This shift would radically change the ethical program of Twitter, shifting more of the responsibility for filtering information from individual users to the company’s algorithms and no doubt making it easier for advertisers to target certain audiences.
Shift of responsibility equals shift of control and power.
my own concerns with hospitality, guests, and hosts would call into question whether the host (the listowner) is the clear locus of responsibility in such a situation.
Okay, let me see if I understand this correctly. Responsibility shifts and is not always clear because a host can become a guest and vice versa, not to mention the responsibility of the software program.
Responsibility is not so easily assigned in such instances
Is this because the software, the ethical program, is what provides the constraint on the network, and not the human user alone?
procedural argument has embedded assumptions, and this invites the audience to interact and interpret.
A real-world example would be nice here.
The messages generated by such collaborations may in fact be artificially personal, but they are generated by software, which is authored by humans and which uses procedures to express ideas and arguments.
Just as some campaigns still use hard-copy letters that are artificially personal and are sent to a mailing list of targeted voters in a candidate's district.
protocological network, one that simultaneously exerted vertical, hierarchical power while also allowing volunteers to operate in a distributed fashion, and how volunteers used procedural arguments to navigate their way through that protocological infrastructure.
I would love it if this book had terms bolded wherever they are defined. I know it's not a textbook, but this would be so helpful to readers! Here the term protocological could be in boldface because the author uses it numerous times in the sentences that follow. :)
“Processes like military interrogation and customer relations are cultural. We tend to think of them as flexible and porous, but they are crafted from a multitude of protracted, intersecting cultural processes.”
Right. For instance, think about the script used by customer-service agents in The Philippines when speaking to Americans.
the authorship of procedures that generate image and text
i.e., that which underlies the visible.
ethical programs did they craft
How do individuals/campaigns "craft ethical programs"? Chapter 1 says that ethical programs are "pieces of software" at the threshold of the hospitable and inhospitable, the gate-keepers; and this software "informs, shapes, enables, constrains each networked rhetorical situation . . . the human user of software does not make decisions on her own."
the predicament of hospitality
Here is Brown referring to both the Law of hospitality and the laws of hospitality, i.e., both the availability of the Internet and the filters that respond to it?
These examples referring to Twitter and Facebook would be helpful earlier in this chapter to clarify the author's concept of hospitality (Law and law) because most people can relate to them.
This dual meaning of ethos demonstrates how ethical programs are always the result of the interplay between rhetor and space, and in computational environments this means that the ethical programs of writers and speakers are always in conversation with those of the software that shapes (and sometimes establishes) that space.
Per the author's earlier discussion, the software not only shapes but also informs, enables, and constrains, right? Is the author talking about the laws of hospitality, the filtering process here?
The list manager may be host to those sending e-mails, but she is the guest of protocols and software platforms.
This is the messiness of host/guest relations discussed above.
SMS enacts an ethical program.
Please clarify: how does this make SMS enact an "ethical program"? What defines an ethical program?
absolute, unconditional hospitality and calculating, conditional hospitality
i.e., the Law and the law