Culture & Society Volume 42 (2020): 1410-1426. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0163443720916412 ↩︎