Pub Date : 2023-06-05DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2023.2220081
J. Pecourt
{"title":"Feminist counterpublics and media activism in contemporary France","authors":"J. Pecourt","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2220081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2220081","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89301428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-05DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2023.2220086
G. Illés, András Körösényi
{"title":"The touch of the leader: representation and responsiveness in plebiscitary leader democracy","authors":"G. Illés, András Körösényi","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2220086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2220086","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72491229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-24DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2023.2214846
Niamh Mulcahy
This article considers the conceptual role that contingency plays in class-based inequality, by examining financial insecurity in the UK following the 2008 financial crisis, austerity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Althusser's aleatory materialism, I counter postmodern and poststructuralist ideas of contingency as a universally disruptive challenge to power and stratification, showing instead how a pervasive sense of uncertainty drives working households into debt and diminishes savings, creating ongoing financial strain or poverty. Using Althusser's concept of the 'encounter', I note how the emergence of consumer finance is historically contingent, but has become normalized in the wage relation. Financial risk, with its potential to yield high rewards for institutional investors and financial firms trading stocks, securities, and assets, amplifies uncertainty that working households face in socially reproducing themselves, because it forces those who draw an income as their main source of wealth to manage the potential risk of loss on an untradeable commodity. The encounter between financial institutions and working households is thus unevenly weighted, with precarious households unable to offload risk in unpredictable times. I connect this aleatory reading of inequality with Althusser's earlier work on contradiction and overdetermination, to understand the implications of stratification on crisis and change.
{"title":"The aleatory moment of finance and the structural production of class-based inequality","authors":"Niamh Mulcahy","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2214846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2214846","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the conceptual role that contingency plays in class-based inequality, by examining financial insecurity in the UK following the 2008 financial crisis, austerity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Althusser's aleatory materialism, I counter postmodern and poststructuralist ideas of contingency as a universally disruptive challenge to power and stratification, showing instead how a pervasive sense of uncertainty drives working households into debt and diminishes savings, creating ongoing financial strain or poverty. Using Althusser's concept of the 'encounter', I note how the emergence of consumer finance is historically contingent, but has become normalized in the wage relation. Financial risk, with its potential to yield high rewards for institutional investors and financial firms trading stocks, securities, and assets, amplifies uncertainty that working households face in socially reproducing themselves, because it forces those who draw an income as their main source of wealth to manage the potential risk of loss on an untradeable commodity. The encounter between financial institutions and working households is thus unevenly weighted, with precarious households unable to offload risk in unpredictable times. I connect this aleatory reading of inequality with Althusser's earlier work on contradiction and overdetermination, to understand the implications of stratification on crisis and change.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88176110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2235634
Fabian Muniesa
ABSTRACT Contemporary cultures of information technology are particularly propitious to the construction and propagation of stereotypes, and, hence, to the cultural critique thereof. Should that critique take at face value the vernaculars of information and behaviour that this culture affords? Or should it attempt at distorting those vernaculars, so to confront from a different angle the latent problem of the stereotype? A number of recent cultural works (in art, poetry and activism) seem to go in that direction. They may connect, in a sense, with the tradition of the ‘paranoiac-critical method’ once formulated by Salvador Dalí, and they provide an interesting testbed for the ‘science of stereotypes’ once imagined by Pierre Klossowski. This hypothesis is examined here, with reference to a number of contemporary illustrations that feed this perspective.
{"title":"A science of stereotypes: paranoiac-critical forays within the medium of information","authors":"Fabian Muniesa","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2023.2235634","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2235634","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Contemporary cultures of information technology are particularly propitious to the construction and propagation of stereotypes, and, hence, to the cultural critique thereof. Should that critique take at face value the vernaculars of information and behaviour that this culture affords? Or should it attempt at distorting those vernaculars, so to confront from a different angle the latent problem of the stereotype? A number of recent cultural works (in art, poetry and activism) seem to go in that direction. They may connect, in a sense, with the tradition of the ‘paranoiac-critical method’ once formulated by Salvador Dalí, and they provide an interesting testbed for the ‘science of stereotypes’ once imagined by Pierre Klossowski. This hypothesis is examined here, with reference to a number of contemporary illustrations that feed this perspective.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89663429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2223395
C. Borch
The proliferation of machine learning (ML) systems, which are algorithmic assemblages designed to extract patterns from data and make predictions, is visibly transforming society and everyday life. OpenAI’s GPT-4 represents the latest development in this field, but even less remarkable ML systems have made significant inroads into important societal domains over the past decades. For instance, scholars have explored the deployment of ML systems in areas such as credit scoring (Kiviat 2019; Rona-Tas 2020), insurance (Cevolini and Esposito 2020), criminal justice (Brayne and Christin 2021), selfdriving cars (Bissell et al. 2020; Stilgoe 2018), social media (Fourcade and Johns 2020), warfare (Scharre 2018), and automated trading (Hansen 2020; Hansen and Borch 2021). A substantial and growing body of literature has examined the societal effects of these systems. Concerns have been raised about their potential biases (Zou and Schiebinger 2018), their contribution to racial and social inequalities (Benjamin 2019; Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018), and their transformative impact on subjectivity, everyday life, and labour markets (Shestakofsky 2017; Wajcman 2019). Scholars have also discussed the opacity of ML systems and the broader epistemological, ethical, and political implications they entail. These discussions have touched on established notions of accountability, expertise, liability, and more (Amoore 2020; Brighenti and Pavoni 2021; Burrell 2016; Coeckelbergh 2020; Collins 2018; Fazi 2020; Pasquale 2020; Svetlova 2021). Simultaneously, there is a growing recognition, partially fuelled by these studies, that the rise of ML may have profound implications for social theory. On one hand, ML’s use as a new methodological tool holds the promise of uncovering patterns in data that could prompt a reevaluation of established concepts used to describe the social world. While this promise may not yet be fully realized, some scholars are optimistic about ML’s potential to generate theories by extracting non-linear patterns in data (Edelmann et al. 2020; Evans and Aceves 2016). On the other hand, the functioning of ML systems necessitates a reconceptualization of human-centered social theory (Airoldi 2022; Borch 2023; Esposito 2017; Yolgörmez 2021). In certain domains, the actionable predictions of ML systems not only inform human decision-making but replace it entirely (Borch and Min 2023). This distinction sets them apart from previous algorithmic systems and raises questions about accountability, control, ethics, liability, and
机器学习(ML)系统是一种旨在从数据中提取模式并进行预测的算法组合，它的激增正在明显地改变社会和日常生活。OpenAI的GPT-4代表了这一领域的最新发展，但在过去的几十年里，即使不那么引人注目的ML系统也在重要的社会领域取得了重大进展。例如，学者们已经探索了ML系统在信用评分等领域的部署(Kiviat 2019;Rona-Tas 2020)、保险(Cevolini and Esposito 2020)、刑事司法(Brayne and Christin 2021)、自动驾驶汽车(Bissell et al. 2020;Stilgoe 2018)、社交媒体(Fourcade and Johns 2020)、战争(Scharre 2018)和自动交易(Hansen 2020;Hansen and Borch 2021)。越来越多的文献研究了这些系统的社会影响。人们对它们的潜在偏见(Zou and Schiebinger 2018)、它们对种族和社会不平等的贡献(Benjamin 2019;尤班克斯2018;Noble 2018)，以及它们对主体性、日常生活和劳动力市场的变革性影响(Shestakofsky 2017;Wajcman 2019)。学者们还讨论了机器学习系统的不透明性以及它们所带来的更广泛的认识论、伦理和政治影响。这些讨论触及了既定的问责制、专业知识、责任等概念(Amoore 2020;Brighenti and Pavoni 2021;伯勒尔2016;Coeckelbergh 2020;柯林斯2018;Fazi 2020;帕斯夸里2020;Svetlova 2021)。同时，在这些研究的推动下，越来越多的人认识到，机器学习的兴起可能对社会理论产生深远的影响。一方面，机器学习作为一种新的方法论工具，有望揭示数据中的模式，从而促使人们重新评估用于描述社会世界的既定概念。虽然这一承诺可能尚未完全实现，但一些学者对机器学习通过提取数据中的非线性模式来生成理论的潜力持乐观态度(Edelmann et al. 2020;Evans and Aceves 2016)。另一方面，机器学习系统的功能需要对以人为中心的社会理论进行重新概念化(Airoldi 2022;Borch 2023;埃斯波西托2017;Yolgormez 2021)。在某些领域，机器学习系统的可操作预测不仅为人类决策提供信息，而且完全取代人类决策(Borch和Min 2023)。这种区别使它们与以前的算法系统区别开来，并提出了关于问责制、控制、道德、责任和
{"title":"Introduction to thematic section on ‘social theory in an age of machine learning’","authors":"C. Borch","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2023.2223395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2223395","url":null,"abstract":"The proliferation of machine learning (ML) systems, which are algorithmic assemblages designed to extract patterns from data and make predictions, is visibly transforming society and everyday life. OpenAI’s GPT-4 represents the latest development in this field, but even less remarkable ML systems have made significant inroads into important societal domains over the past decades. For instance, scholars have explored the deployment of ML systems in areas such as credit scoring (Kiviat 2019; Rona-Tas 2020), insurance (Cevolini and Esposito 2020), criminal justice (Brayne and Christin 2021), selfdriving cars (Bissell et al. 2020; Stilgoe 2018), social media (Fourcade and Johns 2020), warfare (Scharre 2018), and automated trading (Hansen 2020; Hansen and Borch 2021). A substantial and growing body of literature has examined the societal effects of these systems. Concerns have been raised about their potential biases (Zou and Schiebinger 2018), their contribution to racial and social inequalities (Benjamin 2019; Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018), and their transformative impact on subjectivity, everyday life, and labour markets (Shestakofsky 2017; Wajcman 2019). Scholars have also discussed the opacity of ML systems and the broader epistemological, ethical, and political implications they entail. These discussions have touched on established notions of accountability, expertise, liability, and more (Amoore 2020; Brighenti and Pavoni 2021; Burrell 2016; Coeckelbergh 2020; Collins 2018; Fazi 2020; Pasquale 2020; Svetlova 2021). Simultaneously, there is a growing recognition, partially fuelled by these studies, that the rise of ML may have profound implications for social theory. On one hand, ML’s use as a new methodological tool holds the promise of uncovering patterns in data that could prompt a reevaluation of established concepts used to describe the social world. While this promise may not yet be fully realized, some scholars are optimistic about ML’s potential to generate theories by extracting non-linear patterns in data (Edelmann et al. 2020; Evans and Aceves 2016). On the other hand, the functioning of ML systems necessitates a reconceptualization of human-centered social theory (Airoldi 2022; Borch 2023; Esposito 2017; Yolgörmez 2021). In certain domains, the actionable predictions of ML systems not only inform human decision-making but replace it entirely (Borch and Min 2023). This distinction sets them apart from previous algorithmic systems and raises questions about accountability, control, ethics, liability, and","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84277028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2221398
D. Cardon, Jean-Marie John-Mathews
ABSTRACT This article presents an interpretation of the transformation of selection tests in our societies, such as competitive examinations, recruitment or competitive access to goods or services, based on the opposition between reality and world proposed by Luc Boltanski in On Critique. We would like to explore the change in the format of these selection tests. We argue that this change is made possible by a spectacular enlargement of the space for comparisons between candidates and by the implementation of machine learning techniques. But this shift is not the only and simple consequence of the introduction of the technological innovation brought by massive data and artificial intelligence. It finds justification in the institutions and organizations that order selection tests because this new test format claims to absorb the multiple criticisms that our societies constantly raise against the previous generations of tests. This is why we propose to interpret the attention and the development of these automated procedures as a technocratic response to the development of a critique of the categorical representation of society.
{"title":"The displacement of reality tests. The selection of individuals in the age of machine learning","authors":"D. Cardon, Jean-Marie John-Mathews","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2023.2221398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2221398","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 This article presents an interpretation of the transformation of selection tests in our societies, such as competitive examinations, recruitment or competitive access to goods or services, based on the opposition between reality and world proposed by Luc Boltanski in On Critique. We would like to explore the change in the format of these selection tests. We argue that this change is made possible by a spectacular enlargement of the space for comparisons between candidates and by the implementation of machine learning techniques. But this shift is not the only and simple consequence of the introduction of the technological innovation brought by massive data and artificial intelligence. It finds justification in the institutions and organizations that order selection tests because this new test format claims to absorb the multiple criticisms that our societies constantly raise against the previous generations of tests. This is why we propose to interpret the attention and the development of these automated procedures as a technocratic response to the development of a critique of the categorical representation of society.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90472951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2243658
S. Day, Celia Lury, H. Ward
ABSTRACT The articles in this Special Issue arose from a workshop in June 2021 (https://peoplelikeyou.ac.uk/activities/people-like-you-a-new-political-arithmetic/) which considered whether we might understand the enormous variety of calculations we encounter today as a political arithmetic. Our proposal was that the term provides a powerful way to understand the political nature of calculations of economic and social value. In this introduction we showcase how contributors address the proposal in studies of personalisation, competitive test formats, algorithmic profiling, YouTube personalities and the significance of information as an increasingly important medium of ‘the social. We suggest that, together, these developments are transforming relations between the individual and society today in ways that both intensify inequalities and provide the basis for new forms of individual and collective identity.
{"title":"Introduction. Political arithmetic: old and new","authors":"S. Day, Celia Lury, H. Ward","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2023.2243658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2243658","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The articles in this Special Issue arose from a workshop in June 2021 (https://peoplelikeyou.ac.uk/activities/people-like-you-a-new-political-arithmetic/) which considered whether we might understand the enormous variety of calculations we encounter today as a political arithmetic. Our proposal was that the term provides a powerful way to understand the political nature of calculations of economic and social value. In this introduction we showcase how contributors address the proposal in studies of personalisation, competitive test formats, algorithmic profiling, YouTube personalities and the significance of information as an increasingly important medium of ‘the social. We suggest that, together, these developments are transforming relations between the individual and society today in ways that both intensify inequalities and provide the basis for new forms of individual and collective identity.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86162746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-21DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2185874
A. Mackenzie
ABSTRACT The paper situates personalization by comparing widely used numbering practices on social media and other digital platforms. It draws on A.N. Whitehead's analysis of approximation to identify how probabilities and hashes, two key approximating practices, combine to configure platforms and individual users. It shows how personalization in a typical social media setting, the Instagram Explore Page, both distributes individual differences in a statistical manifold and indexes a state of affairs of persons, things, transactions, times and places in numbers such as hashes. Approaching personalization as a practice of entangled approximations, I suggest, shows how relational mappings developed by social media platform overflow the cultural-economic logic of targetted advertising. I argue that the combination of probabilities and hashes, or statistical manifolds and distributed coordination practices, articulate new versions of the some-any relationships embedded in many facets of social life. As approximations, these numberings point to the possibility of new critical framings of technical ensembles and their capacity to condition the formation of groups.
{"title":"Some-any: approximating personalization in contemporary ensembles","authors":"A. Mackenzie","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2023.2185874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2185874","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The paper situates personalization by comparing widely used numbering practices on social media and other digital platforms. It draws on A.N. Whitehead's analysis of approximation to identify how probabilities and hashes, two key approximating practices, combine to configure platforms and individual users. It shows how personalization in a typical social media setting, the Instagram Explore Page, both distributes individual differences in a statistical manifold and indexes a state of affairs of persons, things, transactions, times and places in numbers such as hashes. Approaching personalization as a practice of entangled approximations, I suggest, shows how relational mappings developed by social media platform overflow the cultural-economic logic of targetted advertising. I argue that the combination of probabilities and hashes, or statistical manifolds and distributed coordination practices, articulate new versions of the some-any relationships embedded in many facets of social life. As approximations, these numberings point to the possibility of new critical framings of technical ensembles and their capacity to condition the formation of groups.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76403004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-21DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2023.2187736
T. Lehtimäki, M. Virtanen
{"title":"Differentiating natures, connecting environments pragmatic sociology and the emergence of green justifications","authors":"T. Lehtimäki, M. Virtanen","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2187736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2187736","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88624448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-16DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2185873
Emily Rosamond
ABSTRACT YouTube, the world’s most popular online video sharing and social media platform, is filled with personalities. Lifestyle bloggers, hobbyists, self-styled newscasters and exercise instructors add flair to what they share, carving out a niche in a crowded field. Typically, personality is understood as something that belongs to its bearer. But how might it be possible to analyze YouTube, starting from the opposite proposition: that the ‘YouTube personality’ is not so much a property of the persons featured, as it is a property of the platform itself? This article argues that on YouTube, personalities become estranged from their ostensible bearers, becoming platform infrastructure. YouTube not only broadcasts personalities; it renders personalities operational. YouTube personalities act as assetization infrastructure, in that they continually compensate for the poor terms offered on advertising revenue, producing links within ecosystems of opportunities that extend beyond the platform. They also act as cohortification infrastructures, transforming the platform’s surveillance-marketing logic of cohortification – the continuous placement of users into cohorts of similar users – into a participatory process.
{"title":"YouTube personalities as infrastructure: assets, attention choreographies and cohortification processes","authors":"Emily Rosamond","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2023.2185873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2185873","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT YouTube, the world’s most popular online video sharing and social media platform, is filled with personalities. Lifestyle bloggers, hobbyists, self-styled newscasters and exercise instructors add flair to what they share, carving out a niche in a crowded field. Typically, personality is understood as something that belongs to its bearer. But how might it be possible to analyze YouTube, starting from the opposite proposition: that the ‘YouTube personality’ is not so much a property of the persons featured, as it is a property of the platform itself? This article argues that on YouTube, personalities become estranged from their ostensible bearers, becoming platform infrastructure. YouTube not only broadcasts personalities; it renders personalities operational. YouTube personalities act as assetization infrastructure, in that they continually compensate for the poor terms offered on advertising revenue, producing links within ecosystems of opportunities that extend beyond the platform. They also act as cohortification infrastructures, transforming the platform’s surveillance-marketing logic of cohortification – the continuous placement of users into cohorts of similar users – into a participatory process.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87014953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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