Session Chair: Alex Gekker
Presentation 1
SCROLL, PRINT, ALGORITHMICALLY CLUSTER: A CO-ANALYSIS APPROACH TO EXPLORE THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN USERS, PLATFORMS AND ALGORITHMIC MODELS ON INSTAGRAM
Nicholas Carah, Maria-Gemma Brown, Rani Tesiram, Hine Kahukura, Lisa Enright, Kiah Hawker
The University of Queensland, Australia
Over the past fifteen years Instagram has industrialised and platformised the everyday practices of creating and sharing digital images. Our posts and stories are both an archive of our lives and visual practices, but also part of the historical process of assembling image data sets for training machine vision systems. This paper presents the final part of a multi-year project where we use a combination of cultural and computational methods to explore the relationships between our everyday image-making practices and the algorithmic models of Instagram (Authors). We present findings from a study with 25 participants who have used Instagram for five or more years as part of their professional or creative practices. Participants downloaded and donated their complete archive of Instagram posts and stories. We then printed out 500 images from their profile as photographs and clustered their entire archive using our purpose-built machine vision system. In a co-analysis interview participants scrolled back through their Instagram profile, narrating changes in their practices and the platform over time. They then manually sorted the images printed from their archive and explored a visualisation of the algorithmic clustering of their images. Through this process of co-analysis we elicit the algorithmic imaginary of users and develop an intimate platform biography of how their practices are entangled with platform interfaces and algorithmic models.
Presentation 2
Mixed Feelings: the platformisation of moods and vibes
Ludmila Lupinacci
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Over the past few years, digital platforms from different sectors have started tailoring their content to both respond to and create certain moods, vibes, or ‘ambiences’. In so doing, they become ‘atmospheric architectures’ (Bohme 2020), entering the industry of emotional regulation. I posit that a critical-phenomenological framework is a productive epistemological, theoretical, and methodological resource for scrutinising this shift precisely at the intersection of embodied affect and the political economy of platformisation. By critical phenomenology I mean a phenomenological disposition that is not blind to the social, technical, and political environment in which it is situated (Couldry and Kallinikos 2018). This paper also dialogues with recent discussions both in public discourse and the relevant scholarship about a latent change in our digital sociality, in which the values for which we once celebrated digital media are now being replaced by a different mode of consumption, fruition, and attention (John 2022). Using the contemporary case studies of TikTok and Spotify to flesh out these new formations in emotional capitalism (Illouz 2007), I propose that we are entering a new stage in programmed sociality (Bucher 2018), focused less on sharing, connecting, or engaging, and more on the platformisation of the merely felt. The examination of this phenomenon demands us to acknowledge the significance of those mixed feelings – which involve an interplay of the affective and the computational – and of their entanglement with a profit-oriented corporate technoscape.
Presentation 3
Theorising toggling: moving and being pushed by UI
Simiran Lalvani
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Toggling has been used to refer to fasteners that held garments in place. In computing it refers to the ability to switch between functions. As users of mundane software, we switch between doing activities (Morriss and Murray 2018) using elements of user interactions (UI) like buttons, push notifications, tapping, swiping, and toggling.
In this paper, I theorise the user interaction (UI) of toggling as people’s _movement across interfaces_ to buy, work, sell, and have fun in the everyday. Staying on the surface of interfaces through elements of UI, I show how interfaces also _push_ information to expand. Currently techno-material systems like platforms are understood to expand via application programming interfaces (APIs) (Helmond 2015) that _pull_ information. Elements of UI like toggling, swiping, tapping push notifications, suggestions, and other buttons bring to our attention how we move and are pushed as users. Obviously prior to touch-based interactions with interfaces, we have moved across livelihood and leisure. Yet, interfaces’ techno-materiality offer a speed of switching between activities.
I draw from my doctoral research on food delivery platforms and their relationships with consumer and business users to theorise toggling and contribute to literatures on touch-based interactions. By studying how platforms push and how people respond via touch based interactions, I also contribute to limited scholarship on consuming via on-demand platforms.
Presentation 4
Jewish Entrepreneurial Labor Tiktok: Navigating Visibility, Education, And Algorithmic Harm
Tom Divon(1), Jess Rauchberg(2), Jessica Maddox(3)
1: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; 2: Seton Hall University; 3: University of Alabama
This work introduces Jewish entrepreneurialism on TikTok. The platform emerged as a prominent space for Jewish creators to showcase religion and culture, fostering visibility and community engagement. They have skillfully carved out a distinct realm for entrepreneurial labor by dedicating their content creation to cultivating the #JewTok. Entrepreneurial labor prompts creators to mine their own identities for content, blurring the lines between work and self-representation. For #JewTok creators, monetizing culture becomes deeply entwined with their identity as they transform aspects of their religion, ethnicity, heritage, and culture into fodder for engagement. We use ethnographic observations of 27 creators' profiles, supplemented by interviews with 19 creators, revealing entrepreneurial labour as Jewish Ambassadorship in four ways: (1) Jewish creators as cultural brokers, helping fellow Jews navigate non-Jewish dominant spaces, with their profiles serving as cultural hubs; (2) community builders who use TikTok's features to bridge interreligious gaps among marginalized groups; (3) justice advocates who address Jewish stereotypes, and (4) religion explorers who enhance understanding of Judaism's diverse identities. Our findings also reveal entrepreneurial labour as Jewish Hardship in two ways: (1) algorithmic antisemitism, described as baked biases in algorithms leading to the suppression of Jewish creators. This harm leads to the amplification of their content to harmful audiences perpetuating (2) religious voyeurism and surveillance, where creators' content transforms into voyeuristic spectacles, drawing unwanted attention. This dynamic underscores the urgent need for researchers to explore this creator economy, as similar patterns have already emerged in other creator communities across race, disability, gender, and sexuality.
