1040247
research-article2021
NMS0010.1177/14614448211040247new media & societyHutchinson
Article
Digital intermediation:
Unseen infrastructures for
cultural production
new media & society
2023, Vol. 25(12) 3289­–3307
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211040247
DOI: 10.1177/14614448211040247
journals.sagepub.com/home/nms
Jonathon Hutchinson
University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract
This article constructs a theoretical model of digital intermediation: a process of three
key, and unseen, components for cultural production in our contemporary media
environment. Digital intermediation is a content production and consumption process
that incorporates the cultural characteristics of technologies, agencies and automation.
First, the article describes the key components of digital intermediation that bring
about the production and distribution of cultural artefacts. Second, the article describes
digital intermediation as a process of production and consumption amid these three
components. Third, the article articulates the problems digital intermediation creates
by examining the loss of user agency over the production of and access to cultural
artefacts. Finally, the article highlights how digital intermediation problems can be
addressed by cultural institutions, specifically public service media, to shore up user
agency within automated media environments.
Keywords
Algorithms, automation, cultural intermediation, digital intermediation, online content
producers, YouTube
Introduction
Cultural production relies on visibility processes by intermediaries to highlight its significance through artefacts that capture, contribute towards, extend conversations about
and describe the societies in which we live. While this process has typically been
Corresponding author:
Jonathon Hutchinson, Department of Media and Communication, University of Sydney, Room N232 John
Woolley Building (A20), Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia.
Email: jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au
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undertaken by human cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu, 1984; Hutchinson, 2017), the
contemporary media environment increasingly relies on technological and non-human
intermediaries to create and make these digital objects visible. These mechanical, predetermined and automated processes are those that systematically sort, add value and
make visible the sorts of content that contain information about the world around us,
which is a process many media consumers have lost control over. This environment
underpins the processes of digital intermediation, which combines technologies, agencies (e.g. institutions) and automation to amplify the value of cultural production
through increased exposure to that information: an automated media production and
consumption process.
This article maps out the automated media production and consumption processes,
highlighting the loss of user agency as one of its key problems. User agency is the ability
to engage a set of tactics or technical capacities to determine content visibility across
platforms: a tacit knowledge of how platforms intermediate content and how to adjust
these processes. Media automation refers to content that is distributed via digital intermediation and not through automated mechanisms such as bots and the like. Digital
intermediation here suggests as content passes through unseen filtering mechanisms, for
example, recommender systems, its visibility is determined with increasingly less human
intervention. In this context, automated media relies heavily on algorithms as decision
makers that help guide or make sense of one’s environment (Dourish, 2016; Wilson,
2017). Automated media is useful to solve the problems associated with media-saturated
environments, where one’s own capacity to understand its navigation is impossible.
However, building on Bishop’s (2019) recent question, ‘what should be made visible,
and to whom?’ (p. 2590), the visibility of content becomes crucial for users to understand
why their content appears as it does on their platforms. Content visibility across platforms is often based on a user’s past activities (Gillespie, 2016), is prioritised by the
hosting platform (Crawford and Gillespie, 2016) or is seen as a result of recommender
systems which take into account users’ social relationships and behaviours (Helberger
et al., 2018). Much of the work on automated media to date has looked at increased surveillance (Andrejevic, 2019), inequality (Eubanks, 2017), oppression (Noble, 2018) or
politics (Bucher, 2018). This article focuses on how media is produced and consumed
within this environment.
Intermediation is based within our understanding of information transmission within
networks, for example, how information appears on our phones, platforms, chat group
messages or web search results. For the most part, human intermediation such as community management within these networks has been framed as a positive, enabling process undertaken by individuals who are focused on improving the collection of individuals
within the network (Long et al., 2013; McCosker, 2018). Beyond intermediation alone,
cultural intermediation is especially important because of the social capital exchange
between stakeholder groups within cultural production (Bourdieu, 1984; Smith Maguire
and Matthews, 2010; Hutchinson, 2017, 2019): a process that cannot be determined
through digital media devices and processes alone (Striphas, 2015). While it might be
difficult for users to comprehend how their digital media is processed through intermediation – for consumers to realise why certain content is visible to them and for creators
to understand how their content can attract greater visibility – there is a need for increased
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user agency for individuals to take control over their media experiences (Lingel, 2021).
In this context, greater emphasis on user control over media visibility through digital
intermediation is critical given the direct connection between media plurality and the
societies we are part of and that surround us (Couldry, 2012).
Digital intermediation as a process between technologies, agencies and automation
determines our exposure to information which has direct impact on how we understand the
world around us: it is the sorting of content in our media-saturated lives. Each digital intermediation actor within cultural production introduces agency at each stage of processing,
which is more broadly contextualised by cultural, political and economic dynamics, determining the diversity of exposure to information. Digital intermediation impacts not only
which programmes we watch on Netflix, but also the journalism we see, our access to new
music, reviews of the best restaurants in town, where to holiday and, in many cases, who
should receive our vote at election time. Helberger et al. (2018: 191) frame media recommendation as a media diversity problem because ‘the information that is ultimately being
presented to us has been filtered through the lens of our personal preferences, our previous
choices and the preferences of our friend’. While digital intermediation seems like an
untouchable problem, there are techniques that can help users take better control over
which content they have access to, which should be championed by our cultural institutions. As a set of principles within the design and implementation of digital intermediation,
understanding diversity as one of its problems will assist in developing a user’s capacity to
effectively find and consume relevant media that keeps them engaged with their societies.
This article first describes the three unseen infrastructures of digital intermediation
that enable the production and distribution of content within our contemporary media
ecology: technologies, agencies and automation. The article then articulates the process
of content production within this environment. In highlighting the production of cultural
artefacts within digital intermediation, the problem of compromised visibility and loss of
user agency become obvious. To address these digital intermediation problems, users can
improve their exposure to a variety of media if they are supported by cultural institutions
with an understanding of both users and online content producers. Finally, the article
includes recommendations for cultural institutions to provide improved interface design
for increased user control over digital intermediation, explicitly championed by our public service media organisations.
Digital intermediation: unseen infrastructures
The future is private. This is the next chapter for our services. (Zuckerberg, 2019)
Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the 2019 Facebook’s F8 Developer’s Conference was
framed with a key concept of ‘the future is private’, signifying the platform’s failure to
address the surveillance concerns of its users. What this concession also highlights is the
central role that platforms, especially social media, play within our everyday lives. Yet,
how we use these platforms also determines how they will treat us as users, suggesting
users have more agency on these platforms than has previously been suggested. This
section of the article highlights the state of play of digital infrastructures while revealing
the potential gaps for increased user agency.
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The impact of platforms on their user’s news consumption habits is demonstrated in
the series of Digital News Reports (Newman et al., 2018, 2019), which highlights the
high level of news consumption by Facebook users, alongside the increasing use of private messaging applications such as Facebook’s own WhatsApp. Beyond news as a category of content, and on YouTube alone, 450 hours of content is uploaded every minute
and one billion hours of videos are viewed every day (Neistat, 2018; YouTube, 2019),
while Twitter has around 500 million tweets sent each day, with over 326 million users
every month (Cooper, 2019). Tencent’s WeChat also has staggering user statistics with
over 1.09 billion monthly active users (Statistica, 2018). The combination of these social
media platforms alone, and newer platforms such as ByteDance’s TikTok, suggests a
large user base who rely on the intermediation of platforms as one significant way to
access and retrieve information.
The extent of intermediation and meaning between content production and consumption is at its peak when platforms, regulation, commercial imperatives, content creators
and automated and predictive calculations are combined: the process of digital intermediation. Digital intermediation is both the combination of and the process with these
actors that determine the exposure of content to its audiences. The combination of these
relatively new actors within our contemporary media ecology reflects the deep mediatisation process highlighted by Hepp (2016) that outlines the social and cultural effects
constructed through the combination of media technologies. Hepp (2016: 918) notes
deep mediatisation is ‘the far-reaching entanglement of media technologies with the everyday practices of our social world’ that incorporate the different perspectives of actors.
I build on Hepp’s work to explore the contemporary processes of digital intermediation
that includes the often non-transparent or indeed unseen infrastructures of our digital
media ecology.
These non-transparent mechanisms comprise what I argue here as digital intermediation. Digital intermediation is the combination of digital media actors, including
technologies, agencies and automation. It is also the deep intricate and interconnected
process of content production, distribution and consumption which is the result of
several unseen infrastructures. This non-human intermediation process is significantly
different to the human-focused version of intermediation and cultural intermediation.
Historically, scholarship on human intermediation for visibility and content diversity
has existed in various forms, but the current digital intermediation is unique to the nonhuman social media technological epoch. Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) note the
impact of the ‘culture industry’ is a media content method that mediates the feedback
mechanism between media consumers and producers of a post-war society. Similarly,
Negus (1992) provides an argument in the music industry of how consumer feedback
is materialised for the additional production of cultural artefacts, in this case music.
More recently, Nieborg and Poell (2018) frame visibility in the context of platformisation, while Petre et al. (2019) present compelling evidence that social media platforms
are aware of online content producers ‘gaming the system’ as an incredibly sophisticated process of human intermediation. Digital intermediation departs from this scholarship by describing the non-human construct of intermediation, in which these other
human aspects of intermediation occur.
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The digital intermediation process, as framed earlier through the lens of visibility, is
continually challenged, redesigned, conquered and forfeited by the online content producers who operate within this environment.
Technologies
Digital intermediation technologies include a number of interconnected and interoperable interfaces and databases that are unseen and immovable. This includes Internet platforms, which, as Gillespie (2010) highlights, do significantly more than merely host
content: they are the interface between users, regulation and commerce. Most obvious
for this technology are the social media platforms that are the digital intermediation process between content users, who are directed by the perspectives of the respective facilitating corporations. Technologies also include a number of proprietary devices such as
personal tracking devices, drones, sensors and so-called smart devices like voice-activated speakers or Smart TVs which are purchased with a bundle of preinstalled applications. These devices usually require the user to operate them with preinstalled firmware
or software, which are often un-installable. Beyond these sorts of technologies are the
data systems associated with interoperability. Elkhodr et al. (2016: 86) note that ‘interoperability is needed to support seamless and heterogeneous communications in the IoT
[Internet of Things]. Achieving interoperability is vital for interconnecting multiple
things together across different communication networks’. What Elkhodr notes here is
the interconnectedness of information systems, which are becoming increasingly popular in our digital societies through systems such as the Australian My Health Record
database or the Chinese Social Credit System. These technology examples are interfaces
and databases that iteratively and systematically sort information for users, extract value
through predetermined calculation processes and promote and bolster that value through
increased exposure to that information.
Agencies
Digital intermediation agencies are those unseen infrastructures that enable increased
visibility by leveraging the collective contribution across those technological infrastructures mentioned above. They are essentially creative agencies that are located between
content producers and platforms and enable increased visibility through a number of
strategies, including a nuanced understanding of platforms and technologies, along with
the collective publishing power of multiple online content producers. Cunningham et al.
(2016) have noted the impact of online entertainment within the screen industries, with
particular focus on the enabling roles of multichannel networks (MCNs) to promote
entrepreneurial online content producers. MCNs make up a part of what Cunningham
and Craig (2016: 5412) call social media entertainment, which is ‘built upon the technological, networking, and commercial affordances of multiple, rapidly scaling, near-frictionless, global social media platforms – for example, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat,
and Twitch’. Yet, it is not only the role of the agencies to increase exposure across unseen
technological infrastructures – they are also responsible for genuine user engagement
between the online content producer and the audiences. Here, we see the role of social
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media influencers emerge who often operate and engage with smaller, more engaged
audiences or micro-audiences, which are so-called because of their relative size to the
larger, yet relatively disengaged audiences, of more popular social media influencers.
This emphasis and shift towards smaller and more engaged audiences moves the agency
focus towards that of microplatformisation (Hutchinson, 2019) to connect brands and
services with users through the use of specialised, niche online content producers. In any
case, it is the collective ecosystem of MCNs, digital agencies and microplatforms that
perform the role of connecting online content producers with audiences by navigating
the unseen technologies of information. In other words, they play a significant role in the
process of digital intermediation by promoting specific information to collective
audiences.
Automation
Automation as a component of digital intermediation has also emerged as a significant
area of scholarly enquiry, with intelligent technologies (Thomas, 2018), surveillance
(Andrejevic, 2019) and media literacy (Valtonen et al., 2019) as some of its key aspects.
Through this increase of scholarship, automation in the media context suggests our
media consumption is curated and designed by mathematically calculated decisions.
These automated decision processes are built on and include techniques such as machine
learning, algorithms and recommendation systems that are most obvious on media applications and social media platforms. The media industries in particular have employed
algorithms as a sense-making mechanism (Gillespie, 2016; Wilson, 2017): to enable
media content consumers to navigate and indeed consume content to make sense of our
worlds in our media-saturated lives. Within many automated systems, users are often
presented with a highly targeted, yet limited, choice of options, which is based on their
past consumption habits, alongside other predetermined values which may be driven by
the hosting platform. Amazon, for example, provides customers with purchasing suggestions on their site and app, based on previous purchases and product searches, YouTube
has the ‘Up Next’ functionality based on a user’s previous viewing and Spotify has the
‘Recommended for You’ function. While this can be seen as a useful process to sort,
curate and present a media within a saturated media market, it also contributes to the
decrease in diversification of our exposure to information. Other scholars have highlighted the political power of algorithms (Bucher, 2018), the inherent bias of algorithmic
systems (Noble, 2018), the impact of algorithmic ‘black-boxes’ on society (Pasquale,
2015) and the homogeneity of the tech industries spearheading these processes (Whittaker
et al., 2018). Automation, then, as part of the unseen infrastructures of digital intermediation combines a number of processes and performs a significant role in how information
and media content is curated, presented and distributed to groups of users.
Digital intermediation, when combining these three components and presented as a
process, demonstrates how media consumers have little to almost no control over how
information is made visible to them. In many ways, this is a reflection of the gatekeepers
that are present within legacy media formats. Yet, there are a host of new online content
producers who are consistently operating within these environments, with varying
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degrees of success in the ‘visibility game’ as Cotter (2019) describes. The next section
describes these users and the environment in which they operate.
Digital intermediation as process for online content
producers
Within digital intermediation, some online content producers demonstrate cultural intermediation expertise to navigate the technological, agency and automation components to
enable and, in some cases, increase their visibility. Cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu,
1984) are able to translate fringe cultural activities to new and broader groups of audiences specifically through their ability to identify areas of potential interest (Author
removed, 2017). Powers (2015: 4) notes cultural intermediation is ‘the process by which
art, music, and other forms of cultural production circulate, assume meaning, and gain
value’. Online content producers are exceptionally able to transfer expertise and value
across technologies, work alongside agencies to bolster that value translation and are
often best placed to understand and ‘game’ the automation practices within the digital
intermediation process. Online content producers include microcelebrities (Marwick,
2013; Senft, 2013), digital influencers (Abidin, 2016) and digital first personalities
(Hutchinson, 2019). [Author removed] notes digital first personalities are ‘those individuals that produce digital content for maximum visibility by engaging social influencer
publication strategies that appease platform algorithms’ (p. 3). Maximum visibility is
then achieved by online content producers employing the digital intermediation
process.
While it is useful to break down digital intermediation into its components, its
strengths emerge when understood as a media consumption and production process. As
with cultural intermediation, it is the transfer of cultural information that provides value
from one group of stakeholders to another. While Piper (2015: 248) suggests, ‘in its
broadest sense, cultural intermediation describes the process of moving “cultural” information around’ (author’s emphasis), the same can be said of digital intermediation as
information passes through its unseen infrastructures. Striphas (2015), for example, first
described computational algorithmic cultures as a process of cultural intermediation
through non-human agents. Digital intermediation introduces several other actors within
this cultural information distribution process.
What is of interest here is the value that the digital intermediation process applies to
particular content, at the expense of other information. For example, YouTube employees may notice the users are interested in and would prefer more content that includes
K-Pop. This observation will then be mobilised through the platform’s algorithm and the
sort of content it recommends and makes visible. Online content producers will observe
this shift in the algorithm, which is likely driven through the insights of agencies or the
trends from within platform analytics, and will begin creating videos that will include
some aspect of K-Pop. The audience is then exposed to more K-Pop content, thereby
increasing its cultural value within this ecosystem. Figure 2 describes this iterative cycle
of value creation between technology, agencies, automation, online content producers
and audience.
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Figure 1. The components of digital intermediation.
Figure 2. The digital intermediation process.
new media & society 25(12)
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In this context, the process of digital intermediation demonstrates a power dynamic,
prompting the question, ‘what is a process and how does its power emerge?’ As content
passes through each component in Figure 2, it is effected by its input and output values.
To that end, process-relational philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) is a way to
understand the materialisation of items that may pass through one or any number of these
digital intermediation components. Robinson (2016: 57) uses process-relational theory
to suggest the concept of a process has two sides or dimensions ‘that coexist and are in
perpetual exchange, communication, opposition, conversion, translation, and interdependency’ and presents the opportunity to ‘find the means to undo a static being’.
Digital intermediation as a process, then, represents the inherent perpetually exchanged
power relationships, often demonstrated through value, within the intermediation of content that flows through technologies, agencies and automation. Digital intermediation,
then, defines media and culture through power and value measures as it passes through
its components to become material content.
The concept of digital intermediation requires further interrogation from the increasing focus of automation and its impact on culture. Given the prominence, speed and scale
of online media content, digital intermediation is an understudied concept. As I will
argue, the power relationships of digital intermediation and its impact on media organisations, online content producers and audiences have significantly shifted in the last
decade. This reframing of the media industries is sometimes obvious in tangible elements of social media, for example, the shares of user-created content. However, the
surrounding politics and economic models are often undertaken by unseen infrastructures which are predominantly engineered within that same political economy. Digital
intermediation represents the content production process through which all content must
pass: the non-human gatewatchers that determine which topics are prominent, who sees
those topics and who is rewarded for producing those topics.
The problems of digital intermediation
Ted Striphas (2015: 395) highlighted the fact that the work of culture has been increasingly delegated to computational processes – ‘the sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing
of people, places, objects and ideas’. He locates this within the algorithmic culture
framework. Striphas accounts the Amazon case study that saw thousands of books within
the ‘Adult’ genre become non-visible to customers. This was the result of a programmer
changing one piece of code in Amazon’s recommendation algorithm that identifies adult
content, which includes health, wellness, erotic and gay and lesbian content from ‘false’
to ‘true’. This coding process then removed thousands of titles from the view of Amazon
customers, impacting not only the authors of this work, but also instantly ostracising the
LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning) community as a
representative of world culture. Through this landmark and highly contentious automated process, Striphas problematises automation in the cultural space.
The inherent condition of Striphas’ argument here is that items processed by automated calculations, namely, algorithms, are somewhat untouchable, and when combined
with culture, they may determine a new discourse through an algorithmic culture. This is
of utmost concern, especially if we recall Williams’ (1958: 16) positioning of culture
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within society: ‘concentrated in the word culture are questions directly raised by the great
historical changes which the changes in industry, democracy and class, in their own way,
represent’. By positioning algorithms firmly within the cultural studies field, Striphas
(2015: 406) further notes, ‘[t]oday . . . it is not culture per se that is a ‘principle of
authority’ but increasingly the algorithms to which are delegated the task of driving out
entropy’. How might automated systems like those within the digital intermediation
framework incorporate concepts like serendipity or diversity? This becomes a digital
intermediation problem, primarily a ‘black-box’ argument, that I would like to relativise
in this section.
Algorithms are often framed as untouchable ‘black boxes’ that we cannot understand
nor alter in any manner. ‘Deconstructing the black boxes Big Data isn’t easy . . . [they]
are determined by complex formulas devised by legions of engineers and guarded by a
phalanx of lawyers’ (Pasquale, 2015: 6). It is a specialist developer skill that takes time
and resources to learn. However, just like culture, algorithms are a continual conversation between its participants – they are in ‘perpetual exchange’, to borrow Robinson’s
(2016) process philosophy terminology. This is certainly the case with our everyday
social media use across platforms such as Netflix, YouTube and Spotify, especially with
our daily media consumption habits. However, it would be remiss to assume that all users
are unaware of how their interactions with digital intermediation components generate
new outcomes. For example, like machine-learning algorithms are trained by data sets,
users can ‘train’ a recommender system of a content provider to generate new search
results, or recommendations, the following day – or indeed the next minute or hour. A
majority of users do lack the skills to programme algorithms and simply reading a formula has little meaning to them.
Users are interfacing with the results of algorithms every day, developing an understanding of how their actions result in processed reactions. Indeed, Bucher (2018: 43–44)
reflects this observation by suggesting algorithms are neither black nor boxes: ‘There are
many ways of knowing algorithms (broadly understood) besides opening the black box
and reading the exact code instructions that tell the machine what to do’. The ability to
inform the automation processes is opaque for most users, beyond ‘gaming’ the search
results to train the algorithm to return a specific genre or theme of content. The serendipity and diversity problem of digital intermediation needs to be addressed at not only
national and regional regulatory levels, but also locally at the platform level and indeed
by the developers of these tools. A useful contribution to these scholarly accounts is to
acknowledge and encourage the role the user and a two-way conversation between the
user and the developer through an interactive algorithmic interface.
Indeed, Lingel (2019: n.p.) argues for increased user agency within the, as she argues,
gentrified Internet. She notes users should be their own algorithms: ‘Rather than passively accepting the networks and content that platforms feed us, we need to take more
ownership over what our networks look like so that we can diversify that content that
comes our way’. This is a call for Internet users to reject the rhetoric that it is a black box
of which we have no control and take an active role in shaping the digital society they
wish to experience and be a part of. In many ways, this is a call for users to develop a
strategy when they engage with a digital intermediation system.
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This strategic approach is indeed represented through the work of the digital intermediation online content producers, including influencers, gamers and YouTubers. The
publication strategy that these users especially employ is a perpetual lutte, whereby
online content producers are continuously ‘gaming the system’ for visibility. One way to
approach this is through what Abidin (2016: 6) labels visibility labour. While Abidin is
specifically referring to peer visibility, the techniques she describes are entirely dependent to the Instagram platform: hashtag use, cultural scripts and ‘in-group vocabulary,
semiotics and practices – community norms’. Gerrard (2018: 4499) describes a similar
strategy undertaken by the pro-eating disorder that describes how users circumvent moderation processes for increased exposure. She notes that these user strategies move
beyond earlier hashtag logics by not tagging and categorising: ‘Users who are conscious
about content moderation – of which there are many – must go beyond the hashtag to
find new ways of being visible to those who they wish to be seen by’. In both of these
examples, online content producers are knowingly employing strategies that positively
and negatively game the so-called black boxed algorithm. Their processes are not mathematically informed, but socially, culturally and communicatively founded – a strategy
that might be employed by social media users.
The audience is continually shifting and changing, and platform algorithms are constantly adapting to them to understand what their interests are and how to engage them.
This is a useful indicator that the audience is demonstrating their cultural interests and
favouring particular types of cultural content. This is a crucial moment in the digital
intermediation process. In the final sections of this article, I draw on case studies and
previous literature that highlights the relationship between human and non-human
agents.
Addressing the problems of digital intermediation
The media industries have in the past decade experienced dramatic shifts due to changes
caused by digital intermediation components and processes. The broader global digital
media landscape has increasingly begun to rely on entertainment as a key production
genre over journalism for example. To focus on journalism as a locus for the shift in
content genre production, particularly as an example of online content production more
broadly, it is especially obvious through the observations of Sherwood and O’Donnell
(2018), as they highlight the role of unionism across the journalism industry. They present compelling evidence that union representation for journalists within the Australian
context now has numbers around 20,000, compared with the broader entertainment category which has representation numbers around 200,000. The impact of the digital intermediation process is seen directly through this shift of media professionals from ‘pure’
journalism, towards more broader entertainment roles. If journalism is the practice that
strengthens and supports an informed and involved public, will this continue with less
journalists? Given the digital intermediation problem and its impact on journalism especially, what role does digital intermediation play on automated media? Ananny (2018)
suggests it is not the ‘heroic’ journalist alone that can provide the voice of reason but also
the technological environment in which they operate. For him, the dramatic shift in journalism and technology highlights the public’s right to access diverse content.
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Philip DeFranco is a useful case study to examine in this context as an entertaining
journalist who has adjusted his journalistic style to align with digital intermediation. His
channel has approximately 6.4 million subscribers and he has published over 2700 videos, publishing approximately one per day. He aligns with the YouTube algorithm
requirements such as ensuring his videos have a play time of over 10 minutes, he has a
poster frame that aligns with the standards of daily vloggers, the video descriptions are
both machine readable and human readable for increased visibility and he produces content in a fast, jump-cut method to attract an audience who are accustomed to fast-pace
content. This is precisely what [Author removed] (2019) describes as the digital first
personality: a social media influencer that appeases the requirements of the digital platforms on which they publish. DeFranco incorporates politics with pop culture to attract
high views, suggesting that he is keeping his audience informed of contemporary public
issues.
According to SocialBlade (2020), Philip DeFranco is a B+ ranking (a specific measurement that ranks YouTubers against all YouTubers within the SocialBlade database)
and has been tracking a negative audience for the past 6 months. While this ranking still
suggests he has the earning potential of nearly US$1 million per year, it does highlight
the impact that the YouTube algorithm has on this particular content. Like all YouTube
content producers, DeFranco’s visibility is determined by the platform politics that
decide which types of content is monetized and which is not. This content visibility
mechanism is a weaponized platform tactic that sees YouTube content creators ensure
they align with the requirements of the platform in fear of being demonetized.
Demonetization is the process that inhibits the content producer to earn any money from
their channel and is applied and policed by YouTube itself.
Siles et al. (2020) talk to another condition that aligns with the emerging problems of
digital intermediation, through their work on Spotify. Through the construction of folk
theories, they highlight the visibility of content for users based in Costa Rica can be
categorised as either a personified Spotify or a ‘trained’ Spotify. By drawing on the perspectives and engagement with digital media from not one single culture, they argue
users have also created strategies to ‘make sense of algorithmic recommendations on this
platform’ (Siles et al, 2020: 2). In this instance, we see the users engaging in strategies
much like content producers to identify the problems associated with digital intermediation and create ‘work arounds’ for automated media, either through personification or the
training of algorithms. Through these techniques of this emerging and popular platform
in the global South, users are inadvertently recognising digital intermediation processes
and creating their own solutions to those unseen problems of automated media
infrastructures.
Additional problems through digital intermediation have emerged during the general
lockdown environment due to the pandemic, where creative industry practitioners have
been forced to turn to other methods to create income. For musicians, Spotify has become
one space for income, which operates alongside their merchandise sales and other fan
support sites such as Patreon. Seeking increased plays of their music has become a strategy for musicians on Spotify to increase their income. In this moment, Twitter user Gabe
Goodman published a video on 10 October 2020 in an attempt to educate users on why
saving songs and liking artists on Spotify are incredibly important for those struggling
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through pandemic times. He notes, ‘artists need to rely on . . . algorithmically generated
playlists, such as “Your Discover Weekly”. These are created based on how the platform
sees listeners reacting to music’. Goodman is essentially promoting a way for users to
circumvent digital intermediation problems and help unseen artists receive attention, and
thereby an income, through a visibility strategy. Therefore, content producers, such as
DeFranco on YouTube and musicians on Spotify, alongside users and audience members
will continue to identify new approaches to align their content with the requirements of
the algorithm (automation) and platform (technology).
It is at this point that the role of agencies that support these content creators, especially that of MCNs and digital agencies, become significantly important. Their purpose
is to amplify messages of social media users across platforms, which is also done through
the ‘gaming of the system’. Cunningham et al. (2016, n.p.) note, ‘MCNs are attempting
to provide value-added services superior to basic YouTube analytics, with programmatics and pioneering attempts at management of scale and volume’. It is the scale and
volume aspect of MCNs that indicate their modus operandi is to ensure their clients,
online content producers, receive maximum exposure and visibility. The role, then, of
agencies in the digital intermediation process is to not only enable the perpetual exchange
between user and online content producer through the algorithmic interface, but to ensure
the black box ultimately disappears.
I argued earlier that users can integrate higher levels of agency with platforms by, as
Lingel (2019) suggests, taking control of one’s network to increase the diversity of content. Taking control of the network is precisely the function digital agencies and MCNs
perform from the perspective of the online content producer. Where an online content
producer’s capacity to continue to reach new audiences reduces, the inclusion of agencies increases to address this digital intermediation problem. The significance of the
agency component of digital intermediation is primarily to interpret the surrounding
regulations and technical implementation of those politics. In this context, agencies enable online content producers to address the emerging problems that digital intermediation has created. However, agencies are primarily in place to address problems for
creators and cannot address the digital intermediation problems for audiences and users
of online content.
Digital intermediation and user agency
Digital intermediation, as has been described in this article, relies not only on the participants of the cultural industries, but also in the facilitating institutions that surround cultural production. The environment becomes obvious when examining those content
creators most impacted by the results of digital intermediation, for example, the
YouTubers and musicians described above. But this is also obvious when discussing the
audiences and users of cultural production. While Lingel (2019) rightly argues one
should take control of their networks, not all users demonstrate the capacity to wrangle
these new and ever-changing online communication environments. The Facebook of
2021 is significantly different to that of 2019, and certainly different to the version of
2018 and earlier. While some users have the technical ability to stay across the changes
these digital intermediation technologies introduce, as Siles et al. (2020) demonstrate,
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we simply do not understand the capacity of the vast majority of users in this space. This
section focuses on the work of cultural institutions: to strengthen a user’s agency to
maintain their abilities within automated media spaces.
In many ways, cultural institutions should guide a user’s capacity to effectively function within our digital societies, which includes developing skills in the digital intermediation space outlined in this article. While this process is not to suggest some content over
others, it is indeed their role to provide the tools and frameworks for users themselves to
explore a diverse spectrum of content. I argue this is the role of one particular cultural
institution, public service media. Public service media is legislatively required to provide
innovative media and information delivery methods (Debrett, 2010; Hutchinson, 2013),
which is somewhat different to the offering supplied by its commercial counterparts.
Through increased media guidance, public service media is best placed to assist users to
navigate the vast social media platforms on offer while keeping them abreast of the diverse
aspects of news and information within our societies. This public service media offering
is not in place of commercial media activities, but rather to provide a distinctive innovation (Cunningham, 2013) role that can support and assist the commercial media sector.
Using public service media as the vehicle to address the digital intermediation problem
for users raises the problem, how might they undertake this exactly?
One recommendation to address digital intermediation problems and institutionalise
an approach towards helping citizens and consumers alike is through providing education for users to understand the implications of specific interface functionality. PSM, as
one example of a specific cultural institution, should be acting as an aggregator of content from a wide variety of sources and presenting this broad voice to their audiences.
Beyond performing the aggregation function alone, PSM are well positioned to educate
its users on how to manage their own personalised delivery of that content. This can be
achieved by educating the audience about their choices through interface design options.
Interface design not only demystifies users to the vast array of options that are available
to them; it also assists them in developing their digital intermediation capacity. For
example, the majority of options for adjusting how content is displayed, shared and visible is often hidden to users, buried deep within the settings of social media platforms.
Bringing these sorts of controls to the fore for users, not only makes them visible but also
enables users to understand the immediate implications of adjusting these settings.
To demonstrate this insight, it is useful to rewind our approach to media saturation
before the recommender era. In the pre-recommender system era of Spotify, Earache
Records, a heavy metal record label, released an interface for fans who required a more
personalised playlist. Vince Neilstein of Metalsucks, a specialist heavy metal blog, notes,
Earache’s Metalizer app automatically generates custom metal playlists that draw from all the
metal available on Spotify, not just Earache releases. Users can adjust four sliders — ‘Metal’,
‘Death’, ‘Thrash’ and ‘Grind’, — depending on how much of each sub-genre they want in their
playlist, and then a fifth slider determining the number of tracks in the playlist. Press the
‘Metalize’ button and a playlist materializes before your very eyes.
In this example, the user takes control of the automation processing mechanisms, or
unseen digital intermediation, without any knowledge of algorithms, regulation, the
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broader cultural and political economy tensions that are part of the cultural artefact production process.
Bodó et al. (2019) have started designing algorithms suitable for public service media.
They constructed a model which builds on prior thinking by van de Bulck and Moe
(2017), Sørensen and Schmidt (2016) and the earlier public media scholars like
Jakubowicz (2008). While Bodó et al. are not interested in interface design and how the
user can actually personalise their public media, they do provide this insight:
Public service media have charters that oblige them to educate, inform, and sustain social
cohesion, and an ongoing challenge for public service media is interpreting their mission in the
light of the contemporary societal and technological context. The performance metrics by
which these organizations measure the success of their algorithmic recommendations will
reflect these particular goals, namely profitability, loyalty, trust, or social cohesion. (Bodó
et al., 2019: 218)
While it may not be viable to address digital intermediation problems through commercial platforms, online content producers, digital agencies and automation processes
to promote education in user agency, there are alternatives that provide useful options
through cultural institutions. Improving digital capacity of its users is certainly within the
innovation remit of public service media organisations, which can be embodied through
a more open approach towards interface design for its users as a positive step towards
solving digital intermediation problems.
Conclusion
Digital intermediation presents a number of new and emerging challenges for users of
digital media, which includes the producers and consumers of cultural production.
Producing and consuming content is a complex and difficult process that involves a
number of components within the digital intermediation process. Surrounding the technology, agencies and automation components are the complex cultural, political and economic environments that attempt to reflect our current understandings of societies. This
is difficult for online content producers to navigate but is similarly difficult for a vast
number of users to comprehend. These users require educated insights to not only access
a diverse and varied amount of content, but also increase their capacity to take control of
their own information spaces. Some online content producers are able to navigate these
spaces reasonably well but often have agencies to assist when their capacity to increase
their visibility is limited by technology and automation. Users, on the contrary, are left to
navigate digital intermediation with their own devices, often through pedestrian attempts
such as ‘training’ recommender systems.
To ensure a diverse and healthy media environment continues to evolve, both users
and online content producers need impartial institutions to provide an exemplary modus
operandi. This is the role of cultural institutions, but especially the work of public service
media as one specific cultural institution that is legislated to provide new and innovative
ways of producing and distributing news and information. While this may be a complex
and challenging task to undertake, it can be approached through improved interface
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design for users to interact with media distribution platforms. Developing strategies such
as cultural institution facilitated interface design is one example of how to approach digital intermediation problems, where more work is required to understand the implications
of this evolving phenomenon.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues on the Media Pluralism and Online News project for guiding
the early development of this work, especially Associate Professor Tim Dwyer. I would also like
to thank Dr. Cornelius Puschmann from the Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung for critical discussion in the latter development stages of this conceptual work.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/
or publication of this article: This research was in part funded by the Sydney Social Science and
Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), and in part by the Australian Research
Council funded Discovery Project, Media Pluralism and Online News. It was also funded by the
Algorithmed Public Sphere project at the Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung, Hans-Bredow
-Institute.
ORCID iD
Jonathon Hutchinson
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7349-1662
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Author biography
Jonathon Hutchinson is a Senior Lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University
of Sydney. His research explores Public Service Media, cultural intermediation, everyday social
media, automated media and algorithms in media. He is the Treasurer on the Executive Committee
for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), the Secretary for the
International Public Service Media Association, RIPE, and was recently the Programme Chair for
the 2019 Association of Internet Research (AoIR) conference. He is an award-winning author and
his latest book is Cultural Intermediaries: Audience Participation and Media Organisations
(2017), published through Palgrave Macmillan.