Critical Literacies and the Algorithmic Imagination on #BookTok

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Digital, Visual, and Gaming Literacies in Education (Table 10)

Abstract

The online social and cultural contexts of literacy are now inexorably data-driven, and research on critical literacy must account for youths’ participation in, and co-production of, culture in relation to algorithms. We introduce the concept of algorithmic imaginaries to literacy studies to describe how youth attempt to ‘work algorithms’ to make the content they produce more visible. We analyze how the algorithmic imagination shapes users’ production of culture on TikTok, at the intersection of human and code, focusing on #BookTok, the home of book-related content. Through multimodal content analysis of 50 BookTok videos, we analyse dominant “types” of engagement with the algorithm (eg. critique, “how to,” and exploration) as well as “strategies” of engagement (eg. PSA, parody, recommendation journey).

Authors

• Bronwen E. Low, McGill University
  Presenting Author

• Christian Ehret, McGill University
  Presenting Author