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EXTENSIF

What role does live streaming play in shaping political sensibilities?

EXTENSIF aims to shed light on the political socialization practices of live-streaming communities—video content broadcast and commented on live over the internet. For a growing segment of the population, these practices have become central to staying informed and forming political opinions and attitudes. However, the closure of APIs and the diffuse nature of these practices make them difficult to study. EXTENSIF addresses this challenge by combining social science and design research with digital science research on making online practices observable through browser extensions.

Research

By bringing together research in design, the social sciences and digital sciences, the project ‘Web EXTENsions for SItuated enquiries and Flexible instrumentations’ (EXTENSIF) aims to produce an innovative research tool – distinguished by its methods of data collection, storage and activation – that can be used by a variety of communities and is designed to be maintained over the long term and adapted for other projects. The project will generate insights into (i) the mechanisms of political socialisation specific to communities formed by live-streaming platforms, and (ii) the methodological and technical conditions for ‘post-API’ observability of the web, based on participatory methods and experimental browser extensions: what traces to collect, how to make them interpretable using qualitative, quantitative and participatory methods, and what robustness and privacy protection mechanisms ensure these methods are reliable and replicable.

The pilot research protocol for the study into reception practices surrounding live streaming combines ethnographic, participatory and digital methods. It involves inviting members of live streaming communities to collect and analyse their own activity traces over an extended period through a co-investigation using specific tools (data collection and interviews), and then to examine these traces as a group through collective research workshops.

EXTENSIF places the research participants at the heart of the interpretation of their activity traces through radically participatory methods: it is not merely a matter of requesting the ‘donation’ of data for the purposes of informed analysis, but rather of reconstructing the meaning of these traces and examining them critically with the direct involvement of the participants, by equipping them and engaging them in the study of the political drivers and effects of their live-streaming practices in an active, reflective and sustained manner over time.

The associated research in digital sciences focuses on the design of browser extensions that rely entirely on the browser’s storage and computing capabilities to collect, process and interpret data, as well as on the conditions for maintaining such extensions using semi-automated methods. The aim is to develop tools that are ‘privacy-friendly by design’, which redefine the ethical and practical boundaries of social science research methodologies concerning sensitive practices and opinions.

The results will be shared primarily with research communities in digital social sciences, innovative methods and design research, and human-computer interaction; and subsequently with stakeholders in platform auditing, journalism and media literacy.

Upon completion, EXTENSIF aims to equip a community of digital investigators who make full use of browser extensions, through (1) an ecosystem of reusable and adaptable extensions and modules, released under an open licence; (2) open maintenance and governance practices that contribute to the long-term viability of research tools of this kind; (3) an interdisciplinary and diverse community (research, journalism, regulation, media and information literacy) capable of producing robust analyses of how political sensibilities are formed within live-streaming communities. 

This research project is funded by the Inria Quadrant Programme as part of the France 2030 initiative, led by Inria and managed by the Digital – Algorithms, Software and Applications programme agency.