Inside the Swarms: Personalization, Gamification, and the Networked Public Sphere

TLDR: This chapter explores the aggregate effects of two defining aspects of the Social Web—personalization and gamification, as they respectively manifest in algorithmic filtering tools and common participatory features—on the authors' sense of the public, on the Social Imaginary, and on their shared repertoire of meaningful social action.

Abstract: To understand the ways in which the public sphere has become “colonized” by steering media, and fundamentally mediatized, this chapter explores the aggregate effects of two defining aspects of the Social Web—personalization and gamification, as they respectively manifest in algorithmic filtering tools and common participatory features (friending, sharing, commenting, and reacting)—on our sense of the public, on the Social Imaginary, and on our shared repertoire of meaningful social action. Whereas personalization aligns our interests with others like us based on partial data and pseudoscientific proxies, reducing our sense of the world to reflect our “tribal” predilections, gamification privileges our instant, affective reactions, bypassing our more critical, cognitive faculties. When combined, personalization and gamification accelerate our pre-existing tendencies toward imitation and conformity, destabilize crucial boundaries between public and private, and institutionalize market logics within the social world.