Joint seminar AxPo & Centre for Research on social InequalitieS

How Algorithms Shape Culture: Lessons on Authenticity from Elite Content Creators

Ashley Mears

Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University

Friday 2 June 2023, 11:30-13:00 (Paris time)

Location: Room "Salle du Conseil" (5th floor), Sciences Po, 13 rue de l'Université 75007 Paris.
[There will also be a Zoom option to enable a hybrid seminar.  Registration required]

Discussion by Achim Edelmann, Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science, Sciences Po - Médialab

Algorithms shape culture, but how? Algorithms are now so intertwined with markets, workplaces, and media that scholars describe them as part of our social systems of meaning-making.

This project examines how algorithms shape the practical work of making culture. 

I draw from an immersive ethnography of content creators who engineer entertainment videos to go viral on social media. Algorithms, I find, discipline creative workers into making attention-grabbing content, often transforming their artistic visions of authenticity. 

First, creators learn to subjugate their own tastes to data; second, they adapt to algorithm changes; third, they simplify stories into visual, often stereotypically sexualized and racialized imagery; fourth, they copy what works; fifth, they experience thrills of a game of scoring metrics.Ultimately, successful creators redefine their standards of quality with quantitative metrics they think algorithms will reward. 

By documenting this labor process, and creators’ shift in values and authenticity, I arrive at a theory of algorithms as performative in the online cultural economy, and fundamentally at odds with social media platforms’ insistence that they prize and reward authenticity.

Registration is mandatory. Thanks!