{"title":"To Affinity and Beyond: Clicking as Communicative Gesture on the Experimentation Platform","authors":"James N. Gilmore","doi":"10.1093/ccc/tcaa005","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes how users' engagements with digital platforms through the act of clicking are coded as meaningful for the production of affinity, a way of assessing identity amongst users. Drawing on an understanding of identity as related to the Latin idem—or same—this article explores how streaming media company Netflix uses click-based A/B testing to create “taste doppelgängers” that live in “taste communities” and help structure the recommendations, home pages, and image thumbnails that users experience. Clicks are figured as communicative gestures that platform engineers decode and analyze as part of ongoing experiments for refining algorithms and interface design. Drawing additionally on an analysis of Netflix's recent move into interactive television—in particular, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch—this article ultimately argues for attention to how platforms like Netflix treat users as test subjects for the purposes of constructing idem-based affinities.","PeriodicalId":54193,"journal":{"name":"Communication Culture & Critique","volume":"4 1","pages":"333-348"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"7","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Communication Culture & Critique","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcaa005","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 7
Abstract
This article analyzes how users' engagements with digital platforms through the act of clicking are coded as meaningful for the production of affinity, a way of assessing identity amongst users. Drawing on an understanding of identity as related to the Latin idem—or same—this article explores how streaming media company Netflix uses click-based A/B testing to create “taste doppelgängers” that live in “taste communities” and help structure the recommendations, home pages, and image thumbnails that users experience. Clicks are figured as communicative gestures that platform engineers decode and analyze as part of ongoing experiments for refining algorithms and interface design. Drawing additionally on an analysis of Netflix's recent move into interactive television—in particular, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch—this article ultimately argues for attention to how platforms like Netflix treat users as test subjects for the purposes of constructing idem-based affinities.
期刊介绍：
CCC provides an international forum for critical research in communication, media, and cultural studies. We welcome high-quality research and analyses that place questions of power, inequality, and justice at the center of empirical and theoretical inquiry. CCC seeks to bring a diversity of critical approaches (political economy, feminist analysis, critical race theory, postcolonial critique, cultural studies, queer theory) to bear on the role of communication, media, and culture in power dynamics on a global scale. CCC is especially interested in critical scholarship that engages with emerging lines of inquiry across the humanities and social sciences. We seek to explore the place of mediated communication in current topics of theorization and cross-disciplinary research (including affect, branding, posthumanism, labor, temporality, ordinariness, and networked everyday life, to name just a few examples). In the coming years, we anticipate publishing special issues on these themes.
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
分享
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
扫码关注我们
