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‘If you press this, I’ll pay’: MrBeast, YouTube, and the Mobilisation of the audience commodity in the name of charity Vincent Miller & Eddy Hogg 

Digital Organisation and Society (DOS) research centre upcoming research seminar with Dr Vincent Miller, Reader in Sociology and Cultural Studies in the SSPSSR, University of Kent.

Room: BOILER-0-07-Hybrid (the event will be hybrid and colleagues can join via Teams too)
Date: 20th November 10:30-12pm


About

Dr Miller is an active researcher, writer, and teacher in the inter-disciplinary areas of digital culture/new media studies, social theory and cultural/social/urban spatial studies. Dr Miller completed his PhD in Sociology at Lancaster University (under John Urry and Bulent Diken) and his BA and MA in Geography at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Overlit: Digital architectures of visibility

The DOS Research Centre is delighted to invite you to a public seminar given by our CBS partner, Prof. Mikkel Flyverbom. The event is organised by the DOS cluster of Digital Inequality, Ethics and Cyberactivism.

Speaker: Prof. Mikkel Flyverbom at Copenhagen Business School
Time: 2-4pm, Wednesday 2nd March
Venue: Shilling Lecture Theatre
Livestreaming link: Please contact DOSdirectors@rhul.ac.uk if you want to join this event.

Overlit: Digital architectures of visibility
(forthcoming in special section of Organization Theory, along with essays by Michael Power and Shoshana Zuboff)

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of digital technologies, data-driven approaches and algorithms, organization theory so far only engages with these developments in limited ways. A deeper engagement with the organizational ramifications of a digital, datafied world is urgently needed and must start from mappings of the phenomenon and the development of better theoretical vocabularies that can guide future research. Complementing the essays by Zuboff and Power in this exchange, my essay suggests a research agenda based on how digital technologies, data and algorithms impact and shape our lives in and around organizations by making us visible in novel ways. I unpack the technological and operational underpinnings of this phenomenon in two steps. The first is a broad conceptualization of the overall shape of what I term ‘digital architectures’. The second is a more granular theorization of how data-driven, algorithmic approaches make the ‘management of visibilities’ a central concern for humans, organizations and societies, as well as some reflections on possible responses to these developments. Taken together, these discussions highlight how digital ubiquity calls for novel theoretical perspectives and research avenues for organization theory to explore.