Automated influence, delivered by digital targeting technologies such as targeted advertising, digital nudges, and recommender systems, has attracted significant interest from both empirical researchers, on one hand, and critical scholars and policymakers on the other. In this paper, we argue for closer integration of these efforts. Critical scholars and policymakers, who focus primarily on the social, ethical, and political effects of these technologies, need empirical evidence to substantiate and motivate their concerns. However, existing empirical research investigating the effectiveness of these (...) technologies (or lack thereof), neglects other morally relevant effects—which can be felt regardless of whether or not the technologies "work" in the sense of fulfilling the promises of their designers. Drawing from the ethics and policy literature, we enumerate a range of questions begging for empirical analysis—the outline of a research agenda bridging these fields—and issue a call to action for more empirical research that takes these urgent ethics and policy questions as their starting point. (shrink)

The article stems from the acknowledgment of the popularity of The Beatles’ faces within popular music and popular culture altogether. Unlike some contemporary and successive male rockstars, the band focused their aesthetic appeal entirely on the faces, omitting other body parts, and therefore keeping astray from a “sex symbol” status in a conventional, eroticized sense. The article analyses the cultural role of The Beatles’ faces in terms of aesthetic features, face expressions, face performances, and extensions/prostheses. These parameters are applied to (...) the chronological development of the face looks adopted by The Beatles during their activity and to the case study of those album covers featuring face close-ups of the band. Additional notes are presented in the area of face representation within the band’s musical repertoire. (shrink)