Automated media and commercial populism

ABSTRACT

This article considers the link between the increasingly important role of automated information curation online and the rise of what we call ‘commercial populism’. We invoke the term to refer to the convergence of populism as a marketing tool – a way of selling, for example, nutritional supplements or survivalist merchandise – with political strategies that cater to the citizen as consumer (whose freedoms are framed in the individual register of personal taste unfettered from civic concerns or constraints). Perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, we draw on the example of Donald Trump's political rise, which while not unrelated to his particular idiosyncrasies, demonstrates how the automated curation of social media aligns itself with what the aggressive rise of commercial populism. The goal of such an analysis is to consider how the combination of hyper-commercialism with the formal attributes of social media contributes to inter-related political pathologies of polarization and conspiracy theory. The consumer-oriented model of personal taste catered to by algorithmic curation highlights the paradox of ‘social’ media: they promise to enhance the social by displacing or reframing it fundamental a-social. The offloading of social decisions and formation onto commercial, automated systems for curating news and information reinforces this version of individualism, contributing to the forms of misrecognition that enable it.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• social media
• Donald Trump
• automation
• political polarization
• filter bubble

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Behaviours of Users Modified and Made into Empires for Rent’ (Lanier, 2018; 31).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number CE200100005].

Notes on contributors

Zala Volcic

Zala Volcic is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University. She is the author numerous scholarly books and articles dealing with media and nationalism.

Mark Andrejevic

Mark Andrejevic is Professor of Media Studies in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University. He writes about digital media, surveillance, and popular culture and is the author of four books including, most recently, Automated Media.