Conclusion

This concluding chapter draws together some of the core findings of this book: the epistemic uncertainties that algorithmic personalization creates for users that emerge at times as trust or anxiety; the struggle for autonomy that users must negotiate with algorithms that seek to co-constitute their sense of self; and the performative implications of personalization that impose models of identity that are inherently in tension. The author proposes that it is in approaching personalization algorithms through the lens of the everyday that one can most productively interrogate identity as co-constituted both inside and outside of the algorithm. This means looking beyond calls for more user consent over data tracking to instead consider users’ power as algorithmic tacticians capable of deploying algorithmic capital. Algorithmic personalization must be approached in and through the situated subjectivities of everyday web use if one is to productively understand its increasingly invisible place in algorithmic culture.

Me, Myself, and the Algorithm

If “personalization” involves rendering something personally relevant, then how should “personhood” be understood, constituted, and theorized? To explore this question, this chapter scrutinizes not just “algorithmic” identity, but also broader concepts of what is meant by personhood and the self. The chapter looks to understand how users have come to be understood both inside and outside of algorithmic constitution. It argues that it is only through understanding social subjects as performatively constituted by both algorithmic and sociocultural protocols that it is possible to untangle the nuances that algorithmic personalization produces in social interaction. The chapter also considers in more detail how researchers constitute and negotiate the lived experiences of the participant accounts that they draw on.

Autoposting the Self into Existence

This chapter shifts focus from personalizing processes that threaten an inner self to algorithmic personalization practices that have the power to (re)write the self. To do so, the chapter examines the “autoposting” activities of Facebook’s third-party apps: commercial applications such as Spotify that can automatically post Facebook status updates on the user’s behalf to that user’s Facebook News Feed. These apps are discursively framed by Facebook as tools that aid user self-expression—and yet the author’s findings reveal that autoposting apps can be better considered as actors capable of (re)writing users’ identity performance on Facebook—and beyond. Drawing on the accounts of Facebook users, the chapter argues that this form of personalization can bring the self into existence in ways that require fresh interrogations of cultural capital, data commodification, and online context collapse.

Hiding Your “Scuzzy Bits”

This is the first of three chapters to scrutinize the horizon of possibilities that algorithmic personalization creates for users at the level of everyday life. The site of investigation that takes the focus of this chapter is Ghostery: a browser extension and privacy tool that allows web users to see and block the commercial data trackers that harvest, manage, and monetize the personal data that web users produce as they surf the web. Taking Ghostery’s rhetorical sum of “knowledge + control = privacy” as a conceptual starting point, this chapter draws on interviews with a selection of Ghostery users to explore their struggles for personal privacy in the context of algorithmic personalization. The author finds that Ghostery users’ negotiations with algorithmic personalization have implications in relation to autonomy, epistemic anxiety, and the protection—as well as potential “erosion”—of selfhood against data tracking.

The Drive to Personalize

How did the ubiquitous tracking and commodification of web user interactions come to dominate as the primary form of revenue generation on the internet? Why is it that the once “free” and “public” service ethos championed as the underpinning rationale of the web is now a “free” but very-much “private” service ethos? This chapter considers these questions, by defining some overarching characteristics of personalization and charting a history of commercial data tracking. As this chapter argues, it is by historically mapping both the technological and discursive development of data tracking that it becomes possible to critically understand why algorithmic personalization both seeks to “dividuate” the user but also co-constitutes the individual outside of the algorithm. It also evaluates the development of discourses that champion algorithmic personalization as “aiding” users in their decision-making, even as the same practices also bring about a struggle for autonomy between user and system.

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of current debates and problems associated with the intervention of personalization algorithms into web users’ everyday life. It proposes that platforms’ attempts to algorithmically anticipate users’ identities demand an approach that goes beyond both privacy debates and filter bubble theory normally associated with data tracking and web personalization. The chapter overviews the author’s methodological approach and findings, arguing that it is by analyzing the accounts of web users themselves that it becomes possible to unpack the complexities of algorithmic intersection with contemporary formations of the self. Finally the chapter introduces the primary historical and critical analyses, as well as empirical research studies, that constitute the remainder of the book.

Validating the Self through Google

This chapter focuses on mobile app Google Assistant as an example of algorithmic personalization. The chapter draws on the accounts of six Google users who engaged with the app over the space of six weeks. The chapter explores participants’ framing of the app as “smart” and “impressive” even as the app failed to be “useful”; participants’ invocation of self-blame in order to explain the app’s failures; their faith that Google would uphold its side in the data-for-services exchange; and finally, participants’ expectations that the app could and should know them to an extraordinarily complex degree. The chapter proposes that the Google app’s interface constructs and evokes an ideologically normative “ideal user” in order to present “personalized” information. The author argues that participants articulated an enduring sense of trust to predict, construct, and legitimize identity articulation. This trust is embedded not only in the app itself, but also in Google as a broader technological, sociocultural, and commercial force.