Understanding the Rhythms of Social Media Platforms

The next presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Elinor Carmi, whose interest is in the power behind spam, noise, and other disruptive behaviours. In most forms of creative media, there is a form of direction, often aimed at generating an emotive response from the audience. This is also true in online spaces, where we are directed by algorithmic rhythms. We might be able to understand these by borrowing concepts from sound.

The intentions of a theatre director and a social media executive are quite different, however; they seek to engender different audience responses. In social media, for instance, practitioners from different professions listen to different sources using different tools at different times to generate better knowledge about their users; this can be understood as a form of processed listening.

Building on ideas including Raymond Williams’s ‘planned flow’ in television, feminist technoscience’s process, and Henri Lefebvre’s ‘rhythmanalysis’ leads us to the idea of rhythmedia, then: the way media companies order different components in a way that orchestrates desired rhythms (e.g. sociality) while filtering problematic rhythms (e.g. spam). This happens for example during Facebook’s ad auctions that happen in real time every time an advertisement is served to a Facebook user: during these auctions, the user’s profile and repetitive actions are being assessed in order to determine what ads would be appropriate to serve to the user at that point.

Similar processes also apply in content moderation: this builds on explicit user feedback as well as implicit user activities, traced both on the platform itself and through the wider Web. Such behavioural scanning identifies users’ repetitive actions and common behaviours, and again this can be understood as a form of processed listening. But in each case, this shapes our sociality in ways that predominantly benefit the platform rather than its users.

What, if anything, can we do to break free from this? Would it help to break open the monopolies, to create an Internet tax, to de-individualise the technologies, or to involve users in platform design?