G De Seta
Biographic Data
| ID | 43121 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G De Seta |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | De Seta |
| SIGNATURE | DE SETA G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bergen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0497-2811 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 191 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Four Theses on Algorithmic Folklore
Recent advancements in machine learning have brought new forms of automation to the forefront of online interactions, exposing users of social media platforms and apps to different and unfamiliar kinds of algorithmic logics, which range from the curatorial biases of recommender systems and content analytics to the expansive possibilities offered by large language models and synthetic media. All these forms of automation are not only shaping how c…
The Short-Term Impact of an On-Site Literacy Intervention on Discerning Deepfake Videos Based on Visual Features
This study examines how well individuals in Switzerland can distinguish high-quality deepfakes from real videos and whether a brief literacy intervention improves detection. In an online experiment with 1,361 participants, we tested the deepfake detection skills and how prior exposure and experience with deepfakes and various forms of media literacy relate to performance. Participants struggled to identify deepfakes when attending to visual featu…
Support for deepfake regulation: The role of third-person perception, trust, and risk
Like other emerging technologies, deepfakes present both risks and benefits to society. Due to harmful applications such as disinformation and non-consensual pornography, calls for their regulation have increased recently. However, little is known about public support for deepfake regulation and the factors related to it. This study addresses this gap through a pre-registered online survey (n = 1,361) conducted in Switzerland, where citizens can …
Deepfakes or Synthetic Media? The Effect of Euphemisms for Labeling Technology on Risk and Benefit Perceptions
The language used in public debates and in the news can influence how citizens perceive the risks and benefits of technology. While framing effects on technology perception are well understood, few studies have focused on the effects of specific terms used to describe technology. We analyze how the terms deepfake and synthetic media affect risk and benefit perceptions across application fields. Using Switzerland as a case, our manual content anal…
Imagining machine vision: Four visual registers from the Chinese AI industry
Machine vision is one of the main applications of artificial intelligence. In China, the machine vision industry makes up more than a third of the national AI market, and technologies like face recognition, object tracking and automated driving play a central role in surveillance systems and social governance projects relying on the large-scale collection and processing of sensor data. Like other novel articulations of technology and society, mac…
From Ascii lanterns to synthetic livestreams: Three decades of Chinese digital folklore
The history of the internet in China is often narrated from the standpoint of infrastructural development, commercial growth, and social change—a framework that foregrounds governmental policies, corporate decisions, and large-scale public debates. And yet, in parallel to these processes, the widespread adoption of the internet and its domestication by hundreds of millions of Chinese users have resulted in a long history of digital folklore: ever…
Synthetic ethnography: Field devices for the qualitative study of generative models
Advancements in generative artificial intelligence have led to a rapid proliferation of machine learning models capable of synthesizing text, images, sounds, and other kinds of content. While the increasing realism of synthetic content stokes fears about misinformation and triggers debates around intellectual property, generative models are adopted across creative industries and synthetic media seep into cultural production. Qualitative research …
China’s digital infrastructure: Networks, systems, standards
In the People’s Republic of China, the development of information infrastructures has been a cardinal component of the national modernization project for more than four decades. While most discussions of digital infrastructure in the country focus on the ‘Chinese internet,' framed by architectures of control like the Great Firewall and governmental initiatives like Internet Plus, this special issue contends that China’s digital infrastructure ext…
QR code: The global making of an infrastructural gateway
This article traces the history of machine-readable data encoding standards and argues that the QR code has become an infrastructural gateway. Through the analysis of patents, corporate documents and advertising, ethnographic observations, and interviews with professionals, I describe the global making of the QR code and argue that the convergence of data encoding standards, mobile computing, machine vision algorithms, and platform ecosystems has…
Huanlian , or changing faces: Deepfakes on Chinese digital media platforms
In China, deepfakes are commonly known as huanlian, which literally means “changing faces.” Huanlian content, including face-swapped images and video reenactments, has been circulating in China since at least 2018, at first through amateur users experimenting with machine learning models and then through the popularization of audiovisual synthesis technologies offered by digital platforms. Informed by a wealth of interdisciplinary research on med…
Scaling the scene: Experimental music in Taiwan
This article draws on three years of participation in the Taiwanese experimental music scene and argues that, in order to explain how different forms of sociality contribute to its construction and scaling, it is necessary to examine how musicians, organizers and audiences describe their own creative practices. After sketching a brief history of experimental music in Taiwan and contextualizing my positioning as an audience member, musician and cr…
Apaic Report on the Holocode Crisis
The APAIC Report on the Holocode Crisis is a short story that imagines the future of machine-readable data encodings. In this story, I speculate about the next stage in the development of data encoding patterns: after barcodes and QR codes, the invention of “holocodes” will make it possible to store unprecedented amounts of data in a minuscule physical surface. As a collage of nested fictional materials (including ethnographic fieldnotes, intervi…
Introduction: Asia.Live: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia
This introduction to the special issue ‘ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia’ briefly summarizes the virtual workshop at which it originated and describes its contributions to the central concept of liveness. After reflecting on the increasingly constitutive role of liveness in digital media, we argue that research on livestreaming should move beyond its focus on gaming and its Eurocentric approach to platforms, drawing on extensive…
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, written by Xiaowei Wang
Xiaowei Wang. Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN 978-0-374-53866-8. Price: $16.00.To answer the obvious question first: yes, Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm includes a chapter discussing, among other things, a blockchain chicken farm. This is not a metaphor but an actual farm, even though Shanghai Lianmo Technology – the company behind the GoGoC…
Private messages from the field: Confessions on digital ethnography and its discomforts
This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”.…
Must Zhongzheng fall: Varied responses to memorial statues of Taiwan’s former dictator
Taiwan’s thousands of statues of former dictator Chiang Kai-shek have encountered varying fates since Taiwan’s democratisation in 1987. Citizens have iconoclastically pulled down or beheaded numerous Chiang statues. Many have been removed from public view to the rural grounds outside his temporary mausoleum. Those that remain standing are regularly defaced with paint and slogans highlighting Chiang’s crimes. A more carnivalesque denigration of Ch…
Three lies of digital ethnography
The relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author's reflexive experience of researching digital media use in Ch…
WeChat as infrastructure: The techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms
In the current research on media and communication, Western internet companies (e.g. Google and Facebook) are typically described as digital platforms, yet these actors increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market power. Through the case study of the Chinese social media application, WeChat, we argue that WeChat is an example of a non-Western digital media service that owes its success first to its platformi…
Sensefield: An Exhibition of Experimental Ethnography
This project report describes Sensefield: An Exhibition of Experimental Ethnography, an event showcasing works at the intersection of art and anthropology held in October 2017 in Taipei, Taiwan
Biaoqing: The circulation of emoticons, emoji, stickers, and custom images on Chinese digital media platforms
The Mandarin Chinese term biaoqing, or ‘expression’, categorizes genres of visual content ranging from emoticons and emoji to stickers and custom images. This article is grounded on ethnographic research and approaches biaoqing in terms of their circulation across Chinese digital media platforms. By formulating a comprehensive typology of biaoqing genres, I foreground the situated socio-technical specificities of their circulation: the creative p…
Memes in digital culture
Through the Looking Glass: Twenty Years of Chinese Internet Research
This article is a report on a research project that collected detailed information on articles, book chapters, books, and so on, published by academics on the Chinese Internet between 1990 and early 2013. The findings of the meta-review of 20 years of Chinese Internet research, as gleaned from quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected body of publications, are presented and discussed in this report. It engages with the conclusions dr…
People's pornography: Sex and surveillance on the Chinese Internet
Gabriele de SetaDepartment of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong KongE-mail: [email protected]© 2014, Gabriele de Seta
Meng? It Just Means Cute: A Chinese Online Vernacular Term in Context
Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted a…
WeChat as infrastructure: The techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms
In the current research on media and communication, Western internet companies (e.g. Google and Facebook) are typically described as digital platforms, yet these actors increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market power. Through the case study of the Chinese social media application, WeChat, we argue that WeChat is an example of a non-Western digital media service that owes its success first to its platformi…
Three lies of digital ethnography
The relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author's reflexive experience of researching digital media use in Ch…
Private messages from the field: Confessions on digital ethnography and its discomforts
This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”.…
Through the Looking Glass: Twenty Years of Chinese Internet Research
This article is a report on a research project that collected detailed information on articles, book chapters, books, and so on, published by academics on the Chinese Internet between 1990 and early 2013. The findings of the meta-review of 20 years of Chinese Internet research, as gleaned from quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected body of publications, are presented and discussed in this report. It engages with the conclusions dr…
Meng? It Just Means Cute: A Chinese Online Vernacular Term in Context
Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted a…
Synthetic ethnography: Field devices for the qualitative study of generative models
Advancements in generative artificial intelligence have led to a rapid proliferation of machine learning models capable of synthesizing text, images, sounds, and other kinds of content. While the increasing realism of synthetic content stokes fears about misinformation and triggers debates around intellectual property, generative models are adopted across creative industries and synthetic media seep into cultural production. Qualitative research …
Deepfakes or Synthetic Media? The Effect of Euphemisms for Labeling Technology on Risk and Benefit Perceptions
The language used in public debates and in the news can influence how citizens perceive the risks and benefits of technology. While framing effects on technology perception are well understood, few studies have focused on the effects of specific terms used to describe technology. We analyze how the terms deepfake and synthetic media affect risk and benefit perceptions across application fields. Using Switzerland as a case, our manual content anal…
From Ascii lanterns to synthetic livestreams: Three decades of Chinese digital folklore
The history of the internet in China is often narrated from the standpoint of infrastructural development, commercial growth, and social change—a framework that foregrounds governmental policies, corporate decisions, and large-scale public debates. And yet, in parallel to these processes, the widespread adoption of the internet and its domestication by hundreds of millions of Chinese users have resulted in a long history of digital folklore: ever…
Introduction: Asia.Live: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia
This introduction to the special issue ‘ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia’ briefly summarizes the virtual workshop at which it originated and describes its contributions to the central concept of liveness. After reflecting on the increasingly constitutive role of liveness in digital media, we argue that research on livestreaming should move beyond its focus on gaming and its Eurocentric approach to platforms, drawing on extensive…
Must Zhongzheng fall: Varied responses to memorial statues of Taiwan’s former dictator
Taiwan’s thousands of statues of former dictator Chiang Kai-shek have encountered varying fates since Taiwan’s democratisation in 1987. Citizens have iconoclastically pulled down or beheaded numerous Chiang statues. Many have been removed from public view to the rural grounds outside his temporary mausoleum. Those that remain standing are regularly defaced with paint and slogans highlighting Chiang’s crimes. A more carnivalesque denigration of Ch…
People's pornography: Sex and surveillance on the Chinese Internet
Gabriele de SetaDepartment of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong KongE-mail: [email protected]© 2014, Gabriele de Seta
Meng? It Just Means Cute: A Chinese Online Vernacular Term in Context
Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted a…
Memes in digital culture
Through the Looking Glass: Twenty Years of Chinese Internet Research
This article is a report on a research project that collected detailed information on articles, book chapters, books, and so on, published by academics on the Chinese Internet between 1990 and early 2013. The findings of the meta-review of 20 years of Chinese Internet research, as gleaned from quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected body of publications, are presented and discussed in this report. It engages with the conclusions dr…
Biaoqing: The circulation of emoticons, emoji, stickers, and custom images on Chinese digital media platforms
The Mandarin Chinese term biaoqing, or ‘expression’, categorizes genres of visual content ranging from emoticons and emoji to stickers and custom images. This article is grounded on ethnographic research and approaches biaoqing in terms of their circulation across Chinese digital media platforms. By formulating a comprehensive typology of biaoqing genres, I foreground the situated socio-technical specificities of their circulation: the creative p…
WeChat as infrastructure: The techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms
In the current research on media and communication, Western internet companies (e.g. Google and Facebook) are typically described as digital platforms, yet these actors increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market power. Through the case study of the Chinese social media application, WeChat, we argue that WeChat is an example of a non-Western digital media service that owes its success first to its platformi…
Sensefield: An Exhibition of Experimental Ethnography
This project report describes Sensefield: An Exhibition of Experimental Ethnography, an event showcasing works at the intersection of art and anthropology held in October 2017 in Taipei, Taiwan
Private messages from the field: Confessions on digital ethnography and its discomforts
This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”.…
Must Zhongzheng fall: Varied responses to memorial statues of Taiwan’s former dictator
Taiwan’s thousands of statues of former dictator Chiang Kai-shek have encountered varying fates since Taiwan’s democratisation in 1987. Citizens have iconoclastically pulled down or beheaded numerous Chiang statues. Many have been removed from public view to the rural grounds outside his temporary mausoleum. Those that remain standing are regularly defaced with paint and slogans highlighting Chiang’s crimes. A more carnivalesque denigration of Ch…
Three lies of digital ethnography
The relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author's reflexive experience of researching digital media use in Ch…
Huanlian , or changing faces: Deepfakes on Chinese digital media platforms
In China, deepfakes are commonly known as huanlian, which literally means “changing faces.” Huanlian content, including face-swapped images and video reenactments, has been circulating in China since at least 2018, at first through amateur users experimenting with machine learning models and then through the popularization of audiovisual synthesis technologies offered by digital platforms. Informed by a wealth of interdisciplinary research on med…
Scaling the scene: Experimental music in Taiwan
This article draws on three years of participation in the Taiwanese experimental music scene and argues that, in order to explain how different forms of sociality contribute to its construction and scaling, it is necessary to examine how musicians, organizers and audiences describe their own creative practices. After sketching a brief history of experimental music in Taiwan and contextualizing my positioning as an audience member, musician and cr…
Apaic Report on the Holocode Crisis
The APAIC Report on the Holocode Crisis is a short story that imagines the future of machine-readable data encodings. In this story, I speculate about the next stage in the development of data encoding patterns: after barcodes and QR codes, the invention of “holocodes” will make it possible to store unprecedented amounts of data in a minuscule physical surface. As a collage of nested fictional materials (including ethnographic fieldnotes, intervi…
Introduction: Asia.Live: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia
This introduction to the special issue ‘ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia’ briefly summarizes the virtual workshop at which it originated and describes its contributions to the central concept of liveness. After reflecting on the increasingly constitutive role of liveness in digital media, we argue that research on livestreaming should move beyond its focus on gaming and its Eurocentric approach to platforms, drawing on extensive…
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, written by Xiaowei Wang
Xiaowei Wang. Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN 978-0-374-53866-8. Price: $16.00.To answer the obvious question first: yes, Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm includes a chapter discussing, among other things, a blockchain chicken farm. This is not a metaphor but an actual farm, even though Shanghai Lianmo Technology – the company behind the GoGoC…
China’s digital infrastructure: Networks, systems, standards
In the People’s Republic of China, the development of information infrastructures has been a cardinal component of the national modernization project for more than four decades. While most discussions of digital infrastructure in the country focus on the ‘Chinese internet,' framed by architectures of control like the Great Firewall and governmental initiatives like Internet Plus, this special issue contends that China’s digital infrastructure ext…
QR code: The global making of an infrastructural gateway
This article traces the history of machine-readable data encoding standards and argues that the QR code has become an infrastructural gateway. Through the analysis of patents, corporate documents and advertising, ethnographic observations, and interviews with professionals, I describe the global making of the QR code and argue that the convergence of data encoding standards, mobile computing, machine vision algorithms, and platform ecosystems has…
Imagining machine vision: Four visual registers from the Chinese AI industry
Machine vision is one of the main applications of artificial intelligence. In China, the machine vision industry makes up more than a third of the national AI market, and technologies like face recognition, object tracking and automated driving play a central role in surveillance systems and social governance projects relying on the large-scale collection and processing of sensor data. Like other novel articulations of technology and society, mac…
From Ascii lanterns to synthetic livestreams: Three decades of Chinese digital folklore
The history of the internet in China is often narrated from the standpoint of infrastructural development, commercial growth, and social change—a framework that foregrounds governmental policies, corporate decisions, and large-scale public debates. And yet, in parallel to these processes, the widespread adoption of the internet and its domestication by hundreds of millions of Chinese users have resulted in a long history of digital folklore: ever…
Synthetic ethnography: Field devices for the qualitative study of generative models
Advancements in generative artificial intelligence have led to a rapid proliferation of machine learning models capable of synthesizing text, images, sounds, and other kinds of content. While the increasing realism of synthetic content stokes fears about misinformation and triggers debates around intellectual property, generative models are adopted across creative industries and synthetic media seep into cultural production. Qualitative research …
The Short-Term Impact of an On-Site Literacy Intervention on Discerning Deepfake Videos Based on Visual Features
This study examines how well individuals in Switzerland can distinguish high-quality deepfakes from real videos and whether a brief literacy intervention improves detection. In an online experiment with 1,361 participants, we tested the deepfake detection skills and how prior exposure and experience with deepfakes and various forms of media literacy relate to performance. Participants struggled to identify deepfakes when attending to visual featu…
Support for deepfake regulation: The role of third-person perception, trust, and risk
Like other emerging technologies, deepfakes present both risks and benefits to society. Due to harmful applications such as disinformation and non-consensual pornography, calls for their regulation have increased recently. However, little is known about public support for deepfake regulation and the factors related to it. This study addresses this gap through a pre-registered online survey (n = 1,361) conducted in Switzerland, where citizens can …
Deepfakes or Synthetic Media? The Effect of Euphemisms for Labeling Technology on Risk and Benefit Perceptions
The language used in public debates and in the news can influence how citizens perceive the risks and benefits of technology. While framing effects on technology perception are well understood, few studies have focused on the effects of specific terms used to describe technology. We analyze how the terms deepfake and synthetic media affect risk and benefit perceptions across application fields. Using Switzerland as a case, our manual content anal…
Four Theses on Algorithmic Folklore
Recent advancements in machine learning have brought new forms of automation to the forefront of online interactions, exposing users of social media platforms and apps to different and unfamiliar kinds of algorithmic logics, which range from the curatorial biases of recommender systems and content analytics to the expansive possibilities offered by large language models and synthetic media. All these forms of automation are not only shaping how c…
Computer Science (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Political science (10 works) · Art (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (7 works) · World Wide Web (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works) · China (6 works) · Media studies (6 works)