TY - JOUR
T1 - Some-any: approximating personalization in contemporary ensembles
AU - Mackenzie, Adrian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2023/5/4
Y1 - 2023/5/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Personalization
KW - approximation
KW - ensemble
KW - group
KW - numbering
KW - platform
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85150466573&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2185874
DO - 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2185874
M3 - Article
SN - 1600-910X
VL - 24
SP - 241
EP - 253
JO - Distinktion
JF - Distinktion
IS - 2
ER -