ALGOtalk #4: Santtu Räisänen

Santtu Räisänen is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at Helsinki University, working in the interstices of STS and cultural studies. His current research looks at the new culture of innovation in public administrations, but more broadly, he is motivated by empirical and critical analyses of the varied phenomena of contemporary techno-culture.

The TMS-funded ALGOFOLK project invites him to give a talk titled:

Convenience content: A concept and some open questions

We live in a contemporary deluge of content. Social media capitalise on an endless stream of audiovisual-textual bits of culture (human, corporate, and increasingly machine-produced), while streaming services offer an overflow of instant-access enjoyment. Consumer media consumption is on an even upward slope (estimated by some to have reached an average of over 600 minutes per day). Likewise, the working life of the global professional-managerial class is punctuated by (by some estimates) 30 million daily PowerPoint presentations. Behind the abundance of content is a platform industry demanding increasing content, a working life increasingly demanding the management of appearances, and a consumer increasingly burdened by untamable choice. I argue that across the office cultures, streaming platforms, and social media content feeds, there is a qualitative phenomenon which is not new but is untheorised: convenience content — content whose production and or consumption is in some sense undergirded by an experience, expectation, or discourse of convenience. Convenience content is easy to consume, or it might be easy to produce. It might be lacking in quality, but it makes up for it in quantity. Convenience content is increasingly ubiquitous: often a space filler that barely perturbs our attention but satisfies a constructed need for content. Rather than attempting an analytic definition, this presentation is an exercise in elicitation. I will draw out a broad sensibility of convenience content through certain select examples. Then, I will present preliminary puzzles looking at content through convenience raises: the media-archaeological question, the consumer culture question, and the automated culture question. This presentation represents early work in a nascent research project. Being in the mode of raising questions rather than providing answers, I hope to stir some thoughts. Even more so, I am very grateful for any critical commentary that this evokes.

This talk will be in English, and will be followed by a Q&A.