Facebook as a meta-ideological apparatus: reassessing the encoding/decoding model in the context of social media

Palmer, Marie

Facebook as a meta-ideological apparatus: reassessing the encoding/decoding model in the context of social media

Palmer, Marie

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2020

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Palmer, Marie
dc.date.accessioned	2020-05-26T01:31:46Z
dc.date.available	2020-05-26T01:31:46Z
dc.date.issued	2020
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/140938
dc.description	University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.	en_AU
dc.description.abstract	Social media, over the past fifteen years, has become a major gateway to news. The practice of an algorithmically-customised selection of news content has revived critical concerns within the research community regarding the risk of large scale ideology diffusion without appearing to do so. This research aims to tackle those critical concerns, investigating how the circulation of news on social media, via algorithmic customisation, may impact how the users decode news posts, using Facebook as a case study. A transdisciplinary qualitative approach combining cultural studies and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has been chosen. A series of in-depth interviews with a ‘guided tour’ of Facebook’s newsfeeds was conducted and screen-recorded with a sample of young journalism students. The interview data and the researcher’s observations during the guided tour served to understand decoding practices via a thematic analysis while the content of the newsfeeds was used to observe what the algorithm selected for them, and how meaning was created through circulation. The news posts were coded with an automated semantic tagger, in order to reproduce an algorithmic thinking process, and then a multimodal analysis model was done to investigate any surface patterns of meaning making. The analysis of the participants’ newsfeed showed that the circulation moment may be compared to a decoding/encoding sequence. The newsfeed-generating algorithm decoded both the news contents posted on the platform and its users’ preferences, and then re-encoded the news posts before re-circulating them to users. During the circulation, no new verbal message is created, but existing ones are aggregated together and contextualised in a certain way, to orientate users’ decoding towards the algorithm’s preferred meaning. Despite being orientated to decode towards the algorithm’s preferred meaning, users seemed to preserve their decoding autonomy. They appeared to adapt their decoding practices and to interpret the ideological connotations carried by a news posts before comprehending it and identifying its relevance. When appraising unmarkedness, instead of positioning themselves with respect to the algorithm’s code, they evaluated the news post code with respect to their own set of values. Additionally, on Facebook users systematically encoded a post-decoding response which was automatically transmitted to the algorithm and worked to inform further circulation. Therefore, the circulation of news posts on Facebook’s newsfeed was redefined as an encoding/decoding circuit composed of three moments: production encoding/decoding, circulation decoding/encoding, and ‘prosumption’ decoding/encoding. The larger implications of this redefinition are the characterisation of Facebook as a meta-ideological apparatus, promoting a meta-ideological cultural order that encompasses the cultural order promoted by news producers.	en_AU
dc.format	Thesis (PhD)
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/140938/2/02Whole.pdf
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/ppc
dc.title	Facebook as a meta-ideological apparatus: reassessing the encoding/decoding model in the context of social media	en_AU
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*

Abstract:

Social media, over the past fifteen years, has become a major gateway to news. The practice of an algorithmically-customised selection of news content has revived critical concerns within the research community regarding the risk of large scale ideology diffusion without appearing to do so. This research aims to tackle those critical concerns, investigating how the circulation of news on social media, via algorithmic customisation, may impact how the users decode news posts, using Facebook as a case study. A transdisciplinary qualitative approach combining cultural studies and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has been chosen. A series of in-depth interviews with a ‘guided tour’ of Facebook’s newsfeeds was conducted and screen-recorded with a sample of young journalism students. The interview data and the researcher’s observations during the guided tour served to understand decoding practices via a thematic analysis while the content of the newsfeeds was used to observe what the algorithm selected for them, and how meaning was created through circulation. The news posts were coded with an automated semantic tagger, in order to reproduce an algorithmic thinking process, and then a multimodal analysis model was done to investigate any surface patterns of meaning making. The analysis of the participants’ newsfeed showed that the circulation moment may be compared to a decoding/encoding sequence. The newsfeed-generating algorithm decoded both the news contents posted on the platform and its users’ preferences, and then re-encoded the news posts before re-circulating them to users. During the circulation, no new verbal message is created, but existing ones are aggregated together and contextualised in a certain way, to orientate users’ decoding towards the algorithm’s preferred meaning. Despite being orientated to decode towards the algorithm’s preferred meaning, users seemed to preserve their decoding autonomy. They appeared to adapt their decoding practices and to interpret the ideological connotations carried by a news posts before comprehending it and identifying its relevance. When appraising unmarkedness, instead of positioning themselves with respect to the algorithm’s code, they evaluated the news post code with respect to their own set of values. Additionally, on Facebook users systematically encoded a post-decoding response which was automatically transmitted to the algorithm and worked to inform further circulation. Therefore, the circulation of news posts on Facebook’s newsfeed was redefined as an encoding/decoding circuit composed of three moments: production encoding/decoding, circulation decoding/encoding, and ‘prosumption’ decoding/encoding. The larger implications of this redefinition are the characterisation of Facebook as a meta-ideological apparatus, promoting a meta-ideological cultural order that encompasses the cultural order promoted by news producers.

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