Kelly Gates | University of California, San Diego (original) (raw)
Books by Kelly Gates
Papers by Kelly Gates
Media Culture & Society, 2023
This article examines how video journalism produced by the elite press is using forensic techniqu... more This article examines how video journalism produced by the elite press is using forensic techniques and aesthetics as part of the effort to reinvent journalistic authority in a fragmented media and political sphere. I first discuss some earlier moments in which news coverage of events adopted a media-forensic epistemology and style, and then turn to the formation of the New York Times Visual Investigations team, a group at the leading-edge of this type of journalism today. I provide an analysis of one of the team's investigative reports, a 40-minute account of the January 6 Capitol riot assembled from vernacular video, surveillance footage, police bodycam video, and other non-news source materials. In both its formal aspects and its subject matter, the piece represents an important example for understanding an emerging form of forensic journalism. While the January 6 Capitol riot was not the first time news coverage of a violent event adopted a forensic style and epistemology, the forensic-media coverage of the riot represents a unique conjuncture. A new convergence of media-technological developments and journalist practices shaped how the storming of the Capitol was experienced, investigated, and covered as a media event.
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022
In the United States, the threat of COVID-19 as a public health problem was impossible to separat... more In the United States, the threat of COVID-19 as a public health problem was impossible to separate from the financial threat. From the start, the virus’s circulation through human bodies intermingled with all the ways human lives had been defined by neoliberalism’s economizing rationality. To unpack the convergence of the pandemic with neoliberal rationality, this article examines the financial advisory discourse produced by credit and fintech companies at the start of the pandemic, focusing on Equifax, Experian, and Mint. This messaging was replete with expressions of care, along with promises of institutional assistance. However, reading further it became clear the companies offered mostly financial self-help advice. The immediate turn to this type of messaging suggested how much the financial system depended on a collective continuation of the individual’s sense of moral responsibility for financial self-management and creditworthiness, and especially diligent debt-payment.
https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.3138/topia-2022-0016
Surveillance and Society, 2019
Much of the discussion about platforms and "platform capitalism" centers on commercial platform c... more Much of the discussion about platforms and "platform capitalism" centers on commercial platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Shoshana Zuboff's (2015) analysis of "surveillance capitalism" similarly focuses on Google as the trailblazer pushing the new logic of accumulation that is focused on data extraction and analysis of human activities. In his typology of platform companies, Nick Srnicek (2017) includes less visible industrial platforms that situate themselves as intermediaries between companies rather than between companies and consumer-users. In this article, the focus is a platform-building effort that looks something like an industrial platform but differs in the sense that the company in question, Axon Enterprise, aims to situate itself as an intermediary within and among law enforcement agencies (non-market entities) as a means of building a large-scale data-extractive system of monetization. Axon's business strategy is emblematic of the ways that police evidence and record-keeping systems are being reimagined, and to some extent reconfigured, as sources of data extraction and analytics on the model of the platform. Whether Axon succeeds or is eclipsed by a competitor like Palantir or even Amazon or Microsoft, the process of reimagining and reorganizing policing as a platform is underway-a process that, to paraphrase Zuboff, deeply imbricates public and private surveillance activities, dissolving the boundary between public and private authority in the surveillance project.
Surveillance and Society, 2020
This essay engages with the question of surveillance and evidence by considering the use of media... more This essay engages with the question of surveillance and evidence by considering the use of media forensics in journalistic storytelling. The use of video evidence and other data derived from surveillance systems to assemble investigative news results in a documentary form of what Thomas Levin (2002) calls surveillant narration-a tendency in cinema to treat surveillance thematically while at the same time incorporating it into the structure of the narration itself. If using surveillance as the structure of journalistic narration seems like a natural fit, it is for its aesthetic effect as much as its evidentiary value. Forensic journalism is emerging as one site where media forensics becomes formalized as a product of popular consumption and sense-making, taking its place alongside forensic-themed reality television and fictional crime dramas like CSI, as much as real forensic investigations and legal proceedings.
I was invited to write this short piece for Aeon in response to the prompt, "How Will Biometrics ... more I was invited to write this short piece for Aeon in response to the prompt, "How Will Biometrics Transform Surveillance Culture?" It has since disappeared from the Aeon website, so I'm posting it here.
This chapter looks at the resurgence of interest in emotion measurement in the domain of market a... more This chapter looks at the resurgence of interest in emotion measurement in the domain of market and media research, focusing on efforts to market the nascent technology of automated facial expression analysis (AFEA) for this purpose. Two start-up companies are marketing prototype versions of AFEA as market research tools: Affectiva and Emotient. Formed by researchers from major universities, these companies market their AFEA systems as either web-based platforms that process visual data and serve up results from their servers, or as software development kits that can be integrated with other developers’ devices and applications. This article situates these ventures in the context of the history of market and media research, and specifically the field’s long-standing interest in making emotion a measurable phenomenon. It also looks at the resurgent interest in emotion in more recent market research trends, namely “neuromarketing” and “sentiment analysis.” The chapter lastly examines the way Affectiva and Emotient conceptualize the uses and users of their technologies, as suggested in their website promotional materials. Two big promises made about AFEA as a market research tool are (1) its ability to bypass people’s conscious reflections about their mediated experiences and instead provide “accurate” measures of their visceral, pre-verbal responses, and (2) its “scalability,” or potential application for large-scale visual sentiment analysis—mining visual data to automatically gauge the affective tone of troves of visual media content circulating online. This chapter argues that, in their market research and product design applications, new emotion-measurement technologies like AFEA are best understood as technologies of media subjectivation—ways of both measuring and modulating people’s embodied, affective engagements with media, with each other, and with the world.
This chapter considers the role of body-worn camera systems and the body-worn camera market in th... more This chapter considers the role of body-worn camera systems and the body-worn camera market in the broader police media economy, focusing what TASER International refers to as its “video business” and the forms of media labor that such business both requires and makes possible. By employing the term “police media labor,” I mean to capture the fully integrated aspects of cultural and technical work, material and immaterial labor, that define modern policing and police power—both police work and police authority as embodied, technical, data-intensive, performative, interpretive, and mediated.
First, I discuss TASER International and a TASER Tech Summit I attended in June 2014, considering the role of both the company and the promotional event in the police media economy. While there are many other companies vying for position in the body-worn camera market, TASER seems poised to be a market leader, given the company’s already established relationships with hundreds of police agencies outfitted with their CEWs. In the second section, I look more closely at the “work of wearing cameras,” a form of labor that is part performance and part auto-surveillance. Operating on-body cameras allows cops to create representations of their encounters on the job, self-representations of their subjective experiences. At the same time, the camera systems provide a record of police work for risk assessment within police organizations, and for review in the courtroom or official legal milieu, or by media audiences more broadly. Finally, I consider the practices associated with the backend video evidence management systems, the work required to process, archive, search, circulate, and render authoritative interpretations of video generated by body-worn cameras. It is in these backend systems where the work of wearing cameras is transformed into scalable, infrastructural labor, and where the individual videos and embodied work activities involved in digitally recorded policing become valuable objects of exchange in the police media economy.
Of necessity, the field of media studies no longer focuses exclusively on the conventional catego... more Of necessity, the field of media studies no longer focuses exclusively on the conventional categories of television, film, radio, and print. Distributed digital networks, new types of hardware and software configurations, and new institutional arrangements in the media industries are disrupting existing categories and challenging theoretical and methodological approaches. How can media studies best make sense of changing media institutions, forms, and uses? How will the field keep pace with changes in media occurring in the decades to come? What will the "new media" of the future look like, and how can media studies help shape that future? Media Studies Futures highlights some of the major challenges and opportunities facing scholars, students, and advocates interested in understanding our changing media forms and working toward realizing their democratic possibilities. The main themes addressed here include: (1) media theory, methods, and pedagogy; (2) social and mobile media;
Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies , 2013
This essay addresses three key issues for critical-cultural studies: posthumanism, network infras... more This essay addresses three key issues for critical-cultural studies: posthumanism, network infrastructures, and sustainability. The examples of Google Glass, Google's 'Data Centers' online photo gallery, and James Cameron's film 'Avatar' are used to briefly elaborate on the importance of these issues for critical-cultural studies, and to argue for the integration of materialist and representational forms of analysis.
Media Culture & Society, 2023
This article examines how video journalism produced by the elite press is using forensic techniqu... more This article examines how video journalism produced by the elite press is using forensic techniques and aesthetics as part of the effort to reinvent journalistic authority in a fragmented media and political sphere. I first discuss some earlier moments in which news coverage of events adopted a media-forensic epistemology and style, and then turn to the formation of the New York Times Visual Investigations team, a group at the leading-edge of this type of journalism today. I provide an analysis of one of the team's investigative reports, a 40-minute account of the January 6 Capitol riot assembled from vernacular video, surveillance footage, police bodycam video, and other non-news source materials. In both its formal aspects and its subject matter, the piece represents an important example for understanding an emerging form of forensic journalism. While the January 6 Capitol riot was not the first time news coverage of a violent event adopted a forensic style and epistemology, the forensic-media coverage of the riot represents a unique conjuncture. A new convergence of media-technological developments and journalist practices shaped how the storming of the Capitol was experienced, investigated, and covered as a media event.
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022
In the United States, the threat of COVID-19 as a public health problem was impossible to separat... more In the United States, the threat of COVID-19 as a public health problem was impossible to separate from the financial threat. From the start, the virus’s circulation through human bodies intermingled with all the ways human lives had been defined by neoliberalism’s economizing rationality. To unpack the convergence of the pandemic with neoliberal rationality, this article examines the financial advisory discourse produced by credit and fintech companies at the start of the pandemic, focusing on Equifax, Experian, and Mint. This messaging was replete with expressions of care, along with promises of institutional assistance. However, reading further it became clear the companies offered mostly financial self-help advice. The immediate turn to this type of messaging suggested how much the financial system depended on a collective continuation of the individual’s sense of moral responsibility for financial self-management and creditworthiness, and especially diligent debt-payment.
https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.3138/topia-2022-0016
Surveillance and Society, 2019
Much of the discussion about platforms and "platform capitalism" centers on commercial platform c... more Much of the discussion about platforms and "platform capitalism" centers on commercial platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Shoshana Zuboff's (2015) analysis of "surveillance capitalism" similarly focuses on Google as the trailblazer pushing the new logic of accumulation that is focused on data extraction and analysis of human activities. In his typology of platform companies, Nick Srnicek (2017) includes less visible industrial platforms that situate themselves as intermediaries between companies rather than between companies and consumer-users. In this article, the focus is a platform-building effort that looks something like an industrial platform but differs in the sense that the company in question, Axon Enterprise, aims to situate itself as an intermediary within and among law enforcement agencies (non-market entities) as a means of building a large-scale data-extractive system of monetization. Axon's business strategy is emblematic of the ways that police evidence and record-keeping systems are being reimagined, and to some extent reconfigured, as sources of data extraction and analytics on the model of the platform. Whether Axon succeeds or is eclipsed by a competitor like Palantir or even Amazon or Microsoft, the process of reimagining and reorganizing policing as a platform is underway-a process that, to paraphrase Zuboff, deeply imbricates public and private surveillance activities, dissolving the boundary between public and private authority in the surveillance project.
Surveillance and Society, 2020
This essay engages with the question of surveillance and evidence by considering the use of media... more This essay engages with the question of surveillance and evidence by considering the use of media forensics in journalistic storytelling. The use of video evidence and other data derived from surveillance systems to assemble investigative news results in a documentary form of what Thomas Levin (2002) calls surveillant narration-a tendency in cinema to treat surveillance thematically while at the same time incorporating it into the structure of the narration itself. If using surveillance as the structure of journalistic narration seems like a natural fit, it is for its aesthetic effect as much as its evidentiary value. Forensic journalism is emerging as one site where media forensics becomes formalized as a product of popular consumption and sense-making, taking its place alongside forensic-themed reality television and fictional crime dramas like CSI, as much as real forensic investigations and legal proceedings.
I was invited to write this short piece for Aeon in response to the prompt, "How Will Biometrics ... more I was invited to write this short piece for Aeon in response to the prompt, "How Will Biometrics Transform Surveillance Culture?" It has since disappeared from the Aeon website, so I'm posting it here.
This chapter looks at the resurgence of interest in emotion measurement in the domain of market a... more This chapter looks at the resurgence of interest in emotion measurement in the domain of market and media research, focusing on efforts to market the nascent technology of automated facial expression analysis (AFEA) for this purpose. Two start-up companies are marketing prototype versions of AFEA as market research tools: Affectiva and Emotient. Formed by researchers from major universities, these companies market their AFEA systems as either web-based platforms that process visual data and serve up results from their servers, or as software development kits that can be integrated with other developers’ devices and applications. This article situates these ventures in the context of the history of market and media research, and specifically the field’s long-standing interest in making emotion a measurable phenomenon. It also looks at the resurgent interest in emotion in more recent market research trends, namely “neuromarketing” and “sentiment analysis.” The chapter lastly examines the way Affectiva and Emotient conceptualize the uses and users of their technologies, as suggested in their website promotional materials. Two big promises made about AFEA as a market research tool are (1) its ability to bypass people’s conscious reflections about their mediated experiences and instead provide “accurate” measures of their visceral, pre-verbal responses, and (2) its “scalability,” or potential application for large-scale visual sentiment analysis—mining visual data to automatically gauge the affective tone of troves of visual media content circulating online. This chapter argues that, in their market research and product design applications, new emotion-measurement technologies like AFEA are best understood as technologies of media subjectivation—ways of both measuring and modulating people’s embodied, affective engagements with media, with each other, and with the world.
This chapter considers the role of body-worn camera systems and the body-worn camera market in th... more This chapter considers the role of body-worn camera systems and the body-worn camera market in the broader police media economy, focusing what TASER International refers to as its “video business” and the forms of media labor that such business both requires and makes possible. By employing the term “police media labor,” I mean to capture the fully integrated aspects of cultural and technical work, material and immaterial labor, that define modern policing and police power—both police work and police authority as embodied, technical, data-intensive, performative, interpretive, and mediated.
First, I discuss TASER International and a TASER Tech Summit I attended in June 2014, considering the role of both the company and the promotional event in the police media economy. While there are many other companies vying for position in the body-worn camera market, TASER seems poised to be a market leader, given the company’s already established relationships with hundreds of police agencies outfitted with their CEWs. In the second section, I look more closely at the “work of wearing cameras,” a form of labor that is part performance and part auto-surveillance. Operating on-body cameras allows cops to create representations of their encounters on the job, self-representations of their subjective experiences. At the same time, the camera systems provide a record of police work for risk assessment within police organizations, and for review in the courtroom or official legal milieu, or by media audiences more broadly. Finally, I consider the practices associated with the backend video evidence management systems, the work required to process, archive, search, circulate, and render authoritative interpretations of video generated by body-worn cameras. It is in these backend systems where the work of wearing cameras is transformed into scalable, infrastructural labor, and where the individual videos and embodied work activities involved in digitally recorded policing become valuable objects of exchange in the police media economy.
Of necessity, the field of media studies no longer focuses exclusively on the conventional catego... more Of necessity, the field of media studies no longer focuses exclusively on the conventional categories of television, film, radio, and print. Distributed digital networks, new types of hardware and software configurations, and new institutional arrangements in the media industries are disrupting existing categories and challenging theoretical and methodological approaches. How can media studies best make sense of changing media institutions, forms, and uses? How will the field keep pace with changes in media occurring in the decades to come? What will the "new media" of the future look like, and how can media studies help shape that future? Media Studies Futures highlights some of the major challenges and opportunities facing scholars, students, and advocates interested in understanding our changing media forms and working toward realizing their democratic possibilities. The main themes addressed here include: (1) media theory, methods, and pedagogy; (2) social and mobile media;
Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies , 2013
This essay addresses three key issues for critical-cultural studies: posthumanism, network infras... more This essay addresses three key issues for critical-cultural studies: posthumanism, network infrastructures, and sustainability. The examples of Google Glass, Google's 'Data Centers' online photo gallery, and James Cameron's film 'Avatar' are used to briefly elaborate on the importance of these issues for critical-cultural studies, and to argue for the integration of materialist and representational forms of analysis.