While the traditional notion of friendship highlights the voluntary and durational aspects of becoming friends and becoming friends anew (Allan, 1989), the software, one may claim, functions as a suggestive force encouraging users to connect and engage with the people in ways that are aforded by and benefit the platform. From the point of view of critical political economy, sociality and connectivity are resources that fuel the development of new business models. Platforms do not activate relational impulses in an efort to be nice. Ultimately, someone benefits financially from users’ online activities. This is, of course, a familiar story and one that many scholars have already told in illuminating and engaging ways (see Andrejevic, 2013; Couldry, 2012; Fuchs, 2012; Gehl, 2014; Mansell, 2012; van Dijck, 2013). From the perspective of companies like Facebook and Google, but also from the perspective of legacy news media organizations (discussed in chapter 6), algorithms are ultimately folded into promises of profit and business models. In this sense, a “good” and well-functioning algorithm is one that creates value, one that makes beter and more eficient predictions, and one that ultimately makes people engage and return to the platform or news site time and again. The question then becomes: What are the ways in which a platform sparks enough curiosity, desire, and interest in users for them to return?
The subtle ways of software can, for example, be seen in the manner in which Facebook reminds and (re)introduces users to each other. When browsing through my Facebook news feed it is almost as if the algorithm is saying, “Someone you haven’t spoken to in five years just liked this,” or, “This person whom you haven’t heard from in ages, suddenly seems to be up to something fun.” Somehow, I am nudged into thinking that these updates are important, that I should pay atention to them, that they are newsworthy. Rather than meaning that friendships on Facebook are less than voluntary, my claim is that the ways in which we relate to each other as “friends” is highly mediated and conditioned by algorithmic systems. People we do not necessarily think about, people we might not remember, or people we might not even consider friends continue to show up on our personalized news feeds, as friend suggestions, in birthday reminders, and so forth. While it is often dificult to recognize how Facebook “actively steers and curates connections” (van Dijck, 2013: 12), moments of everyday connectivity provide a glimpse into the ways in which the efects of software might not necessarily feel as incidental as they might appear to be.
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