Monday February 26: DISCUSSING YOUR FINAL PROJECTS
Because your final project proposals are due after spring break, we’ll spend some time today discussing the project and exploring some potentially useful and generative examples and resources.
To Do Before Today’s Class:
- Read Rachel Foullon, “A Collection and a Means for Its Display” in Paper Monument, ed., Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment (2012): 51.
- Read the assignment descriptions for your Collection Proposal and Final Project.
- Come to class with a preliminary list of potential topics or thematic foci for your final project. It’s okay if your thoughts aren’t yet fully formulated; the whole point of sharing today is to solicit everyone’s help in shaping your ideas!
Wednesday February 28: COLLECTING LIKES + FOLLOWERS
Our contemporary social media culture has encouraged the fetishization of “metrics”: the equation of acceptance with follower counts, the confusion of “likes” for social affirmation. We’ll discuss the politics of collecting likes and followers, of quantifying value, and we’ll assess some critics’ proposals that newer platforms have moved beyond metrics to cultivate less “calculating” forms of community. We’ll also consider how our own choices — as students, laborers, citizens, family members, neighbors, and friends — are guided by various logics. Ideally, some non-transactional, non-”accumulationist,” non-audit-oriented motivations will inform how you pursue your final project 😉
To Do Before Today’s Class:
- Read Carina Albrecht, “Discerning Audiences Through Like Buttons,” Harvard Data Science Review (January 31, 2024).
- Read Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz, “Millions Work as Content Creators. In Official Records, They Barely Exist,” The Washington Post (October 26, 2023).
- Read Emily A. Vogels and Risa Gelles-Watnick, “Teens and Social Media: Key Findings from Pew Research Center Survey,” Pew Research Center (April 24, 2023).
Supplemental Resources:
- Aymar Jean Christian, Faithe Day, et al, “Platforming Intersectionality: Networked Solidarity and the Limits of Corporate Social Media,” Social Media + Society 6:3 (2020).
- Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris, and Mark Hansen, “The Follower Factory,” The New York Times (January 27, 2018) [if you hit a paywall, access the Times through PennLibraries’ website]. This piece is five years old! What’s changed since its publication?
- Jordan Foster, “‘It’s All About the Look’: Making Sense of Appearance, Attractiveness, and Authenticity Online,” Social Media + Society 8:4 (2022).
- Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond, “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-Intensive Web,” New Media & Society 15:8 (2013).
- Ben Grosser, Instagram Demetricator.
- Benjamin Grosser, “What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook,” Computational Culture 4 (2014).
- Meng Liang, “The End of Social Media? How Data Attraction Model in the Algorithmic Media Reshapes the Attention Economy,” Media, Culture & Society 44:6 (2022).
- Taylor Lorenz, “For Creators, Community Is the New Follower Count,” The Washington Post (July 24, 2022).
- Hannah Metzler, and David Garcia, “Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media,” Perspectives on Psychological Science (2023).
- Casey Newton, “What Instagram Really Learned From Hiding Like Counts,” The Verge (May 27, 2021).