Computing the everyday: Social media as data platforms

We conceive social media platforms as sociotechnical entities that variously shape user platform involvement and participation. Such shaping develops along three fundamental data operations that we subsume under the terms of encoding, aggregation, and computation. Encoding entails the engineering of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Information society Vol. 33; no. 4; pp. 175 - 191
Main Authors: Alaimo, Cristina, Kallinikos, Jannis
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Routledge 08.08.2017
Taylor & Francis LLC
Subjects:
Agglomeration
Categories
classification
Coding
Conversation
data infrastructures
Digital media
Habits
Internet
Marking
Mass media
Orientation
Participation
posttransactional spaces
Procurement
Shopping
social data
Social interaction
Social media
social media platforms
Social networks
sociality
Value creation
ISSN:0197-2243, 1087-6537
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We conceive social media platforms as sociotechnical entities that variously shape user platform involvement and participation. Such shaping develops along three fundamental data operations that we subsume under the terms of encoding, aggregation, and computation. Encoding entails the engineering of user platform participation along narrow and standardized activity types (e.g., tagging, liking, sharing, following). This heavily scripted platform participation serves as the basis for the procurement of discrete and calculable data tokens that are possible to aggregate and, subsequently, compute in a variety of ways. We expose these operations by investigating a social media platform for shopping. We contribute to the current debate on social media and digital platforms by describing social media as posttransactional spaces that are predominantly concerned with charting and profiling the online predispositions, habits, and opinions of their user base. Such an orientation sets social media platforms apart from other forms of mediating online interaction. In social media, we claim, platform participation is driven toward an endless online conversation that delivers the data footprint through which a computed sociality is made the source of value creation and monetization.
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ISSN:0197-2243
1087-6537
DOI:10.1080/01972243.2017.1318327