[Commlist] Call for Abstracts for Special Issue in New Media & Society, on Automating Communication in the Digital Society

*Call for Abstracts for* Special Issue in New Media & Society

Deadline for Abstract Submission: June 15, 2022

Automating Communication in the Digital Society*: Contexts, 
Consequences, Critique*

Special Issue Editors: Christian Katzenbach (Centre for Media, 
Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen; Alexander 
von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany) & 
Christian Pentzold (Department of Communication and Media Studies, 
Leipzig University, Germany)

Full CfA: 
https://www.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/fachbereiche/fb9/zemki/media/photos/publikationen/special-issues/CfP__Special_Issue_NMS_Automating_Communication.pdf 
<https://www.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/fachbereiche/fb9/zemki/media/photos/publikationen/special-issues/CfP__Special_Issue_NMS_Automating_Communication.pdf>

Automation has momentum. Automation is a defining feature of today’s 
societies. Automation converts the production of content, the 
distribution of information and messages, the curation of media use, and 
the governance of our networked lives into machine operations. All of 
these areas are increasingly shaped by algorithmically-driven processes 
and automated agents. They help to automate the selection and filtering 
of news feeds and search engines, they attribute relevance and 
popularity, perform content moderation and fact-checking. Automated 
agents like social bots participate in organizational communication such 
as customer service and, as a potential force of manipulation, also seem 
to intervene in election campaigns. As of today, innovations in smart 
companions and artificial intelligence are driven by ambitions to 
delegate physical motoric functions, cognitive processes, decisions, and 
evaluations to increasingly autonomous and capable technology. This is 
not a one-way transfer from humans to machines. Rather, we also witness 
environments where people come to act in an automatic fashion, where 
human contributions feed into processes of automation and help to 
improve them.

In consequence, the special issue of New Media & Society aims to study 
how subjectivity, autonomy, agency, and empowerment become defined and 
reconfigured in these novel human-machine encounters. We invite 
contributions that take issue with the conditions and consequences of 
automation and offer critical perspectives on the transition of human 
activity into machine operations.

Because automation, and the related processes of digitization, 
datafication, and algorithmization, are set to redefine most if not all 
sectors of society, they have become a research interest across the 
academy. We are especially interested in submissions that shed light 
across these themes:

Contexts: The ideology, infrastructures, and procedures around 
automatisation have a long history of mechanical inventions that 
implicate expectations of efficiency and enhancement but also engender 
fears of alienation and inorexable domination. What are the dominating 
sociotechnical imaginaries around automation? Inquiries into automation 
open up a broad array of topics from the history of ideas around human 
capabilities and machine capacities via political or economic arguments 
about the implications of automation on prosperity or democracy up to 
ethical, legal, and technological challenges. Hence, possible questions 
are: Can there be alternative visions for automation? What is to be 
learned from historical moments of people protesting and refusing the 
automation of labor and life?

Consequences: Automating communication affects and involves a variety of 
actors: when algorithms produce content this changes the effort and role 
of journalists. So we for instance ask: How do media actors engage with 
algorithmic content production? How does automated communication affect 
media use and media effects? Are journalists “gaming” the algorithms of 
platforms, and how? Who creates the tools and affordances that automate 
communication—and under which conditions? What happens when low-wage 
employees execute highly automated tasks, partly in order to mimic 
algorithms and artificial intelligence (“fauxtomation”)? New and 
(semi-)automated actors such as trolls, connected activists, and social 
bots alter the strategies of campaigning and the way parties and other 
organizations plan their activities. Who are these actors, and are they 
actors at all? Who can be held accountable for automated communication? 
Does automated communication cause dissonance and disrupt public 
spheres, and if so, how is this happening and can automation be a cure 
as well? What are challenges and possible solutions for regulation and 
media policy?

Critique: The story of automating communication can be told from two 
perspectives: the few who are shaping, designing, programming and 
implementing automation technologies, and the many who are using and 
become part of automated communication. In this regard, automation 
raises questions of power and power relations. Automating core features 
of democracy such as the assignment of relevance and legitimacy to 
issues, actors, and specific content, based on data and algorithms 
controlled and operated by a few private companies challenges notions of 
transparency, due process, and legitimacy. What are the regulatory 
measures to curb this power? And can automation provide meaningful 
answers to social problems? What is the impact of the increasing 
automatic detection of content deemed illegitimate (e.g., hate speech, 
copyright violation, nudity) in social media and comment sections? What 
is the role of datafication for automated and automating communication?

Studying automated communication often involves computational methods 
and trace data. But qualitative methods such as ethnography, interviews 
or observations can also help us to understand how automation comes 
about and actors use or make sense of automated communication. 
Particularly research focusing on social media platforms faces severe 
challenges of data access and data management nowadays, dealing with 
data protection regulation, privacy issues, and proprietary data. 
Analyses of automated actors, such as bots, rely on black-boxed tools 
and call for interdisciplinary approaches. We thus also invite 
submissions with a critical perspective on research methods and research 
ethics.

Timeline

1,000 to 1,500 word abstracts should be submitted by June 15, 2022 via 
the submission form at https://forms.gle/3Kxrf2wNrpqVaGno8 
<https://forms.gle/3Kxrf2wNrpqVaGno8>. The abstract should articulate: 
1) the issue or research question to be discussed, 2) the methodological 
or critical framework used, and 3) the expected findings or conclusions. 
Feel free to consult with the Special Issue Editors about your article 
ideas and potential angles or approaches.

No payment from the authors will be required.

Decisions will be communicated to the authors by September 15, 2022. 
Invited paper submissions will be due March 1, 2023 and will be 
submitted directly to the submission site for New Media & Society: 
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nms 
<https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nms> where they will undergo peer 
review following the usual procedures of New Media & Society. Please 
note that the invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee 
acceptance into the special issue.

Contact

Christian Katzenbach, (katzenbach /at/ uni-bremen.de) 
<mailto:(katzenbach /at/ uni-bremen.de)> Christian Pentzold, 
(christian.pentzold /at/ uni-leipzig.de) <mailto:(christian.pentzold /at/ uni-leipzig.de)>


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