ABSTRACT

The paper situates personalization by comparing widely used numbering practices on social media and other digital platforms. It draws on A.N. Whitehead's analysis of approximation to identify how probabilities and hashes, two key approximating practices, combine to configure platforms and individual users. It shows how personalization in a typical social media setting, the Instagram Explore Page, both distributes individual differences in a statistical manifold and indexes a state of affairs of persons, things, transactions, times and places in numbers such as hashes. Approaching personalization as a practice of entangled approximations, I suggest, shows how relational mappings developed by social media platform overflow the cultural-economic logic of targetted advertising. I argue that the combination of probabilities and hashes, or statistical manifolds and distributed coordination practices, articulate new versions of the some-any relationships embedded in many facets of social life. As approximations, these numberings point to the possibility of new critical framings of technical ensembles and their capacity to condition the formation of groups.

摘要

本文通过比较社交媒体和其他数字平台上广泛使用的编号实践来定位个性化。它利用 AN Whitehead 的近似分析来确定概率和哈希（两种关键的近似实践）如何结合起来配置平台和个人用户。它展示了典型社交媒体环境（Instagram 探索页面）中的个性化如何以统计流形分布个体差异，并以哈希等数字索引人、事物、交易、时间和地点的事态。我认为，将个性化视为纠缠近似的实践，表明社交媒体平台开发的关系映射如何溢出定向广告的文化经济逻辑。我认为概率和哈希值的结合，或统计流形和分布式协调实践，阐明了嵌入社会生活许多方面的某些关系的新版本。作为近似值，这些编号指出了技术整体新的关键框架的可能性及其调节群体形成的能力。