Читать книгу Instagram - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 16

In June 2016, Instagram shifted from a chronological display of Instagram content in a user’s feed to an algorithmically sorted timeline in a move which angered many users and was widely considered more like Mark Zuckerberg’s famous instruction to ‘move fast and break things’ (Vaidhyanathan 2018). Like the Facebook newsfeed and related proprietary tools for making decisions about content and curation, the algorithmic timeline is opaque to most users, which led to wild speculation about exactly how decisions are made. In 2018 Instagram briefed technology reporters on the broad parameters of how the algorithmic timeline operates, in part to reassure businesses and brands that the algorithms would continue to ensure a level playing field and that users would see their content, even as the number of users continues to grow. According to their briefing, each user’s unique Instagram feed is based on three core categories:

 Interest – how much Instagram perceives a user will want to see a post based on past viewing of similar content;

 Recency – how new the post is; and

 Relationship – how close a user is to the user posting the content. This is determined by a range of things, including frequency of past liking, comments and being tagged in photos together.

In addition, other minor signals that influence the timeline include how often a user opens Instagram, how many people they follow, and how much time they tend to spend on Instagram each time it is opened (Constine 2018b).

Of course, there are many other algorithms at work on Instagram, from those which determine suggested accounts to follow, through to those that flag content for moderation or removal, through to those that curate the Explore area, matching content and accounts with the recorded activity of each user. Indeed, even the previous chronological timeline was delivered by an algorithm, although the difference here is that the operation of that algorithm was transparent to users. While the scope of algorithmic activities are often invisible to users, and difficult to map or even track, it’s important to recall that all large platforms using algorithms necessarily include cultural assumptions and social norms of some kind in those algorithms, often perpetuating inequalities of various kinds (Gillespie 2018; Noble 2018).

As social media scholar Taina Bucher has argued, the introduction of an algorithmic timeline, or anything labelled as algorithmic, invites users to imagine and respond to the perceived cultural logic of the algorithm. Many Instagram users took to Twitter and other platforms to decry the upcoming timeline changes as something that would destroy their existing experiences of the platform as it would codify elements of popularity and ranking that were perceived to be antithetical to their everyday uses. Thus, in mapping responses to the introduction of Instagram’s algorithmic timeline, the response from users revealed that for them ‘algorithms are seen as powerbrokers that you either play with or play against’ (Bucher 2018, p. 112). The algorithmic timeline was met with the hashtag #RIPInstagram being used on Twitter to lament the changes, and discuss them in a largely negative way (Skrubbeltrang, Grunnet & Tarp 2017). That said, just like Facebook’s newsfeed changes, Instagram did not appear to lose many, if any, users as the algorithmic timeline was rolled out for everyone. Indeed, interpreting and gaming the algorithm has become something of a social media dark art, as discussed in chapter 4.