New research article: Imperfect Automation and the Human Fix

Prof. Dr. Christian Katzenbach and Dr. Paloma Viejo Otero from the “Platform Governance, Media and Technology” Lab at the University of Bremen in collaboration with Leipzig University member Prof. Dr. Christian Pentzold have published a new open access article in the Human-Machine Communication Journal titled: “Smoothing Out Smart Tech’s Rough Edges: Imperfect Automation and the Human Fix”

The article focuses on the human labour needed to make automation work and arguments that “Imperfect automation is here to stay!” Through two case studies that sit at opposite tails of automation processes: the front end of self-service checkouts and the back end of content moderation, building on the seminal work on “ghost work” by Gray/Suri 2019 and others. The article finds that the “Human fix is not a temporary repair of malfunction, but a permanent and constitutive feature of automated systems.”

This publication is a part of a special issue edited by Hepp et al on mediatization and Human-Machine Communication.

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