Social Analytics: Doing Digital Phenomenology in the Face of Algorithmic Power

• In Event: Really Useful Analytics and the Good Life

Abstract

Algorithmic power involves the deep embedding of calculation into social actors’ experience of themselves and their interactions. Broad accounts of ‘algorithmic power’ (Lash 2002, 2009) are blind to social/civic actors’ agency in response to algorithmic power (see critique by Beer 2009). In everyday practice, organizations with pre-existing social/communal goals are rethinking themselves and their digital presence in the light of evidence generated by analytics of various sorts, whether analytics in general use or customised versions. This is an emerging topic for communications research of considerable importance.

Drawing on intensive participatory action research in the North of England with a community reporter organization (autumn 2011 to summer 2013), this paper will explain how the working concept of ‘social analytics’ emerged from this fieldwork. During our fieldwork - part of a wider research project about narrative exchange and digital infrastructures - we found ourselves appropriating Adobe’s term ‘social analytics’; we did so in order to make sense of how we were tracking actors’ use of analytics under conditions that were at least partly open to reflexive adaptation. 'Playing back' this use of analytics to those actors, in an ongoing reflexive dialogue, became the purpose of our research. By ‘social analytics’ (Couldry and Fotopoulou forthcoming), we mean the sociological study of social actors’ (more or less reflexive) uses of analytics to further their own social ends - not the purely instrumental ends of measurement or the generation of economic value through data or the sale of data. By ‘analytics’, we mean both measurement and generation of data, and the various software nowadays often called ‘analytics’, as well as the larger range of processes and practices involved in measuring, evaluating and tracking an organization or group’ practices, and their effects in the world. Our particular focus is with the ways in which social actors are affected by their digital presence, that is websites, metadata, and so on.

We will conclude by arguing that this sociological approach promises to extend our notions of the phenomenology of everyday life and action in the digital age.

Authors

• Nick Couldry, London School of Economics

• Aristea Fotopoulou, U of Sussex