Ode to the (Post-) Modern Subject

Contemporary society lives and dies by the numbers. The phenomenon is so pervasive that when a phenomenon is not quantified in some way, most people will not believe it exists. Statistics have become our epistemic source. Hence, numbers guide our actions. Consider two obvious examples: GDP numbers will inform us about the affluence of a country’s citizens and rising sea levels signal a melting arctic.

In the context of our class, carefully quantified numbers hope to represent the structure and centrality of a social network. As a design choice, the company that runs the platform decides to share some of this data in specific ways, be it number of friends, number of likes, number of views or number of posts. I recently came across an article mentioning a new browser extension, the Twitter Demetricator, an extension that removes all visible metrics from the platform. The article itself appears to be a fertile source for fruitful discussions. For this week I will only consider the following quote:

“This gamification of our social interactions is a component of what Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, and one of the leaders of the recent whistle-blower movement in tech, was referring to when he spoke of a ‘social-validation feedback loop.’ ”

This notion of a “social-validation feedback loop” demonstrates that metrics demonstrated by design choice are not a naïve mirror that merely represents the connectedness of an actor. Actors begin to desire the metric instead of the degree of connectedness it represents. Hence, Parker’s use of the term “gamification”.

Needless to say, at a level, every actor involved in the network is well aware of this. They just have different ways of negotiating their self-image with it. What remains unanswered is the ramification of this phenomenon for network researchers: when the desire for the signifier (displayed metric) outruns the desire for the signified (degree of connectedness among actors) will the numbers still accurately reflect relations among actors in the analog world?

Here is a link to the article: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/escaping-twitters-self-consciousness-machine/amp?__twitter_impression=true