Fenwick Mckelvey
Biographic Data
| ID | 277167 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fenwick Mckelvey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fenwick |
| FAMILY NAME | Mckelvey |
| SIGNATURE | MCKELVEY F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Concordia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7584-1133 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Consultation Machine: Experiments in AI Futures, Literacies and Public Participation
The Consultation Machine was our third attempt to create a workshop for publics to engage and debate AI futures. Our efforts devolved from sincere attempts to use strategic foresight to shape AI policy, towards AI-assisted future-making, and finally to the Consultation Machine. We document these three different prototypes to explain the evolution of their design, shaped by participatory methods, and to critically reflect on the results. Our effor…
Next-generation strategic foresight for responsible AI governance and technology policy: Introducing the Archer Model
ArtIA: Imagining a new digital commons for creative AI
Generative AI and the information commons: Controversy, copyright, and closure
Knowledge or information commons is a critical concept in communication and information policy necessary to understand generative AI (genAI) governance. We introduce the concept of the commons as an existing problem for AI governance and develop a conceptual framework for commons management solutions for genAI. We then evaluate if commons management informs active AI governance. Focusing on efforts in the United States, we analyse regulatory subm…
Blowing artificial intelligence bubbles: Studies of technological hype
Deconstructing public participation in the governance of facial recognition technologies in Canada
AI policymaking as drama: Stages, roles, and ghosts in AI governance in the United Kingdom and Canada
As two researchers faced with the prospect of still more knowledge mobilisation, and still more consultation, our manuscript critically reflects on strategies for engaging with consultations as critical questions in critical AI studies. Our intervention reflects on the often-ambivalent roles of researchers and ‘experts’ in the production, contestation, and transformation of consultations and the publicities therein concerning AI. Although ‘AI’ is…
(Un)stable diffusions: The publics, publicities, and publicizations of generative AI
Generative AI is a uniquely public technology. The large language models behind ChatGPT and other tools that generate text and images is a major develop in publicity as much as technology. Without public data and public participation, these large models could not be trained. Without the attention, hype, and hope around these technologies, the big AI firms probably could not afford the computational costs to train these models. Our special issue q…
Pornhub and Policy: Examining the Erasure of Pornography Workers in Canadian Platform Governance
Background: In 2021, the Canadian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (ETHI) conducted an inquiry around Pornhub, following allegations that parent company MindGeek profits from non-consensual content. Analysis: This article offers a discourse analysis of the ETHI’s process, testimony, and report on Pornhub using Carol Bacchi’s policy analysis method, “What is the problem represented to be?” Conclusions a…
Freezing out: Legacy media's shaping of AI as a cold controversy
Mainstream coverage of artificial intelligence often appears to emphasise the technologies' benefit and economic potential over its growing downsides. How does a technology poised to be so disruptive become so uncritically embraced? Why is it, simply put, that artificial intelligence's representations in legacy media do not normally convey the controversialities otherwise found in research or policy debates? We introduce the concept of 'freezing …
Algorithms, Platforms, and Policy: The Changing Face of Canadian News Distribution
Introduction to Special Section: The Mainstreaming of the Canadian Alt-Right
Is the Alt-Right Popular in Canada? Image Sharing, Popular Culture, and Social Media
Background: In popular coverage and social media analysis, the alt-right has been described as a popular phenomenon. Following Stuart Hall’s understanding of popular culture, we question the status of the alt-right in Canada as both a political and methodological problem that requires critical attention to social media metrics and critical experimentation in developing new digital methods. Analysis: Our study developed a novel method to analyse i…
Introduction: The Mainstreaming of the Canadian Alt-Right
AI and the Automation of Warfare
On June 16, 2021, Fenwick McKelvey met with Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves (2020) to discuss their work, including their recently co-authored book Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine. McKelvey’s (2018) work focuses on algorithmic media and its implications for communication, including his book Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed. Packer’s (2008) work is generally concerned with the use of automated, military, and mobile media for pur…
Introduction: Connection issues
Hyperproduction: A social theory of deep generative models
Platformized cultural production is in flux. Artificial intelligence is often seen as a key driving force of this shift. This article examines the proliferation of AI-generated media to introduce a new concept to theorize cultural production: hyperproduction. This notion designates the penetration of cultural life with deep generative models. Juxtaposing two empirical use cases–autonomous vehicles and virtual influencers—the article problematises…
States of computing: On government organization and artificial intelligence in Canada
With technologies like machine learning and data analytics being deployed as privileged means to improve how contemporary bureaucracies work, many governments around the world have turned to artificial intelligence as a tool of statecraft. In that context, our paper uses Canada as a critical case to investigate the relationship between ideals of good government and good technology. We do so through not one, but two Trudeaus-celebrity Prime Minist…
Introduction: Optimization and its discontents
Optimization is seemingly everywhere and yet elusive. Our bodies, tools, and institutions are now understood as endlessly optimizable. But what does optimization mean? Or more crucially, what does it do? Who or what is optimized or dis-optimized? This themed issue introduces optimization as a critical concept to analyze the governance and governmentality of large technological infrastructures, platforms, and self-management apps. We define optimi…
Special Section: Alt-Rights in Canada
Memes, scenes and #ELXN2019s: How partisans make memes during elections
Our article analyses partisan, user-generated Facebook pages and groups to understand the articulation of political identity and party identification. Adapting the concept of scenes usually found in music studies, these Facebook pages and groups act as partisan scenes that maintain identities and sentiments through participatory practices, principally by making and sharing memes. Using a mixed methods approach that combines social media data and …
Optimizing Our Networked Lives
We use the term networked optimization to emphasize a sustained but changing set of techniques, technologies, and calculations to decide the best life -- the optimal -- through infrastructures, design, mathematics and engineering. Optimization is a vital concept at a time of critical interest in infrastructural power. Usually defined as doing actions to make the best or most effective use of something, our panel highlights the different uses of t…
Corporate contact tracing as a pandemic response
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a steady stream of propositions from tech giants and start-ups alike has furnished us with the idea that GPS- or Bluetooth-enabled contact tracing apps are a vital part of the pandemic response. This commentary considers these apps as ‘corporate contact tracing’, emphasizing the private-sector role that such developments imply. We first discuss corporate contact tracing’s potential to de-center the power …
Political Bots: Disrupting Canada’s Democracy
Bots—automated online agents that mimic human behaviour—attempting to influence public opinion through social media, provide a useful case of the challenges for regulating disruptive technologies. This article articulates four problems associated with bots in politics: identification, evidence, attribution, and enforcement. It then explores policy solutions, arguing the solutions must align with the type of disruption bots contribute to
Artificial Intelligence Policy Innovations at the Canadian Federal Government
This article summarizes two initiatives for artificial intelligence (AI) underway in the Canadian public service: public consultation and collaboration in compiling an algorithmic impact assessment, and a symposium on AI and human rights held by Global Affairs Canada. The findings contextualize the national consultations on digital and data transformation and future steps for more inclusive AI governance in Canada
Discoverability: Toward a Definition of Content Discovery Through Platforms
Discoverability is a concept of growing use in digital cultural policy, but it lacks a clear and comprehensive definition. Typically, discoverability is narrowly defined as a problem for content creators to find an audience given an abundance of choice. This view misses the important ways that apps, online stores, streaming services, and other platforms coordinate the experiences of content discovery. In this article, we propose an analytical fra…
Porting the political campaign: The NationBuilder platform and the global flows of political technology
Political parties rely on digital technologies to manage volunteering, fundraising, fieldwork, and data collection. They also need tools to manage web, email, and social media outreach. Increasingly, new political engagement platforms integrate these tasks into one unified system. These platforms pose important questions about the flows of political practices from campaigns to platforms and vice versa as well as across campaigns globally. NationB…
Freezing out: Legacy media's shaping of AI as a cold controversy
Mainstream coverage of artificial intelligence often appears to emphasise the technologies' benefit and economic potential over its growing downsides. How does a technology poised to be so disruptive become so uncritically embraced? Why is it, simply put, that artificial intelligence's representations in legacy media do not normally convey the controversialities otherwise found in research or policy debates? We introduce the concept of 'freezing …
Hyperproduction: A social theory of deep generative models
Platformized cultural production is in flux. Artificial intelligence is often seen as a key driving force of this shift. This article examines the proliferation of AI-generated media to introduce a new concept to theorize cultural production: hyperproduction. This notion designates the penetration of cultural life with deep generative models. Juxtaposing two empirical use cases–autonomous vehicles and virtual influencers—the article problematises…
Memes, scenes and #ELXN2019s: How partisans make memes during elections
Our article analyses partisan, user-generated Facebook pages and groups to understand the articulation of political identity and party identification. Adapting the concept of scenes usually found in music studies, these Facebook pages and groups act as partisan scenes that maintain identities and sentiments through participatory practices, principally by making and sharing memes. Using a mixed methods approach that combines social media data and …
Algorithmic Regulation in Media and Cultural Policy: A Framework to Evaluate Barriers to Accountability
The word “algorithm” is best understood as a generic term for automated decision-making. Algorithms can be coded by humans or they can become self-taught through machine learning. Cultural goods and news increasingly pass through information intermediaries known as platforms that rely on algorithms to filter, rank, sort, classify, and promote information. Algorithmic content recommendation acts as an important and increasingly contentious gatekee…
We Like Copies, Just Don’t Let the Others Fool You: The Paradox of The Pirate Bay
The Facebook page of the anti-copyright The Pirate Bay (TPB) explains much about the group in few words. “We like copies,” it explains, “just don’t let the others fool you.” The paradoxical phrase reveals the contradictions of TPB. Their use of “copies” deliberately chaffs with their opponents who equate piracy with theft of intellectual property. Pirates copy digital bits; they do not steal intellectual property. Championing copying is problemat…
Bugging out: Darknets as parasites of large-scale media objects
Platforms and infrastructures have quickly become seminal concepts to understand large-scale computational systems. The difference between a platform and an infrastructure is subject to debate. In this article, we use the concept of the darknet to describe how infrastructure tends toward being public with other things where platforms tend to private relations. The darknet reveals these relations negatively, as we discuss, by turning these media o…
A consensual hallucination no more? The Internet as simulation machine
In this article, we investigate the macro-role being played – and played out – by digital, social and ‘new’ media today. We suggest that these media, facilitated by the Internet, can together be understood as a vast simulation machine that mediates and modulates everyday life to refashion what was once the ‘real world’ in its own image. Life in the ‘meatspace’ (the physical world) is most valuable, we suggest, not because it involves tweets, opin…
(Un)stable diffusions: The publics, publicities, and publicizations of generative AI
Generative AI is a uniquely public technology. The large language models behind ChatGPT and other tools that generate text and images is a major develop in publicity as much as technology. Without public data and public participation, these large models could not be trained. Without the attention, hype, and hope around these technologies, the big AI firms probably could not afford the computational costs to train these models. Our special issue q…
Arpanet and its boundary devices: Modems, IMPs, and the inter-structuralism of infrastructures
Our paper focuses on the Interface Message Processor (IMP), an important device in the history of ARPANET. Designed as the interface between ARPANET nodes and the common carrier telephone system, the IMP actualized the ARPANET as an experimental packet-switching communication system. We conceptualize the IMP as historical boundary object that exposes ARPANET’s close relationship to the telephone system. Our analysis offers a novel history of ARPA…
Election bloggers: Methods for determining political influence
This paper discusses early findings and methodological pitfalls of a study of a hyper–mediated election campaign in Canada. Web logs — or “blogs” — serve as the primary object of study. The paper focuses on possible sources of large scale data (aggregated blogger posts) and methods of determining the political influence of bloggers. A series of methodologies are proposed to resolve the over–reliance upon information aggregators and blog search en…
Networked Publics: The Double Articulation of Code and Politics on Facebook
Through three case studies of online political activism on Facebook, this article conceptualizes the deployment of issue publics (Lippmann, 1993; Marres, 2005) on Facebook. We argue that issue publics on Facebook come into being through a specific set of double articulations of code and politics that link and reshape informational processes, communicational constraints and possibilities, and political practices in different and sometimes contradi…
Blogs I Read”: Partisanship and Party Loyalty in the Canadian Political Blogosphere
This article builds upon current hyperlink mapping research to determine the degree of party loyalty and partisanship in the Canadian political blogosphere. The article develops a hyperlink-based method of determining blogger endorsements as a means of tracking cross-party recommendations. The article concludes that bloggers affiliated with the governing Conservative Party of Canada exhibit the most cohesive ideological and party loyal set of blo…
Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times
Founded in 1974, the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) aims to publish Canadian research and scholarship in the field of communication studies. The purview of the journal is the entire field of communication studies as practiced in Canada or with relevance to Canada
Algorithmic Media Need Democratic Methods: Why Publics Matter
Algorithms increasingly control the backbone of media and information systems. This control occurs deep within opaque technical systems far from the political attention capable of addressing its influence. It also challenges conventional public theory, because the technical operation of algorithms does not prompt the reflection and awareness necessary for forming publics. Informed public deliberation about algorithmic media requires new methods, …
We Like Copies, Just Don’t Let the Others Fool You: The Paradox of The Pirate Bay
The Facebook page of the anti-copyright The Pirate Bay (TPB) explains much about the group in few words. “We like copies,” it explains, “just don’t let the others fool you.” The paradoxical phrase reveals the contradictions of TPB. Their use of “copies” deliberately chaffs with their opponents who equate piracy with theft of intellectual property. Pirates copy digital bits; they do not steal intellectual property. Championing copying is problemat…
A consensual hallucination no more? The Internet as simulation machine
In this article, we investigate the macro-role being played – and played out – by digital, social and ‘new’ media today. We suggest that these media, facilitated by the Internet, can together be understood as a vast simulation machine that mediates and modulates everyday life to refashion what was once the ‘real world’ in its own image. Life in the ‘meatspace’ (the physical world) is most valuable, we suggest, not because it involves tweets, opin…
Porting the political campaign: The NationBuilder platform and the global flows of political technology
Political parties rely on digital technologies to manage volunteering, fundraising, fieldwork, and data collection. They also need tools to manage web, email, and social media outreach. Increasingly, new political engagement platforms integrate these tasks into one unified system. These platforms pose important questions about the flows of political practices from campaigns to platforms and vice versa as well as across campaigns globally. NationB…
Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed
A complete history and theory of internet daemons brings these little-known-but very consequential-programs into the spotlight We're used to talking about how tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule the internet, but what about daemons? Ubiquitous programs that have colonized the Net's infrastructure-as well as the devices we use to access it-daemons are little known. Fenwick McKelvey weaves together history, theory, and policy to give…
Arpanet and its boundary devices: Modems, IMPs, and the inter-structuralism of infrastructures
Our paper focuses on the Interface Message Processor (IMP), an important device in the history of ARPANET. Designed as the interface between ARPANET nodes and the common carrier telephone system, the IMP actualized the ARPANET as an experimental packet-switching communication system. We conceptualize the IMP as historical boundary object that exposes ARPANET’s close relationship to the telephone system. Our analysis offers a novel history of ARPA…
Political Bots: Disrupting Canada’s Democracy
Bots—automated online agents that mimic human behaviour—attempting to influence public opinion through social media, provide a useful case of the challenges for regulating disruptive technologies. This article articulates four problems associated with bots in politics: identification, evidence, attribution, and enforcement. It then explores policy solutions, arguing the solutions must align with the type of disruption bots contribute to
Artificial Intelligence Policy Innovations at the Canadian Federal Government
This article summarizes two initiatives for artificial intelligence (AI) underway in the Canadian public service: public consultation and collaboration in compiling an algorithmic impact assessment, and a symposium on AI and human rights held by Global Affairs Canada. The findings contextualize the national consultations on digital and data transformation and future steps for more inclusive AI governance in Canada
Algorithmic Regulation in Media and Cultural Policy: A Framework to Evaluate Barriers to Accountability
The word “algorithm” is best understood as a generic term for automated decision-making. Algorithms can be coded by humans or they can become self-taught through machine learning. Cultural goods and news increasingly pass through information intermediaries known as platforms that rely on algorithms to filter, rank, sort, classify, and promote information. Algorithmic content recommendation acts as an important and increasingly contentious gatekee…
Discoverability: Toward a Definition of Content Discovery Through Platforms
Discoverability is a concept of growing use in digital cultural policy, but it lacks a clear and comprehensive definition. Typically, discoverability is narrowly defined as a problem for content creators to find an audience given an abundance of choice. This view misses the important ways that apps, online stores, streaming services, and other platforms coordinate the experiences of content discovery. In this article, we propose an analytical fra…
Complementary realities: Public domain Internet measurements in the development of Canada’s universal access policies
As access to the Internet has become increasingly essential for social and economic participation, public domain Internet measurements have become indispensable for users to validate quality of service their network operator delivers and for policymakers to identify and address gaps in broadband infrastructure. This article evaluates public domain Internet performance measurements available for assessing the state of connectivity and developing u…
Bugging out: Darknets as parasites of large-scale media objects
Platforms and infrastructures have quickly become seminal concepts to understand large-scale computational systems. The difference between a platform and an infrastructure is subject to debate. In this article, we use the concept of the darknet to describe how infrastructure tends toward being public with other things where platforms tend to private relations. The darknet reveals these relations negatively, as we discuss, by turning these media o…
Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed
Optimizing Our Networked Lives
We use the term networked optimization to emphasize a sustained but changing set of techniques, technologies, and calculations to decide the best life -- the optimal -- through infrastructures, design, mathematics and engineering. Optimization is a vital concept at a time of critical interest in infrastructural power. Usually defined as doing actions to make the best or most effective use of something, our panel highlights the different uses of t…
Corporate contact tracing as a pandemic response
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a steady stream of propositions from tech giants and start-ups alike has furnished us with the idea that GPS- or Bluetooth-enabled contact tracing apps are a vital part of the pandemic response. This commentary considers these apps as ‘corporate contact tracing’, emphasizing the private-sector role that such developments imply. We first discuss corporate contact tracing’s potential to de-center the power …
Introduction: Optimization and its discontents
Optimization is seemingly everywhere and yet elusive. Our bodies, tools, and institutions are now understood as endlessly optimizable. But what does optimization mean? Or more crucially, what does it do? Who or what is optimized or dis-optimized? This themed issue introduces optimization as a critical concept to analyze the governance and governmentality of large technological infrastructures, platforms, and self-management apps. We define optimi…
Special Section: Alt-Rights in Canada
Memes, scenes and #ELXN2019s: How partisans make memes during elections
Our article analyses partisan, user-generated Facebook pages and groups to understand the articulation of political identity and party identification. Adapting the concept of scenes usually found in music studies, these Facebook pages and groups act as partisan scenes that maintain identities and sentiments through participatory practices, principally by making and sharing memes. Using a mixed methods approach that combines social media data and …
Algorithms, Platforms, and Policy: The Changing Face of Canadian News Distribution
Introduction to Special Section: The Mainstreaming of the Canadian Alt-Right
Is the Alt-Right Popular in Canada? Image Sharing, Popular Culture, and Social Media
Background: In popular coverage and social media analysis, the alt-right has been described as a popular phenomenon. Following Stuart Hall’s understanding of popular culture, we question the status of the alt-right in Canada as both a political and methodological problem that requires critical attention to social media metrics and critical experimentation in developing new digital methods. Analysis: Our study developed a novel method to analyse i…
Political science (27 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Law (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Public relations (16 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (13 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Business (10 works)