Taking tweets about algorithms writen by seemingly ordinary people as my starting point, I was interested in geting a beter sense of the kinds of situations and circumstances that had solicited people to react and respond to the ways of the algorithm.14 During the two years of data collection, I regularly searched Twiter for keywords and combinations of keywords, including: “Facebook algorithm,” “algorithm AND Facebook,” “Netflix algorithm,” “algorithm AND Netflix” and so forth.15 I queried Twiter every few weeks and manually scrolled down the stream of tweets and took screenshots of the ones that seemed to be more personal rather than marketing-oriented. Using a research profile I had set up on Twiter, I occasionally contacted people who had recently tweeted about algorithms to ask whether they would be willing to answer a few questions related to that tweet. These tweets included statements such as: “I’m ofended by the awful taste Twiter’s algorithm thinks I have,” “Facebook, perhaps there isn’t an algorithm that can capture human experience,” “It feels like Spotify’s algorithm can read my mind—it’s both awesome and creepy,” “The Netflix algorithm must be drunk,” “The algorithm on Facebook confuses me. It seems to think I should lose weight, am broke, pregnant and single.” Altogether, I engaged in asynchronous email conversations and synchronous computer mediated chats with 25 individuals, based on questions concerning those tweets.16 During the spring of 2016, I conducted an additional ten semistructured interviews with long-time social media users in their early twenties about their media use practices and how they viewed the role of algorithms in those interactions.17
Affective Landscapes
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