Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life

Description

Targeted advertisements, tailored information feeds, and recommended content are now common and somewhat inescapable components of our everyday lives. With the help of searches, browsing history, purchases, likes, and other digital interactions, technological experiences are now routinely "personalized." Companies with access to this information often downplay the fact that users' personal data serves as a key form of monetization, and their privacy policies tend to use the terms "personalization" and "customization" to legitimize the practice of tracking and algorithmically anticipating users' daily movements. In Making it Personal, Tanya Kant sheds light on the dilemmas of algorithmic personalization, exploring such key contemporary questions as: What do users really know about the algorithms that guide their online experiences and social media presence? And if personalization practices seek to act on our behalf, then how can users constitute, retain, or relinquish their autonomy and sense of self? At the heart of the book are new interviews and focus groups with web users who-through a myriad of resistant, tactical, resigned or trusting engagements-encounter algorithmic personalization as part of their lived experience on the web. Tanya Kant proposes that for those who encounter it, algorithmic personalization creates epistemic uncertainties that can emerge as trust or anxiety, produces an ongoing struggle for autonomy between user and system, and even has the power to intervene in identity constitution. In doing so, algorithmic personalization does not just generate "filter bubbles" for individuals' worldviews, but also creates new implications for knowledge production, the deployment of cultural capital as an algorithmic tactic, and, above all, formations of identity itself. Cover half title Making It Personal Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments 1: Introduction: Making it Personal Beyond Privacy: Algorithmic Anticipation Personalization, Political Economy, and the Everyday Bridging the Gap: Getting at Lived Experience Book Structure and Overarching Themes 2: The Drive to Personalize Current Practices of Personalization A History of the Anticipated User From Unique to “Dividual”: Making Sense of the Data-​Tracked Self User versus System: The Struggle for Autonomy 3: Me, Myself, and the Algorithm Identities: Inner, Agential, Performative The Early Net and Online Identity The Ideal User Profiles and Performativity The Authentic Self? The Anticipated User versus the User Herself Algorithmic Imagination and the Algorithmic Imaginary 4: Hiding Your “Scuzzy Bits” “Control”: Tracker Blocking as a Tool for Autonomy “Knowledge”: Ghostery Use as Uneasy Insight Questioning the Power of “Power Users” Resistance: Giving Data Trackers an “Up Yours” Privacy versus Personalization: The Disconnect between Invasion and Convenience Personalization as a Threat to the Self Conclusion: Dividuated Data-​Tracked Subjects 5: Autoposting the Self into Existence Who Do You Think You Are? Identity Performance on Facebook Apps as Actors: Algorithmic Self-​Expression Regulating the Self through Spotify “You Have One Identity?” Algorithmic Context Collapse App Disclosure and Sexually Suggestive Content Wanted Autoposting? Algorithmic Capital: Autoposting as “Chavvy” Conclusion: Personalizing Personhood 6: Validating the Self through Google “Cool,” “Impressive,” “Smart,” but “Useful”? Finding Function in Prediction Self-​Blame: The Trust That Google Will Provide Privacy: The Trust That Google Will Protect The Data-​for-​Services Exchange: The Trust That Google Is Worth It A Failed Exchange: An Experiment in Data-​for-​Services “I’ve Got So Many Interests!”: The Trust That Google “Knows” You Epistemic Trust: The Faith That Google Can Personalize Personalization versus the “Ideal User”: Google’s Normative Framework Participants as Media Studies Scholars: Legitimizing Trust in Google Conclusion: “I’ll Use Google, Just Because It’s There Now” Conclusion: Removing the “Personal” from Personalization From “Personalized Search” to “Search”: Discursive Erasure Struggles for Autonomy Making the Self: Regimes of Anticipation? From Understanding to Coping: Data Providers as Algorithmic Tacticians Appendix Notes Bibliography index