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Real social analytics: A contribution towards a phenomenology of a digital world
Abstract
This article argues against the assumption that agency and reflexivity disappear in an age of
‘algorithmic power’ (Lash 2007). Following the suggestions of Beer (2009), it proposes that,
far from disappearing, new forms of agency and reflexivity around the embedding in
everyday practice of not only algorithms but also analytics more broadly are emerging as
social actors continue to pursue their social ends but mediated through digital interfaces: this
is the consequence of many social actors now needing their digital presence, regardless of
whether they wants this, to be measured and counted. The article proposes ‘social analytics’
as a new topic for sociology: the sociological study of social actors’ uses of analytics not for
the sake of measurement itself (or to make profit from measurement) but in order to fulfil
better their social ends through an enhancement of their digital presence. The article places
social analytics in the context of earlier debates about categorization, algorithmic power, and
self-presentation online, and describes a case study with a UK community organization which
2
developed the social analytics approach in detail. The article concludes with reflections on
the implications of this approach for further sociological fieldwork in a digital world.
... There are many forms that analytics can take, and the amount of data and the outcomes can be customized to meet the needs of individual businesses and even departments within that business. Couldry et al., (2016) divide analytics into the following categories: ...
... • Larger social media platforms like Facebook often sort online data using algorithms, with limited manual adjustment, in order to extrapolate data such as user statistics. "A social analytics approach-more precisely, a sociological treatment of how analytics get used by a range of social actors in order to meet their social ends-aims to capture how particular actors reflect upon, and adjust, their online presence and the actions that feed into it, through the use of 'analytics'" (Couldry et al. 2016). Analytics of how users interact can help increase website engagement. ...
... Analytics of how users interact can help increase website engagement. Couldry et al., (2016) explore how C-Media analyzed exchanges via Facebook or email and social connections such as "likes" to encourage further engagement with the comments functions and introducing new ways to interact, with Five Star and Community Tag options. The benefits are twofold, in boosting engagement, and providing more user information for further analysis. ...
The marketing strategy of offering customer loyalty rewards has evolved with the use of technology. Instead of printing old-fashioned paper coupons, punch cards, and flyers to advertise special offers, customers can access their rewards through a customized app. The app functions as an all-in-one tool to attract customers, send offers, communicate specials, take orders, offer new products and services to existing customers, and so much more. During the restrictions of the COVID-19 lockdown, businesses found online communication soaring, with the ability to offer no-contact delivery of goods and services, and many businesses are keeping the technology they implemented during lock down because it is just good business. The use of application creation for digital marketing has the ability to supercharge sales by more effectively reaching the target audience and providing business analytics on users.
... There are many forms that analytics can take, and the amount of data and the outcomes can be customized to meet the needs of individual businesses and even departments within that business. Couldry et al., (2016) divide analytics into the following categories: ...
... • Larger social media platforms like Facebook often sort online data using algorithms, with limited manual adjustment, in order to extrapolate data such as user statistics. "A social analytics approach-more precisely, a sociological treatment of how analytics get used by a range of social actors in order to meet their social ends-aims to capture how particular actors reflect upon, and adjust, their online presence and the actions that feed into it, through the use of 'analytics'" (Couldry et al. 2016). Analytics of how users interact can help increase website engagement. ...
... Analytics of how users interact can help increase website engagement. Couldry et al., (2016) explore how C-Media analyzed exchanges via Facebook or email and social connections such as "likes" to encourage further engagement with the comments functions and introducing new ways to interact, with Five Star and Community Tag options. The benefits are twofold, in boosting engagement, and providing more user information for further analysis. ...
Big data analytics takes raw, real-time data and uses it to predict trends. Successful use of this data can have a powerful impact on a business’s effectiveness and ultimately their bottom line. As the amount of data increases, the need for analytics is growing. This teaching study discusses the role of social media in data analytics, how to approach the subject, and the desired outcomes. Students will explore the expansion of this field of study, familiarize themselves with the concept and where they may have encountered it in their lives so far, and discuss what analytics can contribute to running a successful business.
... Cooperative algorithm hacking of this sort, although quite distinct from traditional organizing strategies, responds to the coercive force of the "threat of invisibility" (Bucher, 2018) that necessitates constant data production. It functions as a mechanism by which influencers attempt to exert some control over their "conditions of presence-to-others" (Couldry, Fotopoulou, & Dickens, 2016) and, in so doing, combat precarity and protect wages in the field. I begin by outlining the political economic context within which the influencer emerges and offers an overview of the academic literature in this field. ...
... Despite the imposition of black-boxed curation algorithms, cultural producers recognize and resist these conditions in order to protect their own interests. Couldry et al. (2016) argue that in an era characterized by pervasive systems of data production, measurement, and analysis, our presence "now necessarily involves being categorized and measured by automated processes over which the social actor may have very little control" (p. 132). ...
... Cooperative algorithm hacking of this sort, although quite distinct from traditional organizing strategies, responds to the coercive force of the "threat of invisibility" (Bucher, 2018) that necessitates constant data production. They represent a collective attempt to exert some control over their "conditions of presence-to-others" (Couldry et al., 2016) and, in so doing, combat precarity and protect wages in the field. ...
This article examines the phenomenon of Instagram influencer “engagement pods” as an emergent form of resistance that responds to the reconfigured working conditions of platformized cultural production. Engagement pods are grassroots communities that agree to mutually like, comment on, share, or otherwise engage with each other’s posts, no matter the content, to game Instagram’s algorithm into prioritizing the participants’ content and show it to a broader audience. I argue that engagement pods represent a response to the material conditions of platformized cultural production on Instagram, where proprietary curation algorithms wrest knowledge and control of the labor process from producers. Cooperative algorithm hacking of this sort, although quite distinct from traditional organizing strategies, responds to the coercive force of the “threat of invisibility” that necessitates constant data production. They represent a collective attempt to exert some control over their “conditions of presence-to-others” and, in so doing, combat precarity and protect wages in the field. In a post-industrial economy where traditional models of labor organizing have struggled to address the conditions of platformized cultural work, I argue that the unusual phenomenon of Instagram engagement pods represents an organic form of worker resistance that responds to the unique conditions of these workers.
... These traces can originate by swiping a credit card to paying for a coffee, or driving through a checkpoint, and are also generated through actions taken on social media platforms such as liking a post or making a comment. As Couldry et al. (2016) argue, the current era is characterized by the collection and processing of such data, and life 'now necessarily involves being categorized and measured by automated processes over which the social actor may have very little control ' (p. 132). ...
... In addition to sorting and filtering operations that foreground some choices while diminishing others, a core aspect of the performativity of metrics is the reflexive actions of users as they attempt to negotiate platform logics in pursuing their needs and desires. As Couldry et al. (2016) describe, people see themselves represented by metrics, experience metrics as affecting their lives and, consequently, tune their observed actions in order to maintain a desired presence or achieve a desired end. ...
Due to their perceived role in making content visible, engagement metrics are core concerns for people and businesses that generate revenue on social media platforms. While scholars have focused on the ways that social media users manipulate their own visibility, we investigate not only how social media users’ understandings of metrics shape the content they produce but also how this content influences the communication of users who interact with it. Based on a logistic regression analysis of 985 Facebook posts made to a group that distributes information about free products, we find that tactics commonly thought to increase engagement metrics also increased the probability that users would reveal personal information, identities and experiences, including detailed descriptions of debt, unemployment and homelessness. We argue that the information systems, compensation structures, and cultural norms currently surrounding online communication award visibility to those who make others visible in ways that potentially increase vulnerability.
... Automation in data practices can proceed in a context in which participants know how data is meaningful to others, while also placing some degree of responsibility on designers to make participants understand the terms of their consent. Couldry, Fotopoulou, and Dickens (2017) theorize that when communities regularly participate in designing data algorithms for their own needs, they produce "real social analytics" that better reflect their own changing social realities. Real social analytics allow "users to retain control over their conditions of existence, through reflexive adjustment to the parameters of their online categorization and measurement" (2017, p. 126). ...
... At the same time, this ongoing gift labor in the context of communities coming into and out of design processes leaves the question of the role of so many institutions that may wish to support or participate in these digital archives, and relatedly, what Kennedy (2016, p. 190) calls an effort "to do good with data." The fact that so many communication researchers are embedded in the design practices they are studying would infer that academia plays an outsize role in creating alternative archive infrastructures, but to this researchers have added entities representing local government, neighborhood planning, and heritage and preservation (Couldry et al., 2017;De Waal, 2017;Flinn, 2007, respectively). These institutions can seek to align with amateur design groups to further their own mission or outreach efforts. ...
Small data theorizing encompasses the ways communities of collaborators deliberate over the status of data through a set of three mediational logics that pose alternatives to datafication. Small data theorizing is a way of generalizing a framework for understanding the role of the collaborators in digital archiving and database design processes, which often involve both communication researchers and ordinary institutions, such as universities and museums. This framework for mediational logics extends the critiques of big data theory, and its monolithic claims about autonomous technologies and power in society, by elaborating the ways people actively maintain their connectedness to data in archival design. At the same time, it joins critical communication theory’s central concerns about power with a praxis. This can help all communication researchers in seeing how communities are theorizing practical alternatives to archives that are designed for big data and their ecosystems.
... They also benefit the research methods, as researchers develop the capacity to count, measure, and record events or phenomena previously not available as data. Unlike easily available records, which may be of lesser quality in representing phenomena but make up what has widely been called "Big Data," this kind of data work also represents "real social analytics" (Couldry et al. 2016). Furthermore, the close study of a phenomenon enables critical examination of the indicators used to score individuals, a practice central to many reported cases of algorithmic harm. ...
... In managing DF and creating social value, it becomes evident that no universal methodologies can guarantee complete data privacy for internet users while simultaneously allowing them to benefit from new technologies (Couldry et al., 2016). Continuing commitment to a Professional Ethics Code is crucial for all stakeholders in networked activities, promoting responsible behavior and enhancing corporate reputation and stakeholder trust (Gordon et al., 2022). ...
In a world where Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) increasingly leverage their Digital Footprint (DF) for business growth, ethical concerns surrounding employee and customer DF pose a significant challenge. This research investigates how SMEs can navigate this complex landscape, balancing the creation of business value
with the broader social value of managing data. Drawing upon Kantian ethics, which emphasizes the duties of organizations to respect individuals’ autonomy and protect their rights, the study addresses a critical gap in understanding the ethical
implications of DF for business value creation and employee experiences. Using a social constructivist approach, the research reveals the importance of DF awareness and proposes a novel conceptualization of DF as a dual entity: (i) an independent actor influencing consumer decisions and (ii) a collaborative activity within and beyond the organization. This broadens the traditional view of DF and informs a new framework for ethical DF management in SMEs. This framework emphasizes four core pillars – data transparency, data protection, data privacy, and data transformation – supported by stakeholder involvement. The study also highlights overarching factors three key actions and DF strategic implications at the end.
... Journalists, however, can interpret the data without this perspective, which could lead to a misrepresentation of the public's wants and needs. Furthermore, people may adjust their practices when they witness social media data being used (boyd, 2014;Couldry, Fotopoulou, & Dickens, 2016). Perceptions of these journalistic practices could impact what version of public opinion journalists are able to capture. ...
Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data is being used and how public opinion is constructed using social media analytics. In this exploratory study based on a census-weighted online survey of Canadian adults (N=1,500), we examine citizens’ perceptions of journalistic use of social media data. We demonstrate that: (1) people find it more appropriate for journalists to use aggregate social media data rather than personally identifiable data; (2) people who use more social media are more likely to positively perceive journalistic use of social media data to infer public opinion; and (3) the frequency of political posting is positively related to acceptance of this emerging journalistic practice, which suggests some citizens want to be heard publicly on social media while others do not. We provide recommendations for journalists on the ethical use of social media data and social media platforms on opt-in functionality.
... Journalists, however, can interpret the data without this perspective, which could lead to a misrepresentation of the public's wants and needs. Furthermore, people may adjust their practices when they witness social media data being used (boyd, 2014;Couldry, Fotopoulou, & Dickens, 2016). Perceptions of these journalistic practices could impact what version of public opinion journalists are able to capture. ...
Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data is being used and how public opinion is constructed using social media analytics. In this exploratory study based on a census-weighted online survey of Canadian adults (N=1,500), we examine citizens’ perceptions of journalistic use of social media data. We demonstrate that: (1) people find it more appropriate for journalists to use aggregate social media data rather than personally identifiable data; (2) people who use more social media are more likely to positively perceive journalistic use of social media data to infer public opinion; and (3) the frequency of political posting is positively related to acceptance of this emerging journalistic practice, which suggests some citizens want to be heard publicly on social media while others do not. We provide recommendations for journalists on the ethical use of social media data and social media platforms on opt-in functionality.
... Stemming from its various disciplinary roots, critical data studies has by now developed and appropriated a rich body of methods for researching and challenging data power. Precisely because of their critical orientation, critical data studies have from the beginning opposed the naïve positivist methodology of many, especially commercial, data analyses (Couldry et al., 2016;Iliadis & Russo, 2016, p. 1). The idea was to set against such positivism a reflection of the epistemology behind it and a detailed description of people's data practices. ...
Data power is a highly ambivalent phenomenon and it is precisely these ambivalences that open up important perspectives for the burgeoning field of critical data studies: First, the ambivalences between global infrastructures and local invisibilities. These challenge the grand narrative of the ephemeral nature of a global data infrastructure and instead make visible the local working and living conditions, and resources and arrangements required to operate and run them. Second is the ambivalences between the state and data justice. These consider data justice in relation to state surveillance and data capitalism and reflect the ambivalences between an “entrepreneurial state” and a “welfare state”. Third is the ambivalences of everyday practices and collective action, in which civil society groups, communities, and movements try to position the interests of people against the “big players” in the tech industry. With this introduction, we want to make the argument that seeing data power and its irreducible ambivalences in a pointed way will provide an orientation to the chapters of this book. To this end, we first give a brief outline of the development of critical data studies. In part, we also want to situate the data power conferences, the most recent of which this volume is based on. This will then serve as a basis for taking a closer look at three facets of the ambivalence of data power.
... A digital profile also organises user information in a single place that is accessible by others. Digital profiles generally allow users to contribute content in different formats and ways such as text, multimedia (including pictures, audio, and video), and hypermedia such as tags and links to Web pages (Kane, et al., 2014;Couldry, et al., 2016). The majority of participants mentioned comments such as "it has features that users can manage their profiles. ...
We discuss the importance of salient design features (which support purposeful action and relate to functional affordances) of customer-to-customer social media platforms that support communities of interest, focussed on open-ended data and user tasks, in contrast to business-to-customer platforms, focussed on relatively fixed data and transactions. We provide an exposition of their design features, shedding light on how they support tasks of searching and decision-making in which users elicit knowledge from their community, for targeted needs to needs which are less known and speculative. We also discuss that how our findings can be useful for designing social media platforms that support other types of online communities such as online communities of practice. Our research contributes to the ongoing discourse in the information systems field about the importance of identifying and articulating the salient design features of an information technology that is useful for theory and practice.
... To do so would require moving beyond static metrics such as consumption figures or cost-benefit analyses and to develop new ways of capturing public value (Mazzucato et al., 2020, p. 41). This argument aligns with critiques of existing performance measures that are oriented towards economic value (see also Couldry et al., 2016;Rogers, 2018). ...
The legitimacy of public broadcasting has been under pressure for several decades. Attempts to repair and restore this legitimacy have led to an intensification of accountability instruments and measures. These instruments and measures tend to focus on consumption figures or cost-benefit analyses, requiring new ways of capturing public value. This article argues that, given the media’s persistent role as an interpreter and multiplier of news via traditional distribution channels and diverse new platforms providing information and opinions, professional follow-up communication is a relevant source for the examination of broadcasters' contributions to public debate. The essay explores how the analysis of newspapers via computational methods can be used by public broadcasters to reflect on and demonstrate their role in public debates in contributing a diversity of topics and viewpoints.
... Osler (2019). 34 Couldry et al. (2016). 35 Couldry et al. (2016, p. 124). ...
The paper investigates phenomenology’s possibilities to describe, reflect and critically analyse political and legal orders. It presents a “toolbox” of methodological reflections, tools and topics, by relating to the classics of the tradition and to the emerging movement of “critical phenomenology,” as well as by touching upon current issues such as experiences of rightlessness, experiences in the digital lifeworld, and experiences of the public sphere. It is argued that phenomenology provides us with a dynamic methodological framework that emphasizes correlational, co-constitutional, and interrelational structures, and thus pays attention to modes of givenness, the making and unmaking of “world,” and, thereby, the inter/subjective, affective, and bodily constitution of meaning. In the case of political and legal orders, questions of power, exclusion, and normativity are central issues. By looking at “best practice” models such as Hannah Arendt’s analyses, the paper points out an analytical tool and flexible framework of “spaces of meaning” that phenomenologists can use and modify as they go along. In the current debates on political and legal issues, the author sees the main task of phenomenology to reclaim experience as world-building and world-opening, also in a normative sense, and to demonstrate how structures and orders are lived while they condition and form spaces of meaning. If we want to understand, criticize, act, or change something, this subjective and intersubjective perspective will remain indispensable.
... A few even expressed appreciation of the pitfalls of an increasingly datafied existence-either for political reasons (e.g. in light of data collection and privacy-related issues) or social ones (as in the comments on self-reliance). This strengthens us in our conviction, inspired by Couldry, Fotopoulou, and Dickens (2016), that we cannot reduce the users of data visualizations to actors without agency, and should be alert also to signs of reflexiveness. ...
... Drawing from STS and the sociology of quantification, I consider the epistemic and political consequences of these very practices and assemblages on the production of consumer knowledge (Bowker, 2005;Diaz-Bone and Didier, 2016;Espeland and Stevens, 2008). In particular, this qualitative study contributes to the reflections on the new forms of social ordering performed by Big Data analytics, and how these technologies shape and account for individuality (Bolin and Schwarz, 2015;Couldry et al., 2016). It focuses on the original ambivalence of personalized algorithmic marketing, which draws on both instrumental and humanistic arguments, as it simultaneously aims to optimize market strategies, and to take better account of persons, i.e. of each unique customer, defined by her specificities, needs and life trajectory. ...
This paper focuses on the conception and use of machine-learning algorithms for marketing. In the last years, specialized service providers as well as in-house data scientists have been increasingly using machine learning to predict consumer behavior for large companies. Predictive marketing thus revives the old dream of one-to-one, perfectly adjusted selling techniques, now at an unprecedented scale. How do predictive marketing devices change the way corporations know and model their customers? Drawing from STS and the sociology of quantification, I propose to study the original ambivalence that characterizes the promise of a mass personalization, i.e. algorithmic processes in which the precise adjustment of prediction to unique individuals involves the computation of massive datasets. By studying algorithms in practice, I show how the active embedding of local preexisting consumer knowledge and punctual de-personalization mechanisms are keys to the epistemic and organizational success of predictive marketing. This paper argues for the study of algorithms in their contexts and suggests new perspectives on algorithmic objectivity.
... Naturally, every human being will make observations, show concern, make judgments, or subsequently contribute to something [1,2]. Humans as social actors will not only use the resources around them for the common good, but that use will make a positive contribution so that welfare increases [3]. However, humans as individuals consume the whole both tangible and intangible for their interests, and in essence this contributes negatively to welfare [4]. ...
Research is a part of every activity of human life, and the tri dharma of higher education only reaffirms that task for each academician. Research is not just a coincidence like that, but it is a possibility and opportunity, or not incidentally, for life itself. Because, however, every interest will urge to become the human needs, research becomes a solution so as not to contribute negatively to social and personal well-being. This is stated as research serendipity, which ontologically states that a research will supported by another research and will also give birth to another research.
... As an area of business, social media analytics is enabled by datafication, the transformation of social action into quantified data, which allows for real-time tracking and computational analysis (Andrejevic, 2013;Couldry and Yu, 2018;Couldry et al., 2016;Van Dijck, 2014). Some influential accounts of these developments describe how 'big data', consisting of digital traces of human behavior and interaction, could be effectively used to access, monitor, and, most importantly, predict people's behavior (e.g. ...
Social media analytics is a burgeoning new field associated with high promises of societal relevance and business value but also methodological and practical problems. In this article, we build on the sociology of expectations literature and research on expertise in the interaction between humans and machines to examine how analysts and clients make their expectations about social media analytics credible in the face of recognized problems. To investigate how this happens in different contexts, we draw on thematic interviews with 10 social media analytics and client companies. In our material, social media analytics appears as a field facing both hopes and skepticism – toward data, analysis methods, or the users of analytics – from both the clients and the analysts. In this setting, the idea of automated analysis through algorithmic methods emerges as a central notion that lends credibility to expectations about social media analytics. Automation is thought to, first, extend and make expert interpretation of messy social media data more rigorous; second, eliminate subjective judgments from measurement on social media; and, third, allow for coordination of knowledge management inside organizations. Thus, ideas of automation importantly work to uphold the expectations of the value of analytics. Simultaneously, they shape what kinds of expertise, tools, and practices come to be involved in the future of analytics as knowledge production.
... Secara alami, setiap manusia akan melakukan pengamatan, menunjukkan perhatian, membuat penilaian, atau selanjutnya memberikan kontribusi terhadap sesuatu [1,2]. Manusia sebagai aktor-aktor sosial tidak saja akan menggunakan sumber daya di sekelilingnya untuk kepentingan bersama, tetapi penggunaan itu memberikan kontribusi positif agar kesejahteraan meningkat [3]. Namun, manusia sebagai individu mengkonsumsi keseluruhan baik yang berwujud maupun yang tidak berwujud untuk kepentingannya, dan pada hakikatnya ini memberi kontribusi negatif terhadap kesejahteraan [4]. ...
Penelitian menjadi bagian dari setiap aktivitas kehidupan manusia, dan tri dharma perguruan tinggi hanya menegaskan tugas itu kembali untuk setiap akademisi. Penelitian bukan saja kebetulan menye-nangkan seperti itu, tetapi menjadi kemungkinan dan peluang bagi ke-hidupan itu sendiri. Sebab, bagaimanapun, setiap kepentingan yang men-desak dari keperluan manusia, penelitian menjadi jalan keluar agar tidak berkontribusi negatif terhadap kesejahteraan sosial maupun pribadi. Ini-lah yang dinyatakan sebagai kesedapan penelitian, yang secara ontologi menyatakan bahwa suatu penelitian akan didukung oleh penelitian yang lain dan juga akan melahirkan penelitian yang lain lagi.
... Secara alami, setiap manusia akan melakukan pengamatan, menunjukkan perhatian, membuat penilaian, atau selanjutnya memberikan kontribusi terhadap sesuatu [1,2]. Manusia sebagai aktor-aktor sosial tidak saja akan menggunakan sumber daya di sekelilingnya untuk kepentingan bersama, tetapi penggunaan itu memberikan kontribusi positif agar kesejahteraan meningkat [3]. Namun, manusia sebagai individu mengkonsumsi keseluruhan baik yang berwujud maupun yang tidak berwujud untuk kepentingannya, dan pada hakikatnya ini memberi kontribusi negatif terhadap kesejahteraan [4]. ...
Penelitian menjadi bagian dari setiap aktivitas kehidupan manusia, dan tri dharma perguruan tinggi hanya menegaskan tugas itu kembali untuk setiap akademisi. Penelitian bukan saja kebetulan menye-nangkan seperti itu, tetapi menjadi kemungkinan dan peluang bagi ke-hidupan itu sendiri. Sebab, bagaimanapun, setiap kepentingan yang men-desak dari keperluan manusia, penelitian menjadi jalan keluar agar tidak berkontribusi negatif terhadap kesejahteraan sosial maupun pribadi. Ini-lah yang dinyatakan sebagai kesedapan penelitian, yang secara ontologi menyatakan bahwa suatu penelitian akan didukung oleh penelitian yang lain dan juga akan melahirkan penelitian yang lain lagi.
... Although obtaining such multiple and subjective components of tourist experience can be difficult and challenging, the rapid development of web 2.0 has provided a feasible solution for researching tourist experience. Recently, scholars attempted to understand Internet users' attitudes, cognitions, emotions, and behaviours in the digital world from the phenomenological perspective (Couldry, Fotopoulou, and Dickens 2016;Bosangit, Hibbert, and McCabe 2015;Carson 2008). Recent Internet technologies have changed how individuals use, exchange, and create information on various websites. ...
This study examined the experiences of sport tourists at the Formula One (F1) Singapore Grand Prix. In addition, the study also examined the difference in experiences between the genders and between local and international tourists. Three hundred and forty-seven reviews on TripAdvisor were captured and analysed. The initial analysis showed seven themes: ‘race’, ‘track’, ‘event’, ‘concerts’, ‘cars’, ‘food’ and ‘walk’. Further analysis uncovered differences between the genders and between local and international tourists. Specifically, male tourists were more likely to comment on race-related matters. On the other hand, female tourists’ experiences were focused on entertainment activities with family and friends during the event. In addition, locals were more focused on race-related experiences while international tourists commented on enjoyable experiences with local food and people during the event. The findings of this study gained insights into the marketing of the F1 Singapore Grand Prix from the tourists’ perspective.
... The world of social action, we started to realise, was suffused not just with media (of course it was!) but with processes of datafication and the measurement of data. We coined a term for a social research perspective that could register this: 'real social analytics' (Couldry, Dickens and Fotopoulou 2016). This is not the place to go into the detail of that idea, but the key point here is that I had caught up, finally, with a transformation that was already troubling -or exciting -many scholars: the role of algorithmic processing of data in constructing the worlds of appearance that pass for reality under particular conditions, pressures and needs. ...
I am a social researcher who uses both theoretical and empirical enquiry not so much to describe the social as to understand the conflicts involved in constructing an order that appears to us as ‘social’. I seek to address the paradox of doing social research: for the social is not something concrete at which we can point, but a dimension of how whatever in our life is concrete holds together as a world. Media are crucial to what hangs together as a world – and in ways that much social research to this day still ignores. Media are in the contemporary era irrevocably ‘digital’: they take forms that automatically bring possibilities for recombination, retransmission, and reworking by multiple actors. As such, and unavoidably, digital media can be woven tight into the fabric of social life much more than previous media. But what does this mean for the social world, that is, for our possibilities to enhance or undermine how we live together today?
... For public service broadcasters, this comes as a heavy burden. As Karin van Es (2017) rightly pointed out: To align their public remits with Big Data, PSBs need to engage in what Couldry et al. (2016) have termed 'real social analytics'. Real social analytics considers how the digital infrastructure (i.e., algorithms, analytics, architectures and platforms) of social actors supports their social aims. ...
The paper explores how big data creates challenges and opportunities to enhance value relationships be-tween TV broadcasters, audiences and advertisers in digital television broadcasting. It finds that research into big data requires much closer attention to critical issues in the social and cultural sciences – with a fo-cus on media and communication studies and its subfield media management – to inspire our understand-ing that big data would perfectly fit the dominant «techno-economic paradigm», a meta-narrative for a substantial technological revolution that has the power to bring about a transformation across the board in ways that when new technologies diffuse, they multiply their impact across the economy and eventually modifies the socio-institutional structures. While asking how big data adds value to a broadcaster’s decision on corporate strategies in Big-Data driven TV is legitimate and important, we remain skeptical as to what effectively is to be gleaned from big data in broadcast TV This is because the socio-cultural dimensions are greatly unresolved. Notably, the corporate strategies of the «addressable audience» or audience com-modification, whereby audiences are effectively sold as mere datacommodities to broadcasters and adver-tisers, must be observed critically.
This article critically addresses current debates on the digital transformation of the public sphere. It responds to two contrasting responses to this transformation: the school of destruction, which expresses pessimism about the design of social media, and the school of restoration, which advocates for the redesign of social media to align with normative conceptions of the public sphere. However, so far these responses have omitted an explicit philosophical reflection on the relationship between politics, technology and design. After tracing back the current discourse on politics and technology to the Platonic tradition of political thought, I propose to re-arrange the relationship between poiesis, praxis and theoria assumed in this tradition. By connecting Arendt’s phenomenology of the political to postphenomenology and Derrida’s notion of ‘artifactuality’, this article proposes a renewed approach to think the political implications of technological change consistent with the ‘empirical turn’ in philosophy of technology. This approach unfolds in two moves: first, it examines how the design (poiesis) of new technological conditions makes space and time for certain kinds of events to become public; second, it takes the praxis emerging in response to these new conditions as a starting point for re-theorizing the political in specific mediated contexts. The article concludes by advocating for a ‘practical turn’ in political theory of technology, emphasizing the importance of engaging with design practices and artistic practices to refine foundational concepts in political theory.
Exploring emergent relations between data-producing individuals and their data products, this study aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion on agencies in data practices. It focuses on shifts in surveillance structure in the era of Big Data, in which the individual becomes both a subject and an object in the production of data surveillance. Drawing on the concept of the ‘dividual’, the study analyses data practices for a tracing system invented by the South Korean government during the COVID-19 pandemic, with findings from field research conducted with 11 research participants in various urban sites in Seoul. Highlighting how the tracing system positioned surveillance ‘in the hands of citizens’, the study exposes the complexities of the relations that the participants formed with the data they produced, and how they reflexively reappropriated their practices through alterations and deflections on the basis of their tacit knowledge and imaginaries concerning digital data and their constituent positions in the knowledge production system. The resultant expression of surveillance was directly shaped by the evolving relationship between the producers (participants) and products (digital data). The study proposes that an intersectional focus on surveillance and critical data studies, with close attention to ordinary people's relations with data, has the capacity to inquire into the politics of data more fully.
This project examines the new dimensions and attributes of the historical construct of liveness in the current social media environment. In this scope, liveness comprises both the orchestration of the experiential and the continuous pursuit of immediacy, presence, shared experience, and authenticity in contexts marked precisely by mediation. Liveness emerges as the productively contradictory experience of immediate connection through media. This thesis deploys liveness both as its central object of enquiry and as a conceptual device to examine mediation as an experiential process in and of itself. Through a diary-interviewing study conducted with London-based social media users, it explores how ordinary experiences of and with habitual social media challenge, reaffirm, or expand our available conceptions of liveness, and assesses the extent to which liveness can be useful to illuminate our understanding of lived experiences with and of social media more broadly. In so doing, the thesis advances a critical phenomenology of mediation, focusing on perceptual processes to examine and interrogate the structures of lived experience without disregarding the social, technical, economic, and political forces that underpin the social media manifold. In examining liveness through some of the organising principles of phenomenology – temporality, spatiality, intersubjectivity, and embodiment – this thesis explores four existential quests as enacted through technical mediation. They are: the ‘real-time’ experience, the experience of ‘being there’, ‘getting involved in a shared experience’, and the ‘authentic’ experience. I conclude that the conceptual value of liveness and its relevance and endurance as a key topic of interest for media studies rest in its intrinsically contested, disputed nature of as-if-ness – of a mediation that claims also to be immediate – and in how those tensions are renewed, refashioned, and updated with the development and habituation of new technologies of communication.
Once, the Internet was considered an important force to promote social public welfare activities and spread social justice. Today, the driving force of the Internet on the spread of negative social information and polarisation also exists. Social media platforms use this kind of method to customise personalised content distribution schemes by mining and analysing individual historical behaviour data based on algorithms. This behaviour of the platform brings about efficient and accurate information matching. At the same time, the content recommended by the algorithm is also controversial due to the risk of privacy violations and other issues. This article will analyse the advantages and disadvantages of social media platform algorithms and recommendation systems for citizens.
Globalization is manifested in such dimensions as political globalization, economic globalization, scientific and technological globalization, and cultural globalization. Globalization of different dimensions supports and integrates. The “hardware” of information globalization is mainly concentrated in Internet and mobile communication, with obvious scientific and technological attributes. The “software” of information globalization is mainly reflected in the interaction and close connection with politics, culture, society, and other fields, with obvious communication attributes. It is a global complex integrating many elements. Information globalization brings convenience and risks to citizens at the same time. This article will take TikTok as an example to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of information globalization.
This article suggests that algorithmic resistance might involve a particular and rarely considered kind of evasion—political disengagement. Based on interviews with ordinary Brazilian users of Facebook, it argues that some people may stop acting politically on social media platforms as a way of avoiding an algorithmic visibility regime that is felt as demeaning their civic voices. Three reasons given by users to explain their disengagement are discussed: the assumption that, by creating bubbles, algorithms render their citizenship useless; the understanding that being seen on Facebook entails unacceptable sacrifices to their values and well-being; and the distress caused by successfully attaining political visibility but being unable to fully control it. The article explores the normative ambiguities of this type of algorithmic resistance, contextualizing it in Brazil's autocratization process.
Based on participant-driven media use tracking and self-reflexive media use Vlogs, this article explores how young adult media users make sense of their user agency vis-à-vis algorithms in digital media and how they try actualizing it through reflexive and mundane enactments of algorithmic systems. The article proposes to adapt the concept of ‘small acts of engagement’ to grasp the productive and agentic potentials of how users enact algorithms purposively in daily media use. By engaging research participants actively in reflections to better understand, and possibly respond to the influence of algorithmic power in daily media use, the study unfolds common boundaries of users’ reflexive capabilities, showing how exercising user agency in a datafied age is increasingly complex and prospective, yet not merely limited by algorithmic power. As a result, the article discusses the methodological implications and potentials of engaging media users in reflections and actions to shape their communicative agency, which might be a possible step towards mobilizing algorithmic literacy.
There have been ongoing discussions about the ways in which the Internet has created new spaces for sexual minority individuals to meet, communicate, and build their communities in recent decades. Nevertheless, previous studies have paid disproportionate attention to identity politics, civil society, and rights-based movements. They have largely overlooked other possible forms of, and orientations toward, engagement with cyberspace, particularly those that have emerged and been restricted in non-Western contexts. This article examines Chinese lesbians' experiences of using cyberspace and the extent to which these experiences help them develop their intimate and family lives. Drawing on interview data and developing a framework that combines queer counterpublics scholarship with insights drawn from the notion of relational selfhood, this study reveals a wide range of personal, familial, and socio-political motivations for (not) engaging in cyberspace and the mixed feelings of connection and distance experienced by participants. By identifying three forms of (dis)engagement with cyberspace: those demonstrated by ‘pioneers’, ‘skeptics’, and ‘conflicted pragmatists’, this study expands the notion of queer counterpublics beyond its focus on civic and political participation and illustrates the contested and contingent nature of Chinese queer counterpublics. It shows that Chinese lesbians' interactions in cyberspace enable them to explore non-traditional paths to family formation and motherhood. Meanwhile, these interactions expose them to tensions between the new possibilities revealed by online spaces and established socio-political and familial norms. I argue that prevailing heterosexual norms, coupled with material concerns and the regulatory power of the family and the state, continue to restrict the transformative potential of cyberspace and push some lesbians to withdraw from cyberspace into themselves and refrain from taking part in collective action. The article concludes with some reflections on queer counterpublics and the complex interplay between online and offline lives in the digital age.
The visibility of news on social media platforms is now as much mediated by opaque algorithmic power as quantifiable social news sharing. As public interest journalism has been transformed and even held to ransom by platformization, and its metrification of news value, there are ways for the news media to reassert their significance and independence, while building the post-scale engagement necessary to sustain its move from advertising to audience-based revenues. Regulatory activism, engagement re-orientation, and deeper research into commendary cultures offer avenues for journalism to reconfigure its relationship to platform power in an age of social news sharing.
One important methodological challenge to normative disciplines like political or legal theory is if the method in question is purely descriptive or can be used to justify norms. Secondly, trying to incorporate ordinary language in the analysis of political concepts, this part utilizes arguments employed in the global justice debate. So, I will divide the paper into three parts: 1. Is the feasibility interpreted as a requirement of normative political theories? Firstly, I clarify the relation between experience and normativity; then I take a look at how the proto-normative and normative structures gained from experience become norms with a “critical” function. Finally, I will (re-)consider the normative feasibility criteria suggested by Hahn and by Räikkä. 2. After building a connection between the epistemic conception of criticism and the conception of politics within Kantian work, I first present Michelle Kosch’s Fichte, but then criticizing Fichte’s argument. Then, as Dworkin’s account of participation in coercion is challenged, I briefly elaborate on a roughly Dworkinian account of political equality. Lastly, I want to look into the relation between technical and ordinary definitions for political concepts, using elements taken by semantic and pragmatic old models, using populism as a case study. 3. In the concluding appendix, the connections between law and linguistic analysis of normative sentences will be examined, under the perspective of the Genoa Legal Realism.
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the conditions under which such visual texts are generated, disseminated and thought to be of societal benefit. This book is a contribution to the multi-disciplined and multi-faceted conversation concerning the forms, uses and roles of data visualization in society. Do data visualizations do 'good' or 'bad'? Do they promote understanding and engagement, or do they do ideological work, privileging certain views of the world over others? The contributions in the book engage with these core questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quantification on personal experiences, understandings, and practices of artistic creation provides insight into the wider role that metrics play in shaping how we see ourselves and others; and how we present ourselves to others. Through in-depth interviews with emerging musicians, this chapter thus uses the artist as a lens through which to understand everyday life within the “performance complex.”
This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quantification on personal experiences, understandings, and practices of artistic creation provides insight into the wider role that metrics play in shaping how we see ourselves and others; and how we present ourselves to others. Through in-depth interviews with emerging musicians, this chapter thus uses the artist as a lens through which to understand everyday life within the "performance complex."
La presente investigación (1) tiene por objetivo integrar Internet en el análisis de la experiencia del embarazo adolescente, especialmente relacionado con búsquedas sobre salud y cuidado, y la sensación de incertidumbre que se genera alrededor de dichas pesquisas. Se mantiene que el ciberespacio resulta un referente de sentido atractivo para la formulación de riegos –y por tanto certezas–, debido a su carácter vinculante, a la mano, personalizable y anónimo.
Para este caso, se ha optado por un abordaje fenomenológico (Couldry, Fotopoulou y Dickens, 2016) que integra la tecnología Internet –al igual que otros artefactos, actores, actrices y materialidad– como espacio desde donde y por medio del cual se genera sentido dentro de la experiencia perceptual encarnada (Ihde, 2004) de mujeres mexicanas que hayan acontecido un embarazo en su adolescencia.
El estudio se realizó bajo un enfoque cualitativo, entre febrero y mayo de 2019. Se entrevistaron a diez mujeres residentes en el Estado de México que entre los 14 y 19 años continuaron un embarazo. Los resultados apuntan a que Internet es constantemente utilizada por las informantes, y que, aunque este espacio de interacción es percibido como riesgoso, los sentires se modelan a partir de una selección personalizada de experiencias, movilizándose entre diferentes fuentes de información.
(1) Lo aquí expuesto proviene de la tesis de maestría en sociología desarrollada desde 2017 a la actualidad por la misma autora
This article develops a sociotechnical conceptualisation of data literacies in relation to citizens’ data practices: highlighting the agentic, contextual, critical, and social aspects of data skills and competencies, it frames data literacies as both discursive and material. In order for civil society organisations to make sense of big, small, open and other data they need multiple skills, beyond the technical; it is, therefore, unhelpful to talk about a single form of data literacy. It is more helpful to consider how such literacies in the plural develop within the material social contexts of civic cultures, and how they can progress in tandem with critical awareness about the power aspects of data, so they can become central tenets of data advocacy. The primary purpose of the article is to move forward the debate around how to conceptualise data literacy – and to question how far the concept is useful in the first place. The article draws on empirical research and starts from the premise that it is imperative to develop frameworks and training schemes that enable civil society actors and publics more generally to use open data, to make data more relevant to stakeholders, and to support their engagement in policy debates around datafication.
Social networking is a digital phenomenon embraced by billions worldwide. Use of online social platforms has the potential to generate a number of benefits including to well‐being from enhanced social connectedness and social capital accumulation, but is also associated with several negative behaviours and impacts. Employing a life‐course perspective, this paper explores social networking use and its relationship with measures of subjective well‐being. Large‐scale UK panel data from wave 3 (2011–12) and 6 (2014–15) of Understanding Society reveals that social network users are on average younger, aged under 25, but that rising use is reported across the life‐course including into old age. Probit, multinomial logistic, and ANCOVA and change‐score estimations reveal that membership, and greater use, of social networks is associated with higher levels of overall life satisfaction. However, heavy use of social networking sites has negative impacts, reflected in reductions in subjective well‐being. Socio‐economic disadvantage may drive these impacts among young (in education), unemployed and economically inactive heavy SNS users.
Ziel des Kapitels ist es zu diskutieren, wie sich online hinterlassene digitale Spuren in ihrer Komplexität auf eine Weise kontextualisieren lassen, dass man sie in ihrem sozialen Bedeutungsgehalt analysieren kann. Hierzu werden nach einer allgemeinen Diskussion der dabei bestehenden Herausforderungen am Beispiel von Schulinformationssystemen mögliche Strategien der sozialen Kontextualisierung von automatisch generierten Daten herausgearbeitet. Kernargument ist, dass für eine solche Kontextualisierung qualitative Daten notwendig sind und damit eine Triangulation von Analysen großer Datenmengen mit qualitativen Verfahren. Ausgehend von solchen Analysen werden im Fazit des Beitrags hieraus Linien zukünftiger methodischer Entwicklungen im Bereich der Forschung zu digitaler Datenspuren aufgezeigt.
This work analyzes the characteristics and qualitative changes in the forms of exercise of contemporary technologically mediated activism in social media platforms. To this end, five focal groups were held with 24 individuals who act politically, but do not maintain ties with social movement organizations. The purpose was to understand the dynamics of interaction and different strategies used by them in the diffusion of contentious causes. In addition to this material, data from the publications of each profile on the Facebook platform were collected for a period of four months following methodological principles of thickening data. This material consisted of 8,225 collected posts, of which 4,893 were analyzed with content analysis procedures. The database was built and analyzed via Excel software and the focus groups were transcribed and analyzed using the NVivo 10 Pro software. Technologically mediated activism was characterized by the detachment between organization and mobilization, the identification and promotion of actions that aim to mobilize and diffuse one or more causes through performances of connection. Another characteristic perceived in this sort of activism is the publicity of causes defended as an act both personal and political. Finally, the fourth characteristic is the creation of a "we" as the sum of individuals who share common positions about causes, rather than as an embodied group. With this, it was possible to propose an initial typology to identify different forms and meanings that the technologically mediated activism assumes from two criteria: intensity (low and high) and occurrence (continuous and punctual).
In Digital Methods, Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such “methods of the medium” as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By “thinking along” with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium.
Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine such topics as the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods, Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamouring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what 'research' means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-technical phenomenon, we argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate its assumptions and biases. In this article, we offer six provocations to spark conversations about the issues of Big Data: a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology that provokes extensive utopian and dystopian rhetoric.
What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity. Boyd's conclusions are essential reading not only for parents, teachers, and others who work with teens but also for anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in years to come. Offering insights gleaned from more than a decade of original fieldwork interviewing teenagers across the United States, boyd concludes reassuringly that the kids are all right. At the same time, she acknowledges that coming to terms with life in a networked era is not easy or obvious. In a technologically mediated world, life is bound to be complicated.
Does the information on the Web offer many alternative accounts of reality, or does it subtly align with an official version? In Information Politics on the Web, Richard Rogers identifies the cultures, techniques, and devices that rank and recommend information on the Web, analyzing not only the political content of Web sites but the politics built into the Web's infrastructure. Addressing the larger question of what the Web is for, Rogers argues that the Web is still the best arena for unsettling the official and challenging the familiar.
Rogers describes the politics at work on the Web as either back-end—the politics of search engine technology—or front-end—the diversity, inclusivity, and relative prominence of sites publicly accessible on the Web. To analyze this, he developed four "political instruments," or software tools that gather information about the Web by capturing dynamic linking practices, attention cycles for issues, and changing political party commitments. On the basis of his findings on how information politics works, Rogers argues that the Web should be, and can be, a "collision space" for official and unofficial accounts of reality. (One chapter, "The Viagra Files" offers an entertaining analysis of official and unofficial claims for the health benefits of Viagra.) The distinctiveness of the Web as a medium lies partly in the peculiar practices that grant different statuses to information sources. The tools developed by Rogers capture these practices and contribute to the development of a new information politics that takes into account and draws from the competition between the official, the non-governmental, and the underground.
Algorithms (particularly those embedded in search engines, social media platforms, recommendation systems, and information databases) play an increasingly important role in selecting what information is considered most relevant to us, a crucial feature of our participation in public life. As we have embraced computational tools as our primary media of expression, we are subjecting human discourse and knowledge to the procedural logics that undergird computation. What we need is an interrogation of algorithms as a key feature of our information ecosystem, and of the cultural forms emerging in their shadows, with a close attention to where and in what ways the introduction of algorithms into human knowledge practices may have political ramifications. This essay is a conceptual map to do just that. It proposes a sociological analysis that does not conceive of algorithms as abstract, technical achievements, but suggests how to unpack the warm human and institutional choices that lie behind them, to see how algorithms are called into being by, enlisted as part of, and negotiated around collective efforts to know and be known.
This article analyses the social imaginary of ‘networked feminism’ as an ideological construct of legitimate political engagement, drawing on ethnographic study conducted with London-based women’s organisations. For many women’s groups, the desire to connect echoes libertarian visions of Web 2.0 as an ‘open’ and ‘shared’ space, and it is encouraged by widely circulating governmental narratives of digital inclusion. In the context of public services becoming digital by default, and severe funding cuts to volunteer organisations in the United Kingdom, feminist organisations are invited to revise the allocation of resources, in order to best accommodate the setting up of digital platforms, and at the same time, to maintain their political and social aims. It is argued that there are tensions between the imaginaries of a ‘digital sisterhood’ and the material realities of women’s organisations: age, lack of resources and media literacy were found to be the three most important factors that modulate participation, and in many cases become new types of exclusions of access to publicity and recognition. By interrogating the circulation of dominant liberal narratives of digital engagement and digital inclusion that motivate new communicative practices between many feminist organisations today, the article offers a fuller understanding of networked media and activism for social justice.
The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: 'media epidemiography'. This composite of the terms 'epidemiology' and 'ethnography' is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today's swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain's indignados movement, with Twitter as the central site of propagation. Protesters have used Twitter and other viral platforms to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the protests, spreading slogans and organizational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement. These developments may signal the coming of an era in which political reality is shaped by viral contents 'shared' by media professionals and amateurs - an age of viral reality.
This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online data, and its application in social research. We ask how this ‘medium-specific’ technique for data collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a technique that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure research in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks introducing ‘alien’ analytic assumptions such as a pre-occupation with freshness. Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices and devices enabled by online media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with analytics already built in. The pre-ordered nature of captured online data is often approached as a ‘problem’, but we propose it may be turned into a virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the practices under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘live’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. We demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter and Google to track the issues of ‘austerity’ and ‘crisis’ over time. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?).
This paper investigates a web-based, medical research network that relies on patient self-reporting to collect and analyze data on the health status of patients, mostly suffering from severe conditions. The network organizes patient participation in ways that break with the strong expert culture of medical research. Patient data entry is largely unsupervised. It relies on a data architecture that encodes medical knowledge and medical categories, yet remains open to capturing details of patient life that have as a rule remained outside the purview of medical research. The network thus casts the pursuit of medical knowledge in a web-based context, marked by the pivotal importance of patient experience captured in the form of patient data. The originality of the network owes much to the innovative amalgamation of networking and computational functionalities built into a potent social media platform. The arrangements the network epitomizes could be seen as a harbinger of new models of organizing medical kn
This article explores tensions between the imaginaries and material hindrances that accompany the development of digital infrastructures for narrative exchange and public engagement. Digital infrastructures allow civil society organizations to become narrators of their community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition. Often full development and implementation of such infrastructures result in drastic changes to an organization's mode of operation. Drawing from empirical material collected during an action research project with an organization of community reporters in the North of England, here we examine the visions of ‘telling the story of the stories’ that motivated such changes, the experiments in web analytics and content curation that in practice realized these visions and the socio-economic contexts that constrained them. We attend to the wider social imaginaries about the digital as they help us understand better how social actors construct the worlds they want to inhabit within information society through mundane everyday practices. Examining how perceptions of digital engagement translate into such concrete practices is necessary in order to gain insight into the ways in which material infrastructures, such as resources and technologies, intertwine with social and cultural expectations about how life should be with digital technologies.
The paper examines Facebook’s ambition to extend into the entire web by focusing on social buttons and developing a medium-specific platform critique. It contextualises the rise of buttons and counters as metrics for user engagement and links them to different web economies. Facebook’s Like buttons enable multiple data flows between various actors, contributing to a simultaneous de- and re-centralisation of the web. They allow the instant transformation of user engagement into numbers on button counters, which can be traded and multiplied but also function as tracking devices. The increasing presence of buttons and associated social plugins on the web creates new forms of connectivity between websites, introducing an alternative fabric of the web. Contrary to Facebook’s claim to promote a more social experience of the web, this paper explores the implementation and technical infrastructure of such buttons to conceptualise them as part of a so-called ‘Like economy’.
In 2004, the English Department of Health introduced a technology (Choose and Book) designed to help general practitioners and patients book hospital outpatient appointments. It was anticipated that remote booking would become standard practice once technical challenges were overcome. But despite political pressure and financial incentives, Choose and Book remained unpopular and was generally used reluctantly if at all. Policymakers framed this as a problem of ‘clinician resistance’. We considered Choose and Book from a sociological perspective. Our dataset, drawn from a qualitative study of computer use in general practice, comprised background documents, field notes, interviews, clinical consultations (directly observed and videotaped) and naturally occurring talk relating to referral to hospital in four general practices. We used strong structuration theory, Giddens’ conceptualisation of expert systems, and sensitivity to other sociological perspectives on technology, institutions and professional values to examine the relationship between the external environment, the evolving technology and actions of human agents (GPs, administrators, managers and patients). Choose and Book had the characteristics of an expert system. It served to ‘empty out’ the content of the consultation as the abstract knowledge it contained was assumed to have universal validity and to over-ride the clinician’s application of local knowledge and practical wisdom. Sick patients were incorrectly assumed to behave as rational choosers, able and willing to decide between potential options using abstracted codified information. Our analysis revealed four foci of resistance: to the policy of choice that Choose and Book symbolised and purported to deliver; to accommodating the technology’s socio-material constraints; to interference with doctors’ contextual judgements; and to adjusting to the altered social relations consequent on its use. We conclude that ‘resistance’ is a complex phenomenon with socio-material and normative components; it is unlikely to be overcome using the behaviourist techniques recommended in the health informatics and policy literature.
This paper is about the phenomenon of encoding, more specifically about the encoded extension of agency. The question of code most often emerges from contemporary concerns about the way digital encoding is seen to be transforming our lives in fundamental ways, yet seems to operate ‘under the surface’ as it were. In this essay I suggest that the performative outcomes of digital encoding are best understood within a more general horizon of the phenomenon of encoding – that is to say as norm- or rule-governed material enactments accepted (or taken for granted) as the necessary conditions for becoming. Encoded material enactments translate/extend agency, but never exactly. I argue that such encoded extensions are insecure, come at a cost and are performative. To illustrate this I present a brief discussion of some specific historical transitions in the encoding of human agency: from speech to writing, to mechanical writing, and finally to electronic writing. In each of these translations I aim to show that agency is translated/extended in ways that have many unexpected performative outcomes. Specifically, through a discussion of the digital encoding of writing, as reuse, I want to suggest the proposition that all agency is always borrowed (or ‘plagiarized’) – i.e. it is never originally human. As encoded beings we are never authors, we are rather more or less skilful reusers. To extend agency we have to submit to the demands of encoding and kidnap that encoding simultaneously – enabling constraints in Butler’s language. Our originality, if there is any, is in our skill at kidnapping the code and turning it into an extension of our agency, that is to say, our skill at resignification – to be original we need to be skilful ‘parasites’, as suggested by Serres.
This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online
data, and its application in social research. We ask how this ‘medium-specific’ technique for data
collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a
technique that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to restructure
research in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research,
scraping risks introducing ‘alien’ analytic assumptions such as a pre-occupation with freshness.
Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social
practices and devices enabled by online media: scraping makes available already formatted data
for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with
analytics already built in. The pre-ordered nature of captured online data is often approached as a
‘problem’, but we propose it may be turned into a virtue, insofar as data formats that have
currency in the practices under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping,
we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research
analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘live’ social research, in which the formats and life
cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. We
demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on
Twitter and Google to track the issues of ‘austerity’ and ‘crisis’ over time. Here we distinguish
between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms
are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are
happening?).
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, government records, and other digital traces left by people. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-technical phenomenon, we argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate its assumptions and biases. In this article, we offer six provocations to spark conversations about the issues of Big Data: a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology that provokes extensive utopian and dystopian rhetoric.
This article is a scholarly reflection of a novice researcher conducting an action research investigation as a professional developer working with a group of elementary teachers. By the third analysis cycle, the researcher-practitioner became overwhelmed due to the amount and variety of qualitative data, and to the additional complexities caused when situational context needed to be considered. When the researcher sought council from a colleague outside the research event, a new function emerged called External Conversations, based on a common action research procedure, the critical friend. The critical friend had knowledge and experiences in common with the professional developer, but did not have exposure to the action research setting. Because of the critical friend’s lack of contextual understanding, collaborative dialogue to make sense of the data increased the researcher’s ability to see the data within context. The External Conversation strengthened the data analysis because it addressed three dilemmas of action researchers in the field of education as identified by the literature and experienced in practice: isolation, accounting for tacit knowledge, and data overload. Although this process was time consuming, using an External Conversation within an action research investigation may strengthen a study, and could be especially supportive for novice researchers.
Can visibility be counted as a general category for the social sciences? The attempt to provide an answer to this question entails both describing actual phenomena of visibility, and defining the characteristics of visibility as a workable, unified category. This article analyses the relational, strategic and processual aspects of visibility as constituting a single field. The importance of this field is rooted in the deep epistemology of seeing present in our society, as well as in its ratio vis-a-vis the other human sensory dimensions and extensions. At the substantive level, the article addresses the question of the ambivalences of visibility and its effects, according to social places and subjects. Recognition and control are understood and explained as two opposing outcomes of visibility. It is argued that empowerment does not rest univocally either with visibility (as it is assumed by the tradition of recognition) or with invisibility (as it is assumed by the arcana imperii tradition).
Digital studies on culture may be distinguished from cultural studies of the digital, at least in terms of method. This lecture takes up the question of the distinctiveness of "digital methods" for researching Internet cultures. It asks, initially, should the methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the specificity of the new medium? The larger digital methods project thereby engages with "virtual methods," the current, dominant "e-science" approach to the study of the Internet, and the consequences for research of importing standard methods from the social sciences in particular. What kinds of contributions are made to digital media studies, and the Internet in particular, when traditional methods are imported from the social sciences and the humanities onto the medium? Which research opportunities are foreclosed? Second, I ask, what kinds of new approaches are worthwhile, given an emphasis on the "natively digital" as opposed to digitization? The goal is also to change the focus of humanities and humanities computing away from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits. The effort is to develop the study of natively digital objects (the link, the tag, etc.) and devices (engines and other recommendation machines) that make use of them. After critically reviewing existing approaches to the study of the digital, which largely import method onto the medium, I subsequently propose research strategies that follow the medium. How can one learn from methods in the medium, and repurpose them for social and cultural research? The lecture launches a novel strand of study: digital methods.
This study investigates self-presentation strategies among online dating participants, exploring how participants manage their online presentation of self in order to accomplish the goal of finding a romantic partner. Thirty-four individuals active on a large online dating site participated in telephone interviews about their online dating experiences and perceptions. Qualitative data analysis suggests that participants attended to small cues online, mediated the tension between impression management pressures and the desire to present an authentic sense of self through tactics such as creating a profile that reflected their “ideal self,” and attempted to establish the veracity of their identity claims. This study provides empirical support for Social Information Processing theory in a naturalistic context while offering insight into the complicated way in which “honesty” is enacted online.
We analyze a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community System (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. There were complex challenges in creating this infrastructural tool, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual communication failures and tradeoffs. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user needs assessment, feedback, and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use. The study was conducted during a time of unprecedented growth in the Internet and its utilities (1991-1994), and many respondents turned to the World Wide Web for their information exchange. Using Bateson's model of levels of learning, we analyze the levels of infrastructural complexity involved in system access and designer-user communication. We analyze the connection between systems development aimed at supporting specific forms of collaborative knowledge work, local organizational transformation, and large-scale infrastructural change.
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending," and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become "social."
Metadata and data have become a regular currency for citizens to pay for their communication services and security--a trade-off that has nestled into the comfort zone of most people. This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication. Datafication is rooted in problematic ontological and epistemological claims. As part of a larger social media logic, it shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief. Dataism, as this conviction is called, is so successful because masses of people-- naively or unwittingly--trust their personal information to corporate platforms. The notion of trust becomes more problematic because people's faith is extended to other public institutions (e.g. academic research and law enforcement) that handle their (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology makes us want to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.
This special issue acknowledges important innovations in the world of service and within this domain we are particularly interested in exploring the rise and influence of web-based crowd-sourcing and algorithmic rating and ranking mechanisms. We suggest that a useful way to make sense of these digital service innovations and their novel implications is to recognize that they are materialized in practice. We thus need effective conceptual and analytical tools that allow us to take materiality seriously in our studies of service innovation. To this end, we propose some theoretical ideas relating to a sociomaterial perspective, and then highlight empirically how this perspective helps us analyze the specific service materializations enacted through the algorithmic configuring of crowd-sourced data, and how these make a difference in practice to the outcomes produced.
Is the Internet democratizing American politics? Do political Web sites and blogs mobilize inactive citizens and make the public sphere more inclusive?The Myth of Digital Democracyreveals that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse but in fact empowers a small set of elites--some new, but most familiar.Matthew Hindman argues that, though hundreds of thousands of Americans blog about politics, blogs receive only a miniscule portion of Web traffic, and most blog readership goes to a handful of mainstream, highly educated professionals. He shows how, despite the wealth of independent Web sites, online news audiences are concentrated on the top twenty outlets, and online organizing and fund-raising are dominated by a few powerful interest groups. Hindman tracks nearly three million Web pages, analyzing how their links are structured, how citizens search for political content, and how leading search engines like Google and Yahoo! funnel traffic to popular outlets. He finds that while the Internet has increased some forms of political participation and transformed the way interest groups and candidates organize, mobilize, and raise funds, elites still strongly shape how political material on the Web is presented and accessed.The Myth of Digital Democracy. debunks popular notions about political discourse in the digital age, revealing how the Internet has neither diminished the audience share of corporate media nor given greater voice to ordinary citizens.
Prologue Part I. Practice: Introduction I 1. Meaning 2. Community 3. Learning 4. Boundary 5. Locality Coda I. Knowing in practice Part II. Identity: Introduction II 6. Identity in practice 7. Participation and non-participation 8. Modes of belonging 9. Identification and negotiability Coda II. Learning communities Conclusion: Introduction III 10. Learning architectures 11. Organizations 12. Education Epilogue.
In the context of recent debates about the ‘data deluge’ and the future of empirical sociology, this article turns attention to current activities aimed at achieving far-reaching transformations to the World Wide Web. The emergent ‘Semantic Web’ has received little attention in sociology, despite its potentially profound consequences for data. In response to more general recent calls for a critical politics of data we focus our enquiry as follows: first, we explore how sociological analysis of the artefacts and tools that are currently being developed to build a Semantic Web helps us to uncover the potential effects of this ‘next generation’ web on knowledge, data and expertise; and second we consider what a Semantic Web might offer to sociological research. We conclude by considering some implications of multidisciplinary engagement with the Web for the future of sociology.
This text offers an understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical and engineering practice, and the production of scientific knowledge. The author presents an approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the number of factors - social, technological, conceptual and natural - that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, disciplined practices and human beings are in constantly shifting relationships with one another - "mangled" together in ways that are shaped by the contingencies of culture, time and place. Situating material as well as human agency in their larger cultural context, Pickering uses case studies to show how this picture of the open, changeable nature of science advances a greater understanding of scientific work both past and present. He examines the building of the bubble chamber in particle physics, the search for the quark, the construction of the quarternion system in mathematics and the introduction of computer-controlled machine tools in industry. He uses these examples to address the most basic elements of scientific practice - the development of experimental apparatus, the production of facts, the development of theory and the interrelation of machines and social organization.
The movement toward what is often described as Web 2.0 is usually understood as a large-scale shift toward a participatory and collaborative version of the web, where users are able to get involved and create content. As things stand we have so far had little opportunity to explore how new forms of power play out in this context of apparent ‘empowerment’ and ‘democratization’. This article suggests that this is a pressing issue that requires urgent attention. To begin to open up this topic this article situates Web 2.0 in the context of the broader transformations that are occurring in new media by drawing on the work of a number of leading writers who, in various ways, consider the implications of software ‘sinking’ into and ‘sorting’ aspects of our everyday lives. The article begins with this broader literature before exploring in detail Scott Lash’s notion of ‘post-hegemonic power’ and more specifically his concept of ‘power through the algorithm’. The piece concludes by discussing how this relates to work on Web 2.0 and how this work might be developed in the future.
Communities of practice are everywhere. They exist within businesses and across business units and company boundaries. Even though they are informally constituted and reside within a specific area of practice, these self-organizing systems share the capacity to create and use organizational knowledge through informal learning and mutual engagement. Wenger believes that communities of practice are key to understanding the complex knowledge challenges faced by most organizations in today's knowledge economy. To that end, Wenger sets the boundaries of what constitutes a community of practice and how it resides within different types of organizations. In this chapter, Wenger proposes a framework that motivates firms to recognize the critical knowledge generated by communities of practice to engage and identify common work practices, foster belonging, and deploy a knowledge strategy through transformation. With his framework, Wenger highlights how communities forge new connections and relationships with the greater organization—where the community is legitimized as a place for sharing and creating knowledge.
This paper discusses conceptual tools which might allow an elaborated sociological analysis of the relationship between information and communication technology on the one hand, and social inequalities on the other. The authors seek to go beyond the familiar idea of the ‘digital divide’ to develop a focus on digital social inequality, through discussing three bodies of literature which are normally not discussed together. The paper thus addresses issues in feminist theory; the sociological field analysis of Pierre Bourdieu; and the Actor Network Theory. This paper shows that there are unexpected commonalities in these three perspectives which allow the possibility of effective cross-fertilization. All seek to avoid positing the existence of reified social groups which are held separate from technological forces, and all stress the role of fluid forms of relationality, from which social inequalities can emerge as forms of stabilization, accumulation and convertibility.
This paper is a response to Paul Taylor's review article of the book Critique of Information. The book's main thesis is that critique in the information age must be immanent critique. Taylor reproaches this for neglecting the necessity of a transcendental for critique. The response accepts this criticism. However, it rejects Taylor's aporetic notion of critique. Instead, a dialectical notion of critique is proposed. Like all dialectics this informational dialectic is one of materiality and idea. The major difference in the information age, however, is that there is a tendency for the material and the ideal to fuse in information itself. Thus the critique of information, it is argued, is a sort of immanent dialectic. This notion of critique is illustrated with reference to media art and metadata. Throughout there is an engagement with Taylor of the political implications of such critique.
This book is a critical introduction to code and software that develops an understanding of its social and philosophical implications in the digital age. Written specifically for people interested in the subject from a non-technical background, the book provides a lively and interesting analysis of these new media forms.