Can Users Speak?
Reflections on the Use vs. Utilization of digital media in Digital Culture Studies
The Spanish edition of this essay can be read here.
I. From Audience to User
The early years of the first decade of the new millennium witnessed a profound transformation in the way media content was communicated and circulated: there was a shift from a vertical and unilateral communication model — the mass media model — to another, in theory, more horizontal and dialogical model: participatory media (Scolari, 2008), commonly referred to as social media. The reason? The emergence of new media and communication technologies that enabled audiences to produce their own content and share it massively with as many people as possible — the so-called prosumers, as Alvin Toffler had already predicted in The Third Wave around 1979 — such as instant messaging services, bulletin boards, internet forums, blogs, websites, and eventually, social media platforms (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). This democratizing technological revolution, which empowered users like never before, was dubbed the Web 2.0 model (Pérez, 2011; O’Reilly, 2012).
This new interactive digital communication model surreptitiously introduced a new concept for referring to the erstwhile media content consumers: the users. For most of the 20th century, the mass communication paradigm was the main focus adopted from media and communication studies, addressed by various thought traditions, from the classic informational paradigm inspired by cybernetics, which viewed communication as a linear process, to others like the interpretive-cultural paradigm of cultural studies, which envisioned communication as a constant process of encoding and decoding texts both at the point of emission and reception (Scolari, 2008). However, the dominant concept for referring to media consumers at the time was generally the same: audiences.
It was thought that each medium had its own audience, as people tended to consume content more from a single medium than from a broader repertoire (for example, newspaper, television, or radio).
Nevertheless, the explosion of technological innovations that led to the invention of a multitude of digital media devices during the last quarter of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium gradually compelled media studies theorists to adopt the term user in place of audience,
since it had been established that individuals: 1) use multiple media to consume content and communicate, 2) are not only passive consumers but also actively resignify what they consume, 3) had become prosumers, and 4) have personal preferences, but also others that they socially share with larger groupings — the audiences properly said (Picone, 2017; Hartley, 2019).
II. Can the User Speak?
Despite this, many studies focused on the transformation of cultural patterns and social interactions mediated by digital technologies continue to reproduce, to some extent, the image of the individual alienated by technology, manipulated by the media logics of the platforms they use, which end up — according to many of these studies — determining both their behavior and their perceptual-cognitive schemas (their habitus, as the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would say).
These types of research, while recognizing that users of digital technologies possess a certain agency that allows them to produce their own content or to select — based on their interests — the information sources they wish to consult or avoid, ultimately conclude that such agency is rather minimal. These studies attribute this diminished agency to both the persuasive power and the opacity of the algorithms that personalize, organize, and limit the options available to users. Consequently, users end up trapped in filter bubbles or echo chambers, where they see and hear only what the algorithms have predetermined they should perceive — usually worldviews or opinions that the algorithms assume are similar or aligned with those of the user, based on the data collected about their online activity (Pariser, 2011).
Given this situation, which, although not universal, is quite common in media studies, it would be worth posing the same question that Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (2003) asked regarding ethnic-racial minorities in contemporary capitalist societies — both of the colonizers and the colonized: “Can the subaltern speak?” As Giraldo notes in his introduction to that seminal text by Spivak, in the historical narrative, ethnic-racial minorities ‘physically speak, but their speech does not acquire dialogic status because the subaltern is not a subject who occupies a discursive position from which they can speak or respond’ (p. 298)¹.
A very similar situation occurs with users of digital technologies: they speak physically/digitally, but their voice is not sufficiently heard, beyond being represented as exotic beings belonging to “digital tribes” grouped according to their personalized consumption preferences and algorithmically profiled — a vision very present in market studies, for example.
Users do not occupy an important discursive position; they are treated more like ‘noble savages,’ with limited agency, akin to an animal that can only choose between the different life options offered by its caretakers in the zoo enclosure where it is locked up (Trouillot, 2011).
Hence the importance for those of us dedicated to the study of digital culture and the relationships between technology, culture, and people, to ask ourselves in a self-reflective manner, when conducting our studies: can users speak?
The somewhat pessimistic view of the agency of digital technology users, which is held by some media researchers, communicators, opinion leaders, and even documentarians, can be greatly enriched by engaging in dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial perspectives from the field of cultural studies. First and foremost, this approach would shift the focus from a user trapped in the algorithmic bubbles of the digital ecosystem to one who lives a life both online and offline — or “onlife,” to use the term proposed by Floridi (2007; 2015). This refers to an individual who must negotiate not only with the media logics of digital platforms, often at a disadvantage, but also with the institutional logics of the culture in which they are embedded, which do not vanish simply because of increased time spent or dependence on technologies in recent years².
This negotiation between the local culture of the individual and the digital culture of the media with which they constantly interact suggests that
users not only appropriate digital technologies — according to their level of media literacy — for the purposes expressly stated by the companies that manufacture them but also adapt these technologies to their own ends. Often, they materially and semiotically transform these technologies into cultural devices that are completely different from how they were originally conceived by their designers³.
That is, users do not only use digital technologies; they utilize them⁴.
III. The Subalternization of the User in times of Digital Capitalism
At this point, it is worth acknowledging that the techno-deterministic approach of many studies is largely inspired by a combination of theoretical perspectives on mass communication — both from its materialist and institutionalist aspects — and by the legacy of critical cultural theory from the Frankfurt School, as well as structuralism and functionalism that have prevailed in various disciplines within the social sciences. However, it is also important to point out that another source is the mode of production underlying the political economy of digital media: digital capitalism.
Without directly discussing digital capitalism, Žižek (1998) had already suggested, shortly before the Web 2.0 revolution, that capitalism possesses an immanent logic aimed at cyclically producing the subjects it supposedly intends to liberate, in order to continue justifying its existence as an emancipatory project: the poor, the unemployed. Žižek also explains that this logic is based on an ideological model that facilitates the production of subalternized others, who are presented as symptomatic examples of failure caused by not adopting the meritocratic-productivist cultural model of capitalism, namely, multiculturalism. According to the Slovenian theorist, multiculturalism “treats each local culture as the colonizer treats colonized people: as ‘natives’ who must be carefully studied and ‘respected’” (Žižek, 1998, p. 172). However, this supposed diversity tolerated by multiculturalism — the ideological project of many countries in North America and Europe — is based on a rather fictitious respect, since “the multiculturalist respect for the specificity of the Other is precisely the way of reaffirming one’s own superiority” (Žižek, 1998, p. 172).
Digital capitalism also employs a discourse of respect for otherness when dealing with users. In public discourse, executives of large technological conglomerates constantly affirm their commitment to the multiplicity of voices circulating in cyberspace and claim to advocate for the creation of more digital tools that facilitate the democratization of public debate and access to information. However, in practice, this respect does not always translate into concrete actions that address the local needs of users and their opinions — beyond service satisfaction surveys or market studies that allow the appropriation of their ideas for commodification later, a phenomenon known as sharecropping (Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2013). It is also uncommon for these conglomerates to support the creation of local technologies within communities, aimed at solving their problems without having to undergo the creative-productive process mediated by the business models of these companies. Even rarer is a horizontal dialogue between the designers and ideologues of hegemonic digital technologies and the users regarding the epistemology of their models, which often end up replicating a materialistic vision appropriative of nature, and even of the users’ own lives and experiences (Escobar, 2005; Mejías & Couldry, 2019).
The supposed dialogue and respect of digital capitalism are based on what was previously explained: the atomization of the mass of users into esoteric consumption niches, and their treatment in terms of digital tribes, controlled by algorithms that constantly monitor them, steering them towards what these users supposedly “demand” to consume; all of this, mediated by a few digital platforms that concentrate all the social activity and life of the users in the hands of a few companies.
This is the “Californian ideology” of the elites of Silicon Valley (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996).
But the logic of digital capitalism has done even more, which will become clear when reviewing Quijano’s (2000) reflection on the naturalization of the exploitation of the Latin American colonies by European powers. From Quijano’s perspective, the hegemonic imperialist model of the European powers and subsequently the United States is based on a dual axis of naturalization of colonial power: 1) “the codification of differences between the conquered and the conquerors in the idea of race,” and 2) “the articulation of all historical forms of labor control, of its resources and products, around capital and the global market” (p. 202).
What Quijano (2000) means by this is that, at its inception, capitalism required an ethical-political justification for the expropriation and extraction of natural resources in America, Asia, and Africa, as well as for the exploitation of their native populations. This justification was constructed around the phenotypic difference between Europeans and non-Europeans, as well as what distinguished their particular ethnicity: the techno-scientific progress discourse, and the rationalist logic inherent to European ethnocentrism. It was in this way that the idea of savagery, primitivism, and backwardness was associated with non-European populations, because European elites supposed that such ethnic distinction had to be due, not to a distinct socio-historical development, but to a biologically somewhat limited condition compared to themselves.
The model of racialization imposed by colonialist thought served to fix specific roles in the division of labor, such that forced physical labor was assigned to colonized populations — non-Europeans — while intellectual and administrative work was assigned to European — white — populations. Over time these artificially created differentiations were naturalized, and served to justify the civilizing process of the conquest of America, Africa, and Asia, as well as the excessive accumulation of wealth in Europe and subsequently in North America, at the expense of the rest of the world. This naturalization can still be evidenced in common phrases heard in Latin American public media discourse, such as “The poor are poor because they want to be.”
As Couldry & Mejías (2019) and Rovira (2017) point out, digital capitalism has followed a very similar strategy. Currently, what can be observed is a coding of the differences between the elites of the global north and the populations of the global south juxtaposed to those already pointed out by Quijano:
the distinction between those who are digitally literate and those who are not, those who have access to digital technologies and those who do not, and finally, between those who can read the algorithmic code of the black boxes of media, and those who cannot.
Thus, individuals who are in the most privileged positions of the digital economy — literate, connected, capable of decoding the black boxes of media — have contributed to designing — consciously or not, intentionally or not — a new model of economic production based on the commodification of all life and social interactions online of their counterparts — the less literate, those who cannot read the programming code that controls the interfaces with which they interact, those who have no choice but to accept the “terms and conditions of use” lest they disappear from the digital world, like the indigenous communities with the Spanish Requirement — with the purpose of facilitating the management and extraction of their resources, through a deep knowledge of their intimate life, and by repackaging their subjectivities for sale and consumption by any interested digital tribes; all in favor of reducing the digital divide, of bringing the emancipation of the individual through their conversion into a user. This is, data colonialism (Couldry & Mejías, 2019).
IV. Let the User Speak
Of course, this process of reducing user agency is not accidental but derives from a system that continually generates dynamics of exploitation as part of its design. Capital accumulation, as a logic inherent to capitalism, compels technology companies to seek new ways to extract value from user activity, which carries the risk of fostering practices that limit individuals’ autonomy and control over their data and digital lives. However, focusing solely on this aspect, while useful and necessary for properly understanding the political economy of technological corporations and their hardware/software platforms, as anticipated, leaves out the study of user resistance strategies, the clash of media logics with institutional logics, and the development of discursive languages specific to users and the cultures where they are embedded. Remember, users are not passive entities; they are agents with some autonomy, capable of developing critical thinking and devising strategies and languages parallel to those of the hegemonic discursive framework (Roseberry, 1994).
Hence, it is important for those of us who conduct research within the field of digital culture and media to heed the call that postcolonial thinkers made to their counterparts, mainly in the fields of history and literature: to stop reproducing the user as a subaltern, as an exoticized other constructed from technological determinism and digital capitalism, a digital savage who requires emancipation — not because the intention to combat attempts to impose a false consciousness that tries to obscure the reproduction of cultural biases inherent in technological design isn’t valid — but to recognize them as agents capable of utilizing media for their own ends — or even creating them, as do pioneer communities or fan communities (Hepp, 2016) — to resignify them according to their needs, and therefore, capable of dialoguing with the logics of digital media and digital capitalism, and even denying them as suits their interests and the particular context of their local culture.
This proposal is, as Beverley (2004) states, the application of a “negation” — not in the Hegelian sense of dialectical negation as a synthesis of two visions or states into a version that combines elements of both — but in the Feuerbachian sense: an inversion, focused rather on the autonomy and critical capacity of the users. This reformulation can be maintained at least initially, while strategies of resistance, reappropriation, and utilization of digital technologies by individuals are unveiled, which would allow us to observe whether there really is an imposition of the media logics of digital platforms and other technologies, or rather, there is a cultural hybridization — even if partial — that ends up transforming them into something completely different from what their designers initially thought.
In sum: the epistemological stance of postcolonial — and also decolonial — studies can serve as inspiration to start complementing theoretical postulates that tend toward technological determinism, or the determinism of the economic infrastructure of digital platforms and other technologies. Viewing the user as a subject with full agency can encourage the study of forms of “subordinated digitalization” that intensify the existing cultural logics in the communities where users are embedded (Alarcón, 2023). Such studies can complement the rest, more focused on the forms of “digital subordination” of culture to the media logics of digital technologies, that is, the extension of these logics to other cultural domains (Alarcón, 2023).
And especially, one of the great benefits of adopting such a stance would be the ability to finally propose the dialectical manner in which digital platforms and other technologies are constituted not just from the mere genius of the technology gurus of Silicon Valley and their capitalist investors — the techno-elites — but also from the creativity, resistance, appropriation, and collective intelligence of the users, who are as much co-creators of the technologies as those who design and manufacture them.
This reflection would contribute to overcoming the treatment of users as a kind of minors incapable of co-producing and redirecting the productive, design, and market trends that regulate the digital social world and digital capitalism itself, and would return to them not only the agency that has been taken from them to a greater or lesser extent, but also the obligation to critically reflect and participate in public debates about the regulation of all technologies that mediate sociality, instead of leaving such debates only to the “experts,” who are none other than the local agents of techno-digital colonialism, the Californian ideologues.
Footnotes
[1] All direct quotations taken from texts originally written in Spanish have been translated by the author of this essay.
[2] This perspective also helps to avoid the tendency to conduct media-centric studies that propose theoretical and analytical models starting from the media studied as the origin of the user’s social action motivations. Such approaches often overlook the complex institutional norms that shape and encourage the use of the media in the first place, a critique long upheld by media theorists like Couldry (2010).
[3] This is essentially the same idea — but applied to the appropriation of cultural artifacts from colonizing societies in colonized societies — that Walter Mignolo proposed when he coined the concept of colonial semiosis, which consists of “the interpretation and meaning of a sign no longer depending on its original cultural context (e.g., Castilian, or Amerindian, or Chinese), but on the new set of relationships generated by communicative interactions across cultural boundaries” (Mignolo, 2004, cited in Del Sarto, 2004, p. 174).
[4] This idea is inspired by the nuanced differences between the terms ‘use’ and ‘utilization.’ ‘Use’ refers to employing an object according to the original purpose for which it was designed (for example, Facebook was designed for users to communicate and strengthen social relationships within their networks). In contrast, ‘utilization’ refers to employing an object in ways that extend beyond the original intentions of the designer, involving unforeseen or creatively generated uses by the user (for example, the use of Facebook’s group function not just for socialization but also for conducting buy-and-sell operations, effectively transforming it into an e-commerce platform). The distinction between use and utilization of digital technologies, therefore, aligns with the difference between the concept of (perceived) affordance, as developed by Gibson (2014), and the concept of imagined affordance proposed by Nagy & Neff (2015).
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