The algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms

ABSTRACT

This article reflects the kinds of situations and spaces where people and algorithms meet. In what situations do people become aware of algorithms? How do they experience and make sense of these algorithms, given their often hidden and invisible nature? To what extent does an awareness of algorithms affect people's use of these platforms, if at all? To help answer these questions, this article examines people's personal stories about the Facebook algorithm through tweets and interviews with 25 ordinary users. To understand the spaces where people and algorithms meet, this article develops the notion of the algorithmic imaginary. It is argued that the algorithmic imaginary – ways of thinking about what algorithms are, what they should be and how they function – is not just productive of different moods and sensations but plays a generative role in moulding the Facebook algorithm itself. Examining how algorithms make people feel, then, seems crucial if we want to understand their social power.     

Desirable Difference: The Shadow of Racial Stereotypes in Creating Transracial Families through Transnational Adoption

The article analyzes how parents decide to adopt a child transnationally by detailing how the meaning of race is articulated in the formation of family. Drawing from my interviews with adoptive parents, I examine how they internalize ideas about different racial groups. For example, I investigate how what they have learned from the adoption agencies, their own perceptions of racial stereotypes, and their perceptions of the communities in which they reside influence their understanding of race. The article suggests that adoptive parents, when considering whether to adopt children from the U.S. or overseas, use a criteria dictated by racial stereotypes in understanding Asian Americans as the model minority, African-Americans as a deficient group, and Latinos occupying an intermediary position.     

The Influence of Cultural Capital on How AmeriCorps Members Interpret Their Service

How do volunteers interpret what their service means to them? Is it based on the values the program instills, or on their experiences before volunteering? To answer these questions, I investigate service interpretation in the AmeriCorps program, a US-based social service agency. I conduct 22 in-depth interviews with AmeriCorps members to highlight how they use their cultural capital—rooted in their raised-class background—to interact differently with those they serve and to interpret different benefits of AmeriCorps. I find members from lower-income backgrounds use their past as a form of cultural capital to connect with their service population. On the other hand, members from more privileged backgrounds see the program as beneficial in the context of future work, yet have more difficulty connecting with those they serve. I conclude that the cultural capital learned from different social classes fosters different service interpretations for AmeriCorps members.     

Queers,Bullying and Schools: Am I Safe Here?

SUMMARY

This article reports on interviews conducted with students and educators in various Toronto-area high schools in an attempt to gauge how and to what extent so-called “formal” law (laws, policies, regulations) interacts with other, sometimes, competing normative orders, such as gender codes, sexuality, race, religion, in the educational setting. This approach is necessary to understand how anti-harassment and anti-homophobia policies are complicated by these other regulating influences.     

The Symbiotic Ideology: Stewardship,Husbandry, and Dominion in Beef Production

Social studies of agriculture tend to overlook the micro and symbolic interactions that structure relationships among agriculturalists, the environment, and animals raised as commodities. In this study, I use ethnographic methods and in‐depth interviews with conventional beef producers to understand their perceptions of the environment and the nonhuman animals they raise. Central themes in this setting are the ethics of stewardship and husbandry. I seek to understand how these values are constructed and used interactionally. I argue that stewardship and husbandry help describe a process of co‐constitution that binds together ranchers, cattle, and the natural environment. The analysis engages actor‐network theory by emphasizing nonhuman activeness and draws from symbolic interaction and cultural sociology to show how people interpret the actions of nonhumans. The findings show that ranchers frame their relationships with cattle and the environment as symbiotic and work to understand the interests of the nonhuman as complementary to production. I introduce the term symbiotic ideology to show the way this approach mystifies power dynamics embedded in the ethic of dominion.     

The Private Life of Public Ritual: Interaction, Sociality and Codification in a Jewish Orthodox Congregation

This article develops an account of the relationship between codification, interactional achievements and forms of sociality in the context of religious worship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Jewish Orthodox community in Los Angeles, I argue that an important part of what makes public worship situations compelling is how they interactionally highlight individual participants’ lives, creating pressures to engage in predictable forms of sociality. This argument is then developed in two contexts: (a) “information gaps” encoded in the structure of daily Orthodox prayer, and; (b) the religious requirement to pray with a quorum of ten adult men. Through these examples I argue that codified aspects of public ritual give rise to variations that participants may understand to highlight individual lives. In many situations, public worship is compelling precisely because it actually individualizes participation. As these interactions are predicated on a codified structure, they provide “institutional fingerprints” for the construction of specific patterns of sociality. An appreciation of this aspect of public worship provides grounds for a broad comparative agenda, focusing on the relationship between codification, interactional patterns and forms of sociality within, and beyond, religious contexts.     

Das Tabu brechen: Gemeinsam über Geld sprechen Ein Werkstatt-Bericht

The paper shows work in progress. Several years ago I started forming groups of men and women who want to reflect about their different money styles. I assume that the special way a person deals with money reflects its personality, especially the conflicts he or she has with him or herself and with others. The conventional economic view ignores such symbolism. It fails to provide an adequate understanding about the big influence of emotions, norms and values on what people think about money and how they use it in different social situations. But people seldom make rational decisions. In most cases they only rationalize their irrational desires. It is therefore necessary to develop a financial competence which is based on the insight in ones own psychic structure. The groups I report about here offers sheltered spaces where such insights can be gained.     

Consuming Projects in Uncertain Times: Making Selves in the Galilee1

Abstract Reception and identification processes, crucial to understand situations of political conflict, have been studied in relation to particular events, rituals, or media. This article proposes a different approach. It explores how ordinary people, through projects of their own which exhibit particular forms of intentional cultural production and consumption, manifest historically situated notions of selves. I use the idea of “projects” to understand the interconnections between global consumer culture, identity, and nationalism as they are manifested in the everyday lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel. To exemplify these interconnections, I focus on two significant, creative projects through which Palestinian inhabitants of the Western Galilee shape and manifest selves in history. Though these projects appear very different on the surface, they are used to address the same central question – that is, to understand how senses of self in history and attending identities are materially and discursively constituted by members of a national minority in the ever-present context of political conflict. They show that people are not passive consumers of homogenizing rituals and discourse and reveal how, through a bricolage of objects and ideas, people inscribe intentions, meanings, ways of thinking, and self-narration in places and histories.     

Order of recall and meaning of closeness in collecting affective network data

The paper investigates how study participants handle the so-called “hierarchical mapping technique”, an affective name generator developed by Antonucci (1986), which is accompanied by a diagram enabling respondents to compare alters with regard to different degrees of closeness. By applying the thinking-aloud method, we identified three patterns in the order of recalling alters: closeness as overarching schema (with either role relationships or relationship properties as subordinate schema), roles and foci as overarching schema, and a fraying schema. In addition, we investigated how study participants understand and interpret “closeness”. The meanings of closeness can refer to various relationship properties, cultural framing, and relationship dynamics. Results show that specific meanings of closeness are related to different recall patterns. Furthermore, recall patterns vary according to the socio-economic status of the participants. Finally, implications for the construction of name generators and data collection are discussed.     

Thinking with the Mind,Syncing with the Body: Ballet as Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Interaction

Symbolic interactionist theory describes self‐consciousness as arising through symbolic interaction. I use one empirical case, ballet training, to suggest that symbolic interaction can, by producing self‐consciousness, cultivate unself‐consciousness. Using in‐depth interviews with twenty‐three individuals reporting on training experiences in six countries and twenty‐three American states, I show that dancers can learn, through self‐conscious symbolic interaction, how it feels to embody what an audience sees, as they strive to train their bodies to portray an institutionalized aesthetic. The embodiment of technique facilitates a markedly unself‐conscious “flow” experience while performing. In contrast, having an acute awareness of embodying an incompatible physiology inhibits flow and often motivates dancers to self‐select out of ballet. These interactionist sources of “nonsymbolic” interaction both evoke and suppress “mind” through social interaction.     

The manifestations of politics in evaluation: An exploratory study across the evaluation process

Evaluation has been described as a political act. Programs and policies are generated from a political process, and the decision to evaluate and how to use the evaluation are manifestations of the political dynamic. This exploratory study was conducted with practicing evaluators to understand what they view as political situations in the evaluation process and how they responded to these situations. Findings suggest that, in relation to the potential evaluation phases in which each respondent has been involved, evaluations are susceptible to politics when initially attempting to identify stakeholders and when it’s time to report the evaluation findings. Evaluators have also developed multiple strategies for dealing with these situations, including finding allies for the evaluation and working to explain the evaluation process and its implications. We hope that this study will help to inform novice and expert evaluators about the various political situations they may encounter in their practice.     

‘Where are you from?’: Identifying place1

Many social research projects, such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys, take local place as a given: they choose participants from a particular place, take this place as background for what the participants say, ask them about place‐related issues, and correlate responses with different places. But people can identify places in different ways, in geographical or relational terms, and in different levels of scale. This study analyses passages in focus groups in which participants say where they are from, shows that participants generally take the question and answer as routine, and then shows the ways the interaction develops when this routineness is broken, amended, or called into question. When a participant revises their statement of where they are from, they adapt to what they see as the knowledge and stance of their interlocutor, they re‐present themselves, and they create possibilities for further talk, defending, telling stories, or showing entitlement to an opinion. I argue that the ways people answer this question, interactively, can tell us about them, and us, as well as about their map of the world.     

The terrors of night and the arrows of day. Social workers' processes in the aftermath of murder

This paper provides extended extracts from interviews conducted with three social workers interviewed for a study enquiring into social workers' experiences of stress. For the purposes of this study, experienced practitioners were asked to recall a time that stood out for them in their minds as causing them stress. They were asked to describe the experience, to say how it had affected them, how they responded to it and what they had found helpful and unhelpful when attempting to deal with the experience. The three participants quoted in the paper all talked of their involvement with service users who had killed others. They describe personal and organisational responses to the murders and tell of internal processes and responses from others that were found to be helpful and unhelpful. The 'haunting' quality of such experiences is apparent throughout accounts, as is the relevance of psychodynamic theory and concepts. The importance of creating and using a therapeutic space in which it is possible to have ideas about how such stress can be thought about is emphasised.     

Encounters with Philanthropic Information: Cognitive Dissonance and Implications for the Social Sector

Using interviews with senior level employees in the social sector, I analyze the interactions between organizations and individual potential and existing donors. I recommend a reevaluation of the sector’s use of what I term “agents of philanthropy,” as well as a reconsideration of the hesitation to introduce philanthropic giving to individuals and corporations. To support this assertion, I conduct a thematic content analysis of The New York Times to show how the transference of philanthropic information affects the cognitions and subsequent actions of readers. Using this analysis, I show how individuals may be primed for charitable giving if only these opportunities were presented. The design and focus of this research addresses what I have perceived as oversights in philanthropic research to date: the exclusion of psychology theory, an overemphasis on the conscious, stated motivations of donors, and the lack of interdisciplinary work on prosocial behaviors.     

Beyond the body in a box: Visualizing contexts of children's action

Social scientists refer routinely to a range of social and cultural contexts in trying to understand children's lives, but this range may not include what children think or say about what they do. In this article, I examine how two girls thought about their efforts to mummify a Barbie Doll as part of a school project. Attending to what the girls said about their project led me to regard strings of related activities—as defined by kids—as an important but neglected context of children's action. After reviewing how the girls’ work cut across the contexts familiar to social scientists, I examine the implications of “activity series” for visualizing kids and their contexts, in theory and in photographs.     

Unemployed by choice: young creative people and the balancing of responsibilities through strategic self-management

The Danish welfare system inadvertently provides a good opportunity for young creative people to pursue their dreams in creative fields such as art, acting, music while being on unemployment benefits. As Michael, one of the participants, puts it: ‘I consider unemployment benefit entrepreneurial support’. The subversive practice is illegal. This qualitative study investigates how young unemployed people who choose to be unemployed in order to engage in innovative projects in creative fields understand and justify their practice. Analysis of in-depth interviews with six young unemployed persons shows how the understanding and management of responsibility is pivotal in the self-understanding and legitimization of receiving unemployment benefits by choice, not out of need. This creative group reflects the contours of a new type of unemployed that has received very little attention in the research literature. The group challenges the traditional representation of the unemployed and portrays themselves as innovative, competent and able to cope with financial insecurity even though it is psychologically distressing and a risky path to go down. We characterize them as strategic self-managing as they use educational systems and unemployment benefit systems for something entirely different from what they are intended – they use it to create their own artistic life courses. This study tentatively points to a categorization distinguishing between personal, social and societal responsibility by which we can improve our understanding of responsibility in neoliberal contexts.     

Somatic Security: Negotiating Appropriateness in Sexualized Interactions

This article analyzes how individuals use affect as a resource to negotiate judgments of appropriateness in situations where they or others feel sexualized. It draws from two years of participant observation at a sensual figure drawing session in an erotic arts club—where bodily exposure was heightened and social norms regarding sexualization were ambiguous—as well as in-depth interviews with the club’s artists, models, and owners. It argues that somatic security and somatic insecurity, individuals’ comfort or unease with how they perceive others to interact with their bodies through talk and bodily comportment, mediate sexualized interactions. Extending sociological studies of sexualization in interaction, it reveals that these affective states, which arise out of situational dynamics, form a foundation of comfort/unease toward others and assurance/shame with oneself. Individuals use these affective experiences to judge and justify future interactions as appropriate or inappropriate and develop relationships with others.     

“Live Social Work”: How to Bring Life Back into Social Work

Abstract

In this article I discuss how professional social work can entail critical, reflexive work. This is accomplished by adapting the concept of “live sociology”. It is mainly an exploratory article, trying to raise suggestions that can be adopted and be further developed. I argue that people coming into contact with contemporary social work are sometimes reduced to being “dead” objects, as they are pinned down into static categories. The demand for developing evidence-based social work risks substantiating this tendency even further. In contrast, I claim that social work needs to move away from these kinds of explanations and instead turn towards developing “live social work”; that is to say, social work where everyday life, agency, and what people do in what context needs to be the focus, not what people are.     

The Symbolic Dilemmas of Suburban Poverty: Challenges and Opportunities Posed by Variations in the Contours of Suburban Poverty1

Poverty has increased significantly in U.S. suburbs since the 1990s. What we know about suburban poverty is largely limited to demographic and economic information. Building off the organizational perspective approach, I use in‐depth interviews with nonprofit, antipoverty organizations in eight Pennsylvania suburbs to better understand the suburban poverty experience. My focus is on how organizations compete for external resources. By working directly with the poverty problem while also working in broader metropolitan political and economic fields of decision making, this “middleman” role ( Marwell, 2007 ) gives us insights into contemporary poverty dynamics for suburbs. I find that how suburban organizational leaders perceive the challenges they face, and what strategies they adopt to confront such difficulties, revolves around symbolic dilemmas posed by the history, distribution, and politics of poverty in the suburbs. Symbolic dilemmas cluster around three different situational contexts of poverty in the suburbs. I use this to develop a three‐part typology of suburban poverty: symbiotic suburbs, skeletal suburbs, and overshadowed suburbs. This typology has implications for future research and for policymakers interested in developing tools to appropriately address this pressing issue.