Self-Evaluation in Social Media: Reworking Temporalities

This paper focuses on the increasing prevalence of devices for self-evaluation in the context of social media, that is tools that allow users to make sense of the activities and data they produce in social media platforms. While platforms focus on creating climates of immediacy and now-ness, they offer little access the past, to retrospectively search and make sense of one’s data. This lack has lead to the emergence of numerous self-evaluation tools, offering a re-organisation of data, activities and temporalities. The primary focus lies on the performative capacities of such tools, as suggested in the work of Power, Strathern and Espeland, showing that the measurements they create are not designed to capture a separate reality, but function as framing devices, inviting some types of awareness, and action while ruling out others. The framing dynamics are explored by focusing on the production of numbers as enumerated entities (Verran 2010), drawing attention to how numbers are never simply abstractions, but construct relations and temporalities, most particularly through algorithmic rankings and dynamics of ordinality. The role of numbers is understood in relation to dynamics of mediation and medium-specificity (Rogers 2009). Self-evaluative tools not only draw on data and activities specific to social media platforms, they also allow for new modes of organising these activities, data and temporalities. The interlinked movement of numbers, media and selves in self-evaluation is explored as dynamic assemblage, opening up engagement with selected intervals of the past, in order to create climates of anticipation and future orientation.

2012

This paper contends that one of the key contemporary forms of valuation and measurement is selfevaluation. It takes self-evaluation in social media as the empirical focus and introduces to a number of services that allow users to make sense of the data they produce on social media platforms. While users perform increasing amounts of activities and connections, platforms offer only limited possibilities to make sense of one’s own data and often turn activities into fleeting objects on streams and promote immediate interaction without organised access to the past (Berry, 2011; Gehl, 2011). Such a lack has opened up the opportunity for a number of third party self-evaluation applications to emerge.

Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory , 2014

This paper takes tools of self-valuation in social media as an empirical focus. By way of a case-study of Klout, an influential measure of influence, we suggest that the forms of reactivity and self-fulfilling prophecy that have been identified as a problem with some forms of measurement are actually an intentional effect of such tools: that is, the measurements that such tools produce are not designed to capture a separate reality, but are deliberately employed to modify the activity that they themselves invite. In other words, they expect and exploit reactivity. We suggest that such media are indicative of the rise in what might be called participative metrics of value. We further suggest that the capacity to evaluate and modify the self that Klout affords is intricately tied up with the agency and (self-)valuation of Klout as a tool itself. An intermediate layer of the argument is that this tying up is achieved through the production of numbers as specific kinds of ‘enumerated entities’. We use this term to draw attention to the ways in which numbers are never simply abstractions, but always have specific material-semiotic properties. In this case, we show that these properties are tied to the use of media-specific operations, and that these properties, including those of inclusion and belonging, inform how Klout participates in particular kinds of ordering and valuation. We thus explore the interlinked movement of numbers, media, and value in social media as a kind of dynamic assemblage.

International Journal of Communication , 2021

The Like button is simultaneously a means of social interaction and a tool to evaluate social media content. Likes are built into the infrastructure of platforms, fueling personalized searches, recommendations, and targeted advertisements while contributing to the economic valuation of platforms and users alike. Working at the intersection of infrastructure and practice, we analyze the experience of everyday evaluations on social media to understand how platforms shape what people care about. Based on in-depth interviews with 25 artists who use Instagram, we identify three overlapping orientations to the Like button: affective, relational, and infrastructural. We show how the flexibility of the button creates ambiguity around the meaning of a Like which drives practices of metaevaluation, and argue that the platform architecture incentivizes an economic approach to evaluation that crowds out other value schemas, shaping how artists use the platform, make art, and even understand themselves. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of everyday evaluations, algorithms, and platforms. How are you feeling? What do you think about this? Would you like to see more? Questions a close friend might ask have been incorporated into the very infrastructure of online platforms. We are invited to review products purchased and services received, to rate the latest television show or blockbuster movie, and to Like posts on social media with the click of a button or the tap of a screen.

AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research

Since its release in 2017, the video sharing app TikTok has been downloaded 1.5 billion times. While its popularity has been attributed to the abundance of celebrity users, its interactive features, and its short, palatable video length, it has been the subject of relatively few academic studies. This project employs the walkthrough method to examine TikTok within the context of identity negotiation and self-representation on social media. More specifically, it seeks to understand whether TikTok follows a precedent set by other Social Networking Sites which support users self-representing via sociability “to the network, via the network”; i.e. by interacting within the affordances of the platform, which may include sharing, liking, commenting, etc (Papacharissi, 2013). This model ostensibly offers users a stage where they may display their individuality and curate content that reflects their personal interests. By regularly using the app for a period of a month and collecting extens...

An online survey was used to the examine college students' uses and gratifications of social recommendation systems such as ''like'' on Facebook. By presenting numerical values, these systems display the volume (i.e., how many users) and valence (i.e., like/dislike) of collective opinions within a specific e-community that users are involved with. Consequently, these systems offer the chance for users to scan the climate of opinions within a specific online community. More importantly, these systems have introduced a new mode of speaking out online. Due to social recommendation systems' significance in the public opinion domain, the study attempted to understand why and how people use them to express opinions. Results showed that social recommendations were used for expression, information, socialization, and entertainment purposes. Above all, users primarily viewed them as potential expressive tools and actually use them to express their opinions. While internet use had no significant relationships with either motives or system uses, social media uses were closely related with both motives and actual uses. The findings suggest that social recommendation systems seem to play an important role in the public opinion domain by offering an additional way to scan collective opinions and express opinions.

In a postdemographic world, characterized by the continuous production and calculation of social data in the form of likes, comments, shares, keywords, locations or hashtags, social media platforms are designed with techniques of market segmentation in mind. " Datafication " challenges the agency of participatory social media practices and traditional accounts of the presentation of self in the use of social media. In the process, a tension or paradox arises between the personal, curative or performative character of social media practices and the calculative design and commercial usefulness of platforms and apps. In this paper I interrogate this paradox, and explore the potential role of metrics and analytics for emergent data literacies. By drawing together common self-oriented metrics across dominant platforms, the paper emphasizes analytics targets around a) profile, b) activity, c) interactivity and d) visibility, as a step toward developing new data literacies.

Identity in a Technological Society

This chapter discusses the use of social applications in the process of the constitution of the self and the production of the self-presentation in digital environments. It examines two modalities: (1) the use of social applications that promote the comparative analysis of actions, speeches, and performance repercussions taken place in the digital environment, and (2) the use of applications and systems that enable the retrieval of the users’ social information in a systematic, sequential, and historical perspective. It also discusses how these applications present users with different methods of monitoring, controlling, visualizing, and planning information that is published not only by individuals themselves but also by the interacting individuals in the social digital environment.