Digital Intermediation: Unseen Infrastructure for Cultural Production

Digital Intermediation offers a new framework for understanding content creation and distribution across automated media platforms – a new mediatisation process.

This book draws on empirical and theoretical research to carefully identify and describe a number of unseen digital infrastructures that contribute to a predictive media production process through technologies, institutions and automation. Field data is drawn from several international sites, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, London, Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Sydney and Cartagena. By highlighting an increasingly automated content production and distribution process, this book responds to a number of regulatory debates on the societal impact of social media platforms. It highlights emerging areas of key importance that shape the production and distribution of social media content, including micro-platformisation and digital first personalities. This book explains how technologies, institutions and automation are used within agencies to increase exposure for the talent they manage while providing inside access to the processes and requirements of producers who create content for platform algorithms. Finally, it outlines user agency as a strategy for those who seek diversity in the information they access on automated social media content distribution platforms.

The findings in this book provide key recommendations for policymakers working within digital media platforms and will be invaluable reading for students and academics interested in automated media environments.

Jonathon Hutchinson is the Chair of the Discipline of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. He is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Online News and Media Pluralism, and is also a Chief Investigator on the eSafety Commission Research project, Emerging online safety issues: co-creating social media education with young people.