Sociological Theory for Digital Society. The Codes that Bind Us Together [1. ed.] 9781509542963, 9781509542970, 9781509542987

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Sociological Theory for Digital Society The Codes that Bind Us Together

Ori Schwarz

polity

Copyright© Ori Schwarz 2021 The right of Ori Schwarz to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2021 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 lUR, UK

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Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4296-3 ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4297-0 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schwarz, Ori, 1979- author. Title: Sociological theory for digital society : the codes that bind us together I Ori Schwarz. Description: Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021. I Includes bibliographical references and index. I Summary: "How to rethink social theory in our digital times"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005391 (print) I LCCN 2021005392 (ebook) I ISBN 9781509542963 (hardback) I ISBN 9781509542970 (hardback) I ISBN 9781509542987(epub) Subjects: LCSH: Sociology. I Information society. I Online social networks. I Information technology--Social aspects. Classification: LCC HM585 .S3776 2021 (print) I LCC HM585 (ebook) I DDC 303.48/33--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005391 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005392 Typeset in 10.5 on 12.5pt Saban by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Ltd The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. wery effo rt ha been made r trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher wi ll be pleased to include any necessary credits in any su.bscquent rep ri nt or ·dition. Jacker ima >c © Robert Hodgi n. T his digital mirror objectifies social life, bringin~ tog 1b r image taken in different times to create a digitally curated represe mation

of th, self. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

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Acknowledgements

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1. Introduction: Old disciplines, new times, revised theories 2. When Interactions Become Objects: Rethinking symbolic interactionism in the post-situational order 3. When Networks Materialize: Rethinking social ontology beyond the individual and the collective 4. When Social Capital can be Invested: Rethinking social capital 5. When Power is Exercised through Algorithms: Rethinking power under generative rulers 6. When Labour is Everywhere: Rethinking work in the era of workless labour 7. Conclusion: Sociological theory for the future

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Notes References Index

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88 115 157 183 188

196 214

1 Acknowledgements

Introduction: Old disciplines, new times, revised theories

Over the years I discussed the ideas and arguments developed in this book with many people. I am grateful to all of them, but I am especially indebted to Rogers Brubaker and Dan Kotliar, who closely read earlier drafts of the manuscript. This book has been enormously improved by their smart comments and generous suggestions, as well as by the helpful feedback and suggestions of the anonymous readers for Polity, whom I also thank wholeheartedly. Some ideas presented in this book are completely new, others build on and develop insights from my earlier work on the sociology of digital society, but all of them have benefited greatly from countless conversations over the years with colleagues, including Eran Fisher, Eva Illouz and Guy Shani (with whom I co-authored an article discussed in chapter 2), and students, especially Inbar Michelzon-Drori and Sagit Festman. I could not ask for more supportive colleagues than those I have at Bar-Ilan University's Department of Sociology and Anthropology. I also wish to thank everyone at Polity Press for their dedicated and professional support, advice and encouragement - it has been a pleasure to work with you all - and particularly to Jonathan Skerrett, who believed in this project from the very first moment, even before I did; and Fiona Sewell, for her careful copyediting. Last but not least, my love and gratitude go to Hila Keren, with whom I share my life, of which this book has happened to constitute a significant part for quite a while; her support and feedback were invaluable.

The introduction of digital technologies into an ever-growing number of social institutions, practices and routines over the last few decades has reshaped social relations, structures and dynamics across social spheres in various ways. New patterns of sociality emerge with new forms of structure and agency. These changes surely deserve empirical research, and indeed enjoy much research attention in sociology (often under the title of 'digital sociology' ) and adjacent disciplines. But do they make an appropriate topic for a sociological theory book? One may have legitimate doubts. After all, Sociological Theory (not to be confused with 'theories' in the plural and more humble sense, ad hoc explanations for particular empirical phenomena) supplies sociologists with the conceptual tools, categories of thought and postulates without which we cannot even start representing social reality and making sense of it. Too often sociological theory debates are conducted as if these tools predated concrete social realities and have nothing to do with their changing. The core questions of sociological theory are so abstract and fundamental they seem timeless and beyond time: questions of ontology; the choice of units of analysis; temporality; social action and its motives; power, causality and social change; structure and agency; knowledge and epistemology. It has never been possible and never will be to study social life, explain it, or even humbly describe it without first answering these timeless questions, explicitly or implicitly. This simply cannot be done without choosing units of analysis and making certain assumptions about their relations, the ways they can be studied, and how they may interact and change.

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Sociological Theory for Digital Society

Introduction

Every sociology student is familiar with these eternal oppositions that every theory must address and overcome in its own way: micro and macro, agency and structure, consensus and conflict, materialism and idealism, positivism and constructionism. Every theory offers general assumptions about what motivates and shapes social action and what binds human actions together into something bigger. The answers to these questions often claim to be transhistorical and universally valid. Now tell all this to a sociologist of knowledge, or a sociologist of science. Looking at sociological theory as sociologists (as opposed to social philosophers), it becomes obvious that its abstractness and timelessness are an illusion. Sociology is part of the social world it seeks to study, and it transforms with it. Sociological theory, the problems that occupy it and the solutions it offers, are social phenomena. They are the product of the history of struggles and position-taking in the sociological field, of epistemological technologies (that is, ways of producing knowledge, such as statistics), of discourses about society and social problems that prevail outside the sociological sphere (e.g. in politics), and most importantly for us, of the society to be studied with theory. What too often evades us is that theory is made to be used. It supplies us with tools that help us solve certain problems while describing and explaining certain social realities. Concepts and theories that proved helpful for solving one problem may completely fail to solve another, very often since the reality they took for granted has changed, and some of their basic assumptions are no longer valid. Simply put: sociological theory is also a creature of its time. The introduction of digital technologies and digital media does not simply offer yet another new social phenomenon, new objects for empirical sociological research using the same old tools. It seems to challenge some of the core underlying assumptions and core concepts of sociological theory (such as 'social interaction' and 'social network'), as these concepts and assumptions were developed to make sense of very different sociotechnical realities of different eras and to solve different problems under different conditions. The mission of Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes that Bind Us Together is to explore some of the main theoretical challenges that digitalization poses to core concepts of sociological theory, and to point towards ways in which the latter may be revised and adapted to rema in relevant and valid. It offers attempts to rethink core theoretical concepts such as interaction, power, social

capital, social networks and labour as their referents transform in digital societies, in order to adapt them to the changing sociotechnical realities and enable them to account for social transformations associated with digital technologies. Some of these attempts are relatively modest, whereas others are more far-reaching. Indeed, digitalization may compel us to rethink sociology's research object itself - 'the social', social structure, social relations, social interaction and so forth. The fact that the last sentence offered a list is important: sociology, unlike Kuhnian 'normal science', does not have a single set of theoretical underlying assumptions: instead, we share several competing sets (Alexander 1987). This means that it is not 'sociological theory' that must be revised to stand to this challenge, but rather multiple theoretical traditions, each having to cope with different challenges. This book indeed offers revisions to different theoretical frameworks, including symbolic interactionism, Marxism and Bourdieusian theory. The theoretical traditions discussed in this book rely on very different assumptions: whereas Marxists view the social as determined by macro-structural features, interactionists view the social as open and constructed through micro-level interactions (with Bourdieu's view of the social as shaped by the distribution of different forms of capital and the struggle over them offering a middle point). While interactionists and other humanists view humans as inherently different from objects and ascribe the latter very different roles in their accounts, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) scholars strongly disagree, claiming an equal status for objects in shaping sociality. Social network analysts, interactionists and Marxists all say that the social world consists of relations, but mean very different things (formal structure of ties, concrete interactions, or relations of production and exploitation respectively). Other traditions use different building blocks to construct and represent the social, including capital in its multiple forms for Bourdieu, and the collective as a level irreducible to the individual in the Durkheimian tradition. These differing assumptions have resulted in different ways of producing sociological knowledge. But different as they might be, these sociological theoretical traditions are all challenged (albeit in different ways) by emerging digital sociotechnical realities, and these challenges deserve our attention. While all sociological theories can be used to study digitally mediated social phenomena, 1 this book focuses specifically on theoretical

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Sociological Theory for Digital Society

Introduction

assumptions that are challenged by digitalization processes, and on concepts that might need to be redefined. This rationale (alongside unfortunate material limitations on book length) has guided the choice of topics. I synthesize existing work and develop original theoretical solutions in order to revise these theoretical concepts and assumptions, and allow them to retain relevance and validity and help us understand new social phenomena, structures and dynamics. While every chapter deals with a different core concept of sociological theory and with a different theoretical tradition, each chapter builds on insights and concepts developed in earlier chapters. A main focus of the book is the translation of interactions into digital data objects, which I find to be at the core of what distinguishes digital societies from their predecessors. This transformation is addressed from different perspectives throughout the book, as it poses very different challenges to different theoretical traditions. I also discuss a theoretical development that goes beyond adaptations of existing traditions, the emergence of a new social ontology of the 'connective'. And yet, this book does not aim to develop 'a theory of the digital society', or a theory of the 'social implications of the internet' and mediatization, 2 as I do not consider digitalization, algorithms or the internet to be simply new objects for sociological research, or new spheres of social life in need of theorization. Instead, I suggest that digitalization processes remould the social in complex and non-deterministic ways across social spheres, and hence require a much more ambitious endeavour - revising general sociological theory (or rather, theories). In this sense, this book goes against the endeavour to construct 'digital sociology' as yet another subdiscipline not unlike the sociology of education or the sociology of finance, organized around its own object of study, the digital as a sphere, segment or dimension of social life (Daniels et al. 2017; Lupton 2015; Orton-Johnson and Prior 2013; Selwyn 2019), and around its unique digital methods (Marres 2017). Indeed, revising sociological theories and concepts to adapt them to contemporary digital societies sometimes improves their capacity to theorize other aspects of social life which have little to do with digital technologies. Chapter 2 explores the challenges digitalization poses to the symbolic interactionist tradition. Digitally mediated interactions constitute a growing share of all interactions; and they are selfdocumenting, hence they turn into the shared production of evidential data objects. This transformation challenges some of the most

fundamental premises of symbolic interactionism: that the basic building blocks of social life are situated interactions, which are well-bounded in time and space; that these 'social situations' consist of a finite known number of participants who mutually monitor one another within situations and move from one situation to another; that situations and roles within them are defined through situated negotiation; and that the self develops and emerges through interaction with human alters. Some of the challenges involved in adapting interactionism to a world in which interactions are increasingly mediated can be easily met if we only reformulate core interactionist concepts such as 'co-presence' and 'the looking-glass self' by generalizing and thus expanding them. Other challenges are more fundamental: when digitalization translates interactions into durable digital data objects (which may become available to unknown and theoretically unlimited audiences), it blurs the very analytical distinction between interactions and objects. To address this challenge, I develop the concept of interaction-object duality, explore some of its empirical and theoretical consequences (e.g. for the presentation of self; for the 'bracketing' of interaction as a theoretical and epistemological strategy; and for the temporality of social life), and draw outlines for a post-situational interactionism, that is, symbolic interactionism for the post-situational order of the digital era. Chapter 3 explores the challenges that digital technologies in general and social media in particular pose to the concept of 'social networks' on the one hand and to social ontology on the other hand. I show that whereas social network sites (SNSs) are often viewed as concrete manifestations of the social networks studied for decades by social network analysis (SNA), SNS networks actually have a very different ontological status. Social networks turned from a theoretical construct, a model used by sociologists and anthropologists to represent and understand social relations, into a material infrastructure and performative data objects, representations of social ties that are used by algorithms to regulate and reorganize social life. By doing so they offer sociology a new ontology and an alternative object of research, the connective. Like the collective, the connective offers a way in which individuals, their external actions and their internal mental states are intertwined and linked into something bigger which is irreducible to its parts. Like collectivity, it relies on a certain material infrastructure. The chapter reviews the literature on two connective phenomena, connective action and connective

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Sociological Theory for Digital Society

Introduction

memory (and briefly discusses other connective phenomena), while building on these cases to theorize the connective (the computational aggregation of audiences, individual actions and attention, through algorithms that rely on objectified representations of social networks) and its social ontology. Chapter 4 discusses social capital in the digital era. Social capital is a key concept in both Bourdieusian theory and SNA that helps us understand power and inequality. My main argument is that digitalization in general and SNSs in particular transform social capital dramatically in ways that require significant theoretical revisions - transforming its modes of accumulation, operation, maintenance, appropriation and control, and its (in)dependence of symbolic power, as well as its relative importance vis-a-vis other forms of capital. After briefly presenting the theoretical role of 'social capital' in different traditions, I discuss in detail how the materialization of social networks has transformed social capital and the theoretical implications of this transformation. I then develop the concept of generalized social capital to refer to this new digital form of social capital, and discuss its growing importance across social spheres and its emerging status as a new form of meta-capital. I show how multiple fields are reorganized around the accumulation of generalized social capital and competition over it, and how its meta-capital status leads to the concentration of social power in the hands of digital platform operators who turn into social capital banks or mediators. Chapter 5 goes deeper into the sociology of power. After briefly discussing the increased governability of social life in the digital era (as ever-larger chunks of social interaction become digitally mediated and leave digital footprints as they transform into data objects), I focus on algorithmic power in order to make two main arguments. First, I suggest that as algorithms play an increasingly central role in the exercise of organizational power, the sociological theory of power must shift its focus away from the problem of free will that preoccupied it for much of the twentieth century. It should also take the material dimension of power more seriously, since unlike other forms of social power, the effective exercise of algorithmic power is not dependent on human consciousness. The chapter reviews and critically discusses several theorizations of this shift in the relations between power and consciousness. Second, I show that algorithmic rules challenge the distinction between potentiality and actuality. By doing so they shed new light on the old central theoretical debate on

whether power is potential or actual, that is, whether power exists before it is exercised. I suggest that by blurring the potential/actual distinction, algorithmic power makes it much more difficult to claim that power does not exist as a potentiality between the moments of its actualization. In order to make these arguments, the chapter discusses in detail the unique characteristics of algorithmic power and its generative rules, while comparing them to earlier forms of rules in law and bureaucracy. I discuss the shifting relations between power and abstract rules, consciousness, legitimation and categorization; and the rise of 'generative rulers' who wield algorithmic power. Chapter 6 explores how digitalization compels us to rethink work, labour and their relations. Work is not a universal category but a historical social construction. The notions of work and labour were devised for different sociological tasks, but could be used as synonyms in the twentieth century due to unique historical circumstances which have recently changed. I explore how digitalization processes helped transform (in different ways) both waged labour and unwaged labour (that is, unremunerated production of economic value), and review the debates on whether the use of social media and smart devices should be classified as labour. I present the 'Google Glass diagram' behind surveillance capitalism and show how this new mode of accumulation relies on the interaction-object duality, which has rendered social action and interaction more productive than ever. Can a productive activity undertaken without consciousness of its productivity, and which lacks purpose, exertion and instrumentality, still qualify as labour? Can the Marxist labour concept retain its critical power even when departing from work in its lay common sense? To answer these questions, I develop the notion of 'workless labour', as the digital economy continuously widens the gap between these once-synonymous terms, and precludes us from continuing to view labour as a subcategory or a special case of work. Finally, the conclusion (chapter 7) discusses the contributions of the different chapters together, pointing to the commonalities they share and the main features that should characterize sociological theory for digital society in the future.

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When Interactions Become Objects

2 When Interactions Become Objects: Rethinking symbolic interactionism in the post-situational order

Imagine a father playing with his two-year-old son. For a moment he is distracted by the beeping phone: a message from a colleague. He finds the request rude, especially now at the weekend, but does not let his anger reflect in his elegant reply, which wittily declines the request. He then swipes his hand across the screen to take a screenshot and sends the conversation to another colleague. 'He thought he found the sucker to do his work ... WRONG ©', he types with one hand while using the other to tickle the toddler, who has started demanding attention. A few minutes later, as the phone beeps, he glances at it and smiles: the second colleague has complimented his successful deflection attempt, summing up the episode with a sarcastic remark. Scenes like this have become a trivial part of our everyday life, yet they challenge core assumptions of one of the most influential schools in sociological theory, symbolic interactionism. This chapter explores the challenges digitalization poses to symbolic interactionism and possible ways to cope with them. Some of these difficulties had existed before in non-digital contexts, but digitalization has highlighted them, urging us to generalize or revise existing theorizations, whereas other challenges are unique to the digital era. These challenges are neither technical nor minor, as they address the interactionist answer to one of the core questions any theory must answer: what is society and what are its basic building blocks or the proper units of analysis for studying it? Symbolic interactionists have offered a rather radical answer: society consists of individuals

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interacting with one another (Blumer 1986: 7). Against strategies that reify 'society', 'the social system', 'classes' or abstract structural forces and use them to explain what is going on between certain individuals in a certain time and place, interactionists offered an alternative point of departure for analysis: interactions between concrete people, in which they try to figure out and agree about what is going on, repre · nt the world in their mind as mental objects shaped in interacti n, and react to each other's action while tryi ng to achieve what John Dewey called ends-in-view (Whitford 2002), that is, tentative goals which are m edded in and shaped by the situation. Resisting structural de cer:mini m, interactionists have believed that the present is always somewhat open, as interaction parties constantly negotiate and thus influence the micro level of social order: the definition of the situation and the identities and roles of the parties involved (as interactionists adopted Mead's Hegelian view (Honneth 1995) of the self as emerging through dialogue with others). The basic building blocks of social life are thus interactions situated within their context, that is, 'social situations'. These became the main object of interactionist research. Situations are relatively small units of analysis, confined in time and space with a defined set of participants. Against the structuralist view of interactions as trivial realizations of macro structures, interactionists have urged sociologists to zoom in on situations and bracket them from their wider context to explore their openness and internal dynamics. 1 Following this imperative, they have conducted ethnographic studies and closely observed situations. Digitalization does not threaten the interactionist view of human action as directed at mental objects shaped in interaction, and yet, it seems to make the interactionist object of research melt into air. Ideal situations (as portrayed above) become increasingly rare for three reasons which I discuss in depth below. First, interaction is increasingly mediated, and face-to-face interaction where all participants share time and space is no longer the rule. Second, as a result, social reality is no longer structured as a linear sequence of situations: it seems increasingly difficult to characterize situations and demarcate their boundaries, as interactions dissolve into fragments in time and space, always capable of being resumed after hours, days or years, while the number and identity of participants are unstable and often cannot be monitored either in real time or in retrospect. Whereas interacting remains at the heart of social life, the countable noun 'interactions' has melted and social life

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can no longer be easily conceptualized as a sequence of interactions contained within situations. Finally, and most importantly, digitally mediated interactions are self-documenting, hence they turn into the production of documentary data objects. This blurs a distinction that used to be obvious between events and objects. The interaction as an event collapses into the interaction as the shared production of a data object, a record documenting the interaction, and the two can hardly be distinguished. As I show below, this collapse (which I call the interaction-object duality) changes the dynamics of interaction itself, including its temporality (the organization of the relations between the past, the present and the future) and the conduct of interaction parties, who are influenced by the risks and opportunities brought by the data objects they co-produce during interaction and by their value (including their exchange value). The rest of the chapter is dedicated to exploring these three challenges to interactionist premises (which are causally related, but discussed separately for the sake of simplification), their theoretical significance and ways to cope with them, from the easiest to the most substantial. Finally, I discuss a fourth and different transformation: the new roles of non-humans as full interaction parties and their subsequent role in the emergence of the human self, a dynamic I call 'digital mirroring'. What would interactionism for the digital era look like? How can we conceptualize social life as consisting of interactions in a postsituational era, when situations as we used to know them have ceased to exist, as they can no longer be bracketed in time and space? What happens to these social building blocks when interactions translate themselves into durable objects?

shifts from local little boxes to spatially dispersed individualized networks of person-to-person communication (Rainie and Wellman 2012; Wellman 2001). Digital communication technologies have contributed significantly to this trend. But can we simply jettison co-presence? Not too easily, as the assumption of co-presence was not introduced into the interactionist model without reason. To engage in symbolic interaction - that is, to interpret and react to the actions and statements of one another - interactants must be able to monitor one another, and to even monitor the act of mutual monitoring: 'persons must sense that they are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experiencing of others, and close enough to be perceived in this sensing of being perceived' (Goffman 1966: 17). This is why co-presence is required. Goffman defined 'social situation' as 'an environment of mutual monitoring possibilities, anywhere within which an individual will find himself accessible to the naked senses of all others who are " present", and similarly find them accessible to him [sic]' (Goffman 1964: 135). As long as monitoring was strongly associated with co-presence and physical proximity, the situation could be assumed to be bounded in time and space, as it 'lasts during the time two or more individuals find themselves in one another's immediate physical presence, and extends over the entire territory within which this mutual monitoring is possible' (Goffman 1982: 167). Even more basically than monitoring, interactionists assumed that interactants must be able to identify with whom they are interacting. For example, the presentation of self makes little sense without clarity regarding the identity of the audience. Again, this clarity was easily achieved as long as most interactions took place among individuals who were co-present within 'a highly bounded region' in time and space (Goffman 1959: 106). The first challenge to be discussed is then the decline in the share of face-to-face interactions at the expense of mediated interactions, where there is no co-presence and monitoring is not achieved through the 'naked senses' but rather through technological mediation, and as a consequence, is partial and asymmetrical. In the vignette that opened the chapter the protagonist interacted with his co-present son but also, simultaneously and separately, with two colleagues. The colleagues did not monitor all actions of the protagonist (his interaction with his son remained backstage for them, while most of his interaction with them remained backstage for the toddler).

Generalizing co-presence

It is no surprise that the original interactionist model assumed that interactions take place between actors who share a physical space: after all, this was the case for the vast majority of interactions when Mead, Blumer and even Goffman developed their ideas, but gradually it ceased to be the case. Students of late modernity often stress the decline of co-presence, as social relations are disembedded from localized contexts (Giddens 1990) and social structure

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However, this challenge is relatively easy to solve, since Goffman's co-presence assumption does not necessarily follow from the premises of symbolic interactionism as formulated by Mead and Blumer. Two strategies can be used. The first, 'typological' strategy, is to characterize unique new types of situations shaped by digital technologies, which share only some features with traditional situations. This path was taken by Karin Knorr Cetina (2009), who studied traders in the foreign exchange market. Traders are physically located in trading floors where face-to-face interaction with other traders takes place, but simultaneously and more importantly, they react to the situation that takes place on (and through) multiple computer screens displaying the market (through prices, transaction records, and graphs that represent the algorithmic aggregation, weighing and averaging of the constant flows of actions by multiple traders all over the world) and possible influences on the markets (e.g. news reports). Through the screens, traders monitor the actions of other traders, interpret them and give them meaning; define the situation and react to it. Their ears listen to the colleagues in the room while their eyes are fixed on the screens. Knorr Cetina called situations that synthetically weld together mediated components 'synthetic situations'. Examples include the traders discussed above or a surgeon looking alternately at the patient, measures and screened images of the patient's body. The synthetic situation shares with Goffman's 'classical' situation some of its defining characteristics (shared focus of attention and mutual monitoring) but not others (territorial relatedness). In a synthetic situation, interacting parties meet in time rather than in space. Furthermore, parties monitor digital traces of one another rather than their full embodied existence (these traces may represent this embodied existence, e.g. in video conferences, but sometimes they don't, as in trade floor screens, when traders monitor only the transactions of one another). In professional synthetic situations like the latter, actors interact with a huge number of others while receiving information from multiple sources, but unlike in most situations, they are hardly exposed to any information irrelevant to their professional task. The Simmelian view of urban modern ties as increasingly specialized and narrow is materialized here through digital technology, which allows monitoring of only the aspects most relevant to the specialized interaction and its intended shared focus.

But are synthetic situations truly so different from traditional situations? Knorr Cetina argued that when the situation consists of continuously flowing assembled pieces of information, it becomes 'ontologically fluid': the market constantly changes together with the relevant information pieces. It must be admitted, however, that similar things can be said about traditional situations. The traders' case also differs in the fact that actors do not respond directly to each other's actions, but rather to the algorithmic aggregation of these actions, which are detached from the actors, assembled, weighed and translated into the ever-changing graph on the screen. The interaction is not so much with other individual traders as with 'the market' which is reified - not by the consciousness of actors who construct it as an object, but rather by the algorithm (this is then 'connective' sociality, a notion discussed at length in chapter 3 ). However, not all synthetic situations are connective. Furthermore, since Knorr Cetina coined this term, smartphones have become intertwined with our everyday life so much that almost all everyday situations became synthetic in a certain sense, as people constantly shift or divide their attention between mediated and unmediated dimensions (Benediktsson et al. 2015), and these dimensions are often welded into a single situation. 2 This makes the typological strategy much less appealing. An alternative strategy does not classify situations into subspecies, but instead asks what all situations (mediated and unmediated alike) share, in order to develop a generalized, more inclusive definition of a situation. Here co-presence turns into a special case of a more general pattern. This strategy may be helpful in identifying the minimum prerequisites for social interaction. Goffman himself paved the way while revising his definition of social situations, as early as 1983, into 'environments in which two or more individuals are physically in one another's response presence', replacing 'co-presence' with the more general term 'response presence'. He added in parenthesis that the telephone and the mails presumably provide 'reduced versions of the primordial real thing' (p. 2). Viewing mediated sociality as a diluted version of primordial face-to-face sociality is highly problematic, both because the dilution metaphor reduces substantial qualitative differences into merely a matter of quantity and because it imagines past interactions as free of technological mediation.3 Yet generalizing co-presence into 'response presence' retains the core of Goffman's original argument, which defined situations in terms of mutual

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monitoring and focused on 'encounters' or 'focused interactions' characterized by a shared focus of cognitive and visual attention (Goffman 1964: 135; 1972: 7). It simply suggests that interaction includes all those within its 'perceptual range' (Goffman 1981: 3) even if not physically co-present. Celeste Campos-Castillo and Steven Hitlin (2013) went further in revising and generalizing Goffman's notion of 'co-presence'. For them, to be co-present is not about physical presence in the same space but rather about the perceived mutual synchronization of attention, emotions and conduct (which they term 'entrainment' ). 4 This synchronization is the real minimum prerequisite for symbolic interaction, whereas physical co-presence is merely one way to achieve it. Actors are co-present when (and as much as) they perceive synchronization. Co-presence thus may have a degree, turning from a binary category into a continuum. For example, text messaging involves some co-presence, but less than a video call, since its technological affordances make it harder to exchange signals of mutual attention. 5 Actually, it turns co-presence into several continua, since ego may feel synchronized with alter more (or less) than the other way around, that is, co-presence may be asymmetrical. This revised definition also reveals hidden dimensions of non-mediated interaction; for example, turning co-presence into a continuum reveals that the perceived synchronization of mutual attention is never perfect but always partial, even when interactants do share the same room. Furthermore, identifying the core features of co-presence while jettisoning unnecessary premises such as territorial relatedness helps interactionists study many other phenomena beyond digitally mediated interaction, such as the dialogue between worshippers and their gods. Yet this account misses the fact that digitally mediated situations do not only replace face-to-face situations: the two exist simultaneously, inform and penetrate each other, sometimes joining to form a single situation (as suggested by Knorr Cetina) while at other times co-existing without collapsing. But if situations interpenetrate one another and partially overlap, can they still play their role as the stable building blocks of the social? Furthermore, both strategies contend that while situations do not require co-presence in a single physical space (thus dissociating 'situation' from its Latin etymology and its original English meaning, 'location'), they must unite parties in a single point in time. However, simultaneity is often absent in

digitally mediated interactions. When interaction parties are often exposed to one another's actions and statements after a delay or react after a delay, interaction is no longer contained within a situation. This brings us to the second challenge.

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A post-situational world? A common criticism of symbolic interactionism was that focusing on bracketed situations leads to ignoring the macro context that informs them, such as the wider power relations between social groups. While social life takes place in situations, the argument goes, to understand situations we must look beyond them (e.g. Bourdieu 1991). This chapter offers a different line of critique, challenging the very premise that social action is still embedded and contained in social situations. As shown above, the notion of 'situation' may be redefined, generalized and adapted to the social reality of the digital era. But are we still living in a social world consisting of situations? Blumer (1986: 16) wrote that the activity of human beings consists of a flow of situations in which they have to act, a 'succession of situations confronting them'. The second and bigger challenge digitalization poses to interactionist theory is to this interactionist view of social life as a sequence of clearly bounded situations following one another like a train consisting of separate cars, with actors moving between them. When interactions are digitally mediated, situations are no longer bounded, not only in space, but also in time and in terms of their participants; instead, they intertwine and interpenetrate one another. Digitalization introduced discontinuity to time just as it did to space. Digital multitasking 'imports the time-signals and timerelated obligations from multiple activities into a single time-flow' (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 111). The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) blurs the distinction between working time-space and leisure time-space: the latter is punctuated by work whereas the former is punctuated by breaks for shopping, news updates, or communication with family and friends (Rosa 2013; Wajcman 2015). Monolithic blocks of time-space are thus fragmented into tiny pieces (for example, working time fragmented into episodes which are on average only three minutes short: Wajcman 2015: 100) . More important for us, digital interactions

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are self-documenting, and hence can be renewed after hours, days or years, while changing their participants. Even in real time, digitally mediated interaction often allows participants to monitor each other's actions, but not necessarily monitor the act of monitoring. As a result, interactants cannot tell who may monitor the interaction (in real time or in retrospect), that is, how many people participate in the interaction and who they are. Why does it happen, and what does it mean? Whenever people (be it sociologists or the social actors themselves) try to interpret the actions of one another, they put them in a context: it is contextualization that grants action meaning. Interactionists uniquely focus on a concrete and narrow context: for them, the context in which human actions are situated and from which they derive their meaning is not an abstract macro-level social order, and even not so much the mezzo-level institutional context, but rather a bunch of people who share a single space and an emerging (constructed and negotiated) intersubjective understanding of what is going on there. Interactionists choose situations as their unit of analysis, since within this space of mutual monitoring, meaning is constructed and fixed. Situations shape social action itself, since they define the participants' situated roles, and the situated self they present (Goffman 1972: 84-5). Goffman famously urged sociology to study '[n)ot, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men' (1982: 3), that is, to view conduct as shaped by the situation and its situated roles and situational demands, rather than by stable characteristics of the socialized agents. The assumed fixity of the situation was necessary to compensate for the lost fixity of actors. Interactionists had to demarcate situations for methodological reasons, to identify the unit of analysis to be observed and studied. But the situation's boundedness also has a theoretical role: to decide how to act, actors need to know who is exposed to their presentation of self and who participates in negotiating the definition and meaning of the situation. Goffman remarked that the boundedness of situations relies on a material infrastructure of walls and doors typical of Western modern society, which he called 'walled-in society' (1966: 17). In his provocative article on the sociology of monkeys, Latour claimed that Goffman and interactionists describe human societies as too similar to monkey societies while missing the contribution of the material world to the framing and demarcation of human situations

and to fixing human identities and hierarchies (Latour 1996). This is not quite fair: Goffman understood quite well the role of material objects in framing interactions, even though he failed to systematically theorize his position. One example is his account of the kick-door, which clearly separates the kitchen from the dining room while allowing stuff to constantly move between frontstage and backstage, without mixing them into a single situation and threatening their impression management (Goffman 1959: 118-19; for a discussion: Pinch 2010); another is the anteroom, which allows the hostess to give each guest a special greeting or farewell separately, and thus sustain the (false) impression that each is receiving special and unique services (Goffman 1959: 138). Walls play a crucial role in keeping audiences relatively stable and knowable, allowing actors to adapt their actions and presentation of self to the situation bounded within them and its segregated audience. This 'front region control' (Goffman 1959: 137) allows actors to achieve dramaturgical success, despite the inconsistencies between the personae presented to different audiences at different times, as actors can monitor the audience monitoring them and adapt their performance. Breaking the boundaries of the situation in time and space means that something said or done in a certain context may become accessible to different, unpredictable audiences, that is, move to a different context. Digitalization thus challenges the monitoring capacity assumed by Goffman. We cannot tell whether a colleague shares our conversation with other co-workers as in the case above. My study of teenage romance showed that teenagers consult friends (or even parents) in real time about what to say in digitally mediated conversations with potential romantic partners (Schwarz 2011 ), without their partner's knowledge. In digitally mediated communication, the visibility of and access to interactions are structured not by material walls, doors and locks as in unmediated interactions, but rather by interface design, 'privacy settings', and algorithms that determine who may monitor which conduct of whom and who may monitor the monitoring. For example, instant messaging (IM) apps WhatsApp and Telegram allow users as a default to know whether their message was read and by whom. Adding this 'double blue ticks' feature in 2014 reorganized the social drama of social relations. Not answering right away turns into a message in itself, especially in romantic relationships, as endless debates in internet forums indicate. Contrariwise, SNS

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Facebook does not inform users who has read most of their posts and comments. The audience is determined not by users as in IM, but by the EdgeRank algorithm which predicts which data objects may interest which users, based on multiple variables. The decision as to which users will be within the perceptual range of an interaction changes constantly: it is recalculated repeatedly based on all actions of all users, all contents they produce and all their interactions with these contents. This means that the participants in a situation fluctuate constantly and unpredictably. Like walls, computer code demarcates interactions, but unlike walls the boundaries it creates are often unstable and cannot be predicted by the participants, as they are informed by the complexity of codes and flux of data. But can we still talk about 'situations' when monitoring is asymmetrical, hidden and unpredictable? The answer depends on what we consider to be essential to situations and what is merely contingent. If a situation is defined by its capacity to situate social interaction, the answer may well be negative. Empirical studies reveal that when interactions are not stably situated, actors face multiple challenges and difficulties characteristic of this post-situational world. These result from the gap between intended or imagined audiences and the real audiences exposed to mediated interactions (both lurkers, who monitor the interaction without actively participating and revealing their presence, and unintended active participants summoned to the interaction by the algorithm), and from the 'context collapse' which happens when a presentation of self designed for a certain audience is unintentionally exposed to another. 6 For example, when a Facebook user joins a political conversation among fellow activists, the algorithm may present the conversation to his or her family, colleagues or classmates, moving the conversation into their monitoring range and response presence (and the same happens to family interactions). Furthermore, users may encounter an old conversation days or even years later (e.g. in their search result), and if they react to it, all the participants in the original conversation (and some of their friends) will be notified: the conversation will be revived in a different time context. These digitally mediated interactions are not completely simultaneous, and never quite definitely ended. These dynamics are informed by the code design of the particular platform, hence some platforms are more prone to context collapse; yet some material features of digital data and digital networks render digital data objects prone to context collapse even

when the code design tries to bound situations within relatively firm digital walls. When data of various kinds (such as texts, photos and videos) are translated into ones and zeros, they can be accurately copied and disseminated across platforms quickly and easily, and found easily, as computers can automatically and efficiently scan digital databa e. while earching for data. T he e afford,rn c of computers a nd digital data explain the featur f networked public spa cs identified hy boyd (2014): persi tence earcha bility preadability (du t replicability and linkab ili ty) and invisibl a udicn es. When the situati on bouudari s are b.roken, th pre entation of elf is much harder: actors cannot easily present different contradictory personae to segregated au di ence while keepi ng the iJupr sion present ·d to each audience consi tent. SNS users are exposed to unfa miliar side of their weal ti s, turning sp cialized ties more multidimensional (e.g. Murthy 2013; Schwarz and Shani 2016), but this comes at a price. From an interactionist perspective, being able to present different identities means being able to be different people, the freedom to have a complex, plural and multidimensional exisrenc . This capacity to develop and share different dimensions of the self in different institutional contexts did not always exist to the same degree: it is a modern phenomenon, shaped by urban density and the separation of institutional contexts (Simmel 1955[1922]). The emergence of a post-situational order where contexts are always prone to collapse seems to threaten this modern form of social existence. In her study of American teenagers, danah boyd showed that by gaining access to teenagers' social media accounts, adults in gatekeeping and authority roles such as college application officers, teachers, parents or police officers may thwart teens' attempts to present different personae to different audiences (e.g. to use gang symbolism while interacting with friends from the hood while distancing oneself from gang culture when applying to an elite university: boyd 2014: 29-30). In some cases it was other people who made interaction accessible to undesired audiences; thus, boyd tells how in 2010, at a school assembly in a small, rural high school, a campus police officer showed a photo of a student holding a beer; it was a friend of hers who took the photo, posted it on Facebook and tagged her, influencing how parents and teachers viewed her and possibly damaging her chances of receiving a scholarship (pp. 50-1). A mobile phone with a digital camera and internet access

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retrospectively made the party - an interaction that originally included only teenagers - accessible to an unintended audience not taken into account by the participants. Once social interactions are digitally mediated (as in SNSs or IM) or digitally documented (through digital photography, sound or video recording), interactants cannot take into consideration all possible audiences, as these are in principle unbounded. Goffman's walled-in society turned into one which is not wall-free, but where walls are deceptive: unstable and invisibly perforated. Piercing the walls around situations obviously serves state and private intelligence services, which by definition wish to document the backstage of their objects of surveillance (e.g. through automated digital systems that monitor SNS conversations or analyse photos using face-recognition software). These developments and their structural impacts are often discussed in academic and lay public discourse on digital surveillance. But piercing these walls also remoulds interactions among individual users, with an accumulated structural impact that often goes unnoticed. The structural effects of context collapse are evident in a study of politically motivated dissolution of Face book friendship ties (Schwarz and Shani 2016). During a seven-week-long war in summer 2014, an unusually high rate of Israeli users (16 per cent) cut Facebook ties for political reasons (John and Dvir-Gvirsman 2015). A closer look at the dynamics of unfriending revealed that unfrienders often considered themselves pluralist and viewed political unfriending as undesired, but felt urged to do so after being exposed to online interactions their Facebook friends had with others, and being shocked by the style and content of these interactions. Jewish and Arab (or right-wing and left-wing) colleagues learned at first hand how their colleagues sound while talking politics with like-minded people when out of the office. In many politically heterogeneous contexts (at work or in family gatherings) these people avoided politics or discussed it in a way that would not threaten the shared interaction. However, as Eliasoph and Lichterman (2003) suggested, interaction styles are characteristic of groups, not individuals (who change styles while moving between groups and situations). Taken out of context, the meaning of statements may change dramatically. This happened often with ritual talk: when Israeli Jews said or wrote 'death to Arabs' during wartime, they did not always express their support of genocide as individuals (some Israeli Jews who used the

phrase actua lly had Arab friends); it is ritual talk which expresses and revi.talizes solidarity within nationalist sections of Israeli society. These statements, just like comparisons between the Israeli army and the Nazis among Israeli radical leftists, are part of a certain group style which expresses and validates the group collective identity. However, online these interactions hardly remained bounded. Users often failed to guess their algorithmically constructed audience within their response presence, as a comment made within a Facebook conversation among a few like-minded friends can be made accessible to the family or colleagues of all participants if only the person who started the conversation set it as 'public' (or changed its status to 'public' in retrospect). Users oft n ima inec.l their a ucL enc a more hom geneous than it actua ll y was. Furthermore in t the situ ation bo undari ·s in N Ss are hifting and algor itbm_jca ll y detenuined by the reactions of the first users to be exposed to the initial post, it is the most extreme and provocative statements which are made available to the largest and most diverse audiences (including weak ties that are usually not exposed to one's materials and hence remain outside one's imagined audience). In this case, breaking the situation's boundaries caused not only personal discomfort or embarrassment, but an accumulated structural effect: mass dissolution of ties (online, and sometimes offline too). From the sociologist's bird's-eye view, exposure to backstage regions and to the textures of interaction of other groups in which one's Facebook friends participate merely revealed the diversity of interactio n style of every individu al. However, from th sencializing perspective of many actor it was bell ►ved to reveal a hidden truth abour the hidden values of their Facebook fri end , r ndering them morally unworthy and tie dissolution necessary to avoid symbolic contamination. Furthermore, the pierced walls around interactions no longer allowed actors to imagine their Facebook friends (with whom they have some things in common, those standing at the focus of their interactions) as a homogeneous group sharing wider values. Revealing this hidden diversity within their egocentric network evoked extreme discomfort and moved them to enforce political homogeneity through unfriending (Schwarz and Shani 2016). This homogeneity was not necessary in the offline walled-in society, where different group styles were bounded within different interactions, allowing the individual to use them to create and maintain local solidarity and belonging without threatening their solidarity with

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and belonging to other, partly overlapping groups. The unfriending we documented was the undoing of this uniquely modern web of intersecting social affiliations portrayed by Simmel. The collapse of context, that is, of the bounded situation, is symptomatic of a deeper transformation, which poses a much bigger theoretical challenge and has much wider practical implications - the translation of interactions into objects.

When interactions become objects In 2015 a man, impressed by a Facebook profile photo of a woman, sent her a text message. He complimented her beauty; she thanked him but said she had a boyfriend; he kept complimenting, adding that 'just seeing your photos makes my muscle flex', and asked if she wanted to 'take a glimpse' at 'what you caused'. Despite her decisive refusal, he sent her a photo of his penis with an indecent proposal. After blocking the guy, she published a screen print of the whole conversation (with a sticker added to hide his genitals) on a large public Facebook page. The 19,000-member-strong 'Men on Face book' page 7 is a space for Israeli women and girls to anonymously share screenshots of Facebook Messenger chats with men, including bizarre opening lines, cursing and swearing (after their advances were rejected), and multiple 'dick pies', indecent proposals and other forms of sexual harassment. The screenshots (often, although not always, with the men's names deleted) then start conversations. Page followers sometimes argue about what exactly went on in the conversation, whether it really amounts to harassment, whether the women reacted properly and wisely, or what are the best coping strategies for women in similar cases, but most often they show support and empathy, condemn the harassing men, and laugh together at the harassers (at their inarticulacy, rudeness, lack of style, misspellings etc.), an interaction ritual (Collins 2004) that turns the unpleasant original experience into a source of female and human solidarity by focusing attention on the harassment and expressing shared emotions towards it. At first glance, the chats and the conversations they start lend themselves easily to interactionist analysis, as mundane interactions in which actors negotiate the definition of the situation and their roles and participate in interaction rituals. At second glance,

When Interactions Become Objects

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however, these interactions (and many others) pose a real challenge to interactionist theory. The woman was only able to share the

harassment since, being digitally mediated, this harassment turned into an object, a data object. What this woman shared was not an account of the harassment, but the harassment itself as an interaction event, an objectified version of the interaction. Admittedly, this did not include the internal experience of the parties; yet she did share with the page followers all the information the two exchanged, any conduct of the harasser she could have monitored and vice versa, that is, the totality of their social interaction. Many forms of digitally mediated interaction document themselves, leaving behind them an object. Interaction is then simultaneously an exchange of symbolic gestures among interactants (which interactionists are used to analysing) and the collective production of a durable object: the log, the documentation of the interaction. Unmediated face-to-face interactions are increasingly objectified too, although not automatically, but intentionally through digital photography, video and sound recording. This increasingly happens for two reasons. First, digital technologies have made documentation easy and cheap; unlike film cameras, digital phone cameras are always available and may document interactions without marginal costs and almost without space limitations. Second, digital documentation has social uses: objectified interactions are regularly disseminated on line as a point of departure for new social interactions (either in retrospect or in real time, through live streaming, making the original interaction available to wider audiences). The interactionist model assumed a sharp distinction between interactions and material objects. This distinction seems almost obvious, as interactions and material objects are essentially different. The former are events that evolve through time: action and reaction, statement and reply, a continuous flow of performances which exist only while going out of existence. Afterwards they only remain within the interactants' consciousness, printed on the unstable ground of human memory. The only matter in which they are embedded is the biological matter of the human brain, and as memory studies show, the latter is not an archive where traces of the past are retained unchanged (or at worst fade}: memories are elastic and they change any time we recall them; during any activation, they are adapted to the needs of the present, are connected with new associations and gain new meanings (Brockmeier 2010; van Dijck 2007). You cannot

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recall the same river twice. Contrariwise, material objects are much more obdurate and stable. Your memories from the age of twelve are much more fluid than the diary you wrote at twelve. 8 Below I show that turning interactions into objects transforms the social roles of objects in interactions and the way past interactions shape present ones. Interactionist theory used to cast objects in three kinds of social roles. All three contributed to interactions but remained clearly separate from them analytically. First, objects such as walls framed interactions, marked their boundaries and distinguished between frontstage and backstage; as shown above, in digitally mediated interaction this is the role of digital code. Second, objects have been dramaturgical resources: settings, costumes and stage props that help actors define the situation, characterize their roles and support their presentation of self (Goffman 1959); or interactional hooks that organized the interactions around them by helping the audience ascribe identities to actors (such as the yarmulke that brings to the foreground of the interaction the Jewishness of the wearer: Jerolmack and Tavory 2014; Tavory 2016). Third, objects are, well, the objects of human action: people negotiate their meaning in interaction and then act upon this meaning, as our actions are always directed towards objects (Blumer 1986: 11). In this third role it does not matter whether objects are material or immaterial, since for Blumer the objects of human action are never the things-in-themselves, but rather their representations as objects within our consciousness, a constructed 'social creation', 'the product of symbolic interaction' (p. 10) through which objects gain a shared intersubjective meaning (Blumer 1986: 10-12, 68-70). In the first role objects are the frame within which interaction takes place, in the second they are dramaturgical resources used in interaction, and in the third they are objects for interpretation in interaction. However, in the digital world, data objects are also a material medium of interaction and its objectified manifestation, thus making it difficult to clearly distinguish interactions and objects. A large part of digital activity is self-documenting. This extends far beyond the social networking world discussed above, and applies to many other aspects of digital society. Kitchin and Dodge (2008) identify a type of coded objects they call logjects: objects that create a log of their activity. Unlike opening a physical book at the library, opening a digital book sends a digital request which is often documented by

default. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Spotify retain their users' search history and past reactions to contents to offer them personally tailored content and advertisements. The word processor I use to write this book records the last files I worked on and the number of revisions (several thousand, an evidence of the author's anxiety and tendency to save files with every sentence added). Call centres automatically record every call and register its details. Websites record the time users spent on the site, other sites they visited, their routes between subsections, and even their mouse movements. Google registers anything we've ever searched for and Facebook registers with which friends we interact most. But the objectification of interaction is not only at this hidden level: in many platforms, interactants themselves may have access to objectified interactions (e.g. Facebook and IM conversations) or objectify them. The screenshot is a technology of objectification that played a key role in the two stories that opened this chapter and this section. The objectification and self-documentation of interactions have huge consequences, since they remould the availability and accessibility of interactions to both other human actors and algorithms. Whereas this chapter focuses on the former, I later discuss how objectification allows algorithms to analyse interactions for their economic exploitation (chapter 6) and for regulating access to future interactions through algorithmic prediction (chapters 3 and 5). Rendering interactions available to other humans has significant consequences for power relations across institutional contexts. For example, in the field of law enforcement: when any query is documented, police officers can see the number of times a name has been queried by other officers, and treat this number as a quantified proxy for suspiciousness (Brayne 2017: 991-2), further harming minority populations who suffer from over-policing. In the field of labour relations, surveillance is increased: when interactions document themselves, call centre managers, for example, can know exactly how many seconds each conversation took, how much time each worker dedicated to each micro task (such as filing or ringing customers back), and whether a worker was truly rude to a customer in the recorded conversation (e.g. Ball and Margulis 2011; Stevens and Lavin 2007). More generally, it is much easier to practise surveillance, that is, to pay 'systematic attention to personal details, with a view to managing or influencing the persons and groups concerned'

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(Lyon 2003: 16), when elusive interactions are faithfully translated into stable objects. Whereas spies and detectives had to work hard to clandestinely translate interactions into objects, digitally mediated interaction is automatically objectified. Digitalization thus facilitates surveillance not only through its delegation to algorithms, but simply by objectifying interactions. Interestingly, this increased surveillance at workplaces decreases the importance of performance in interaction. Impression management and putting on a performance of dexterity and efficiency matter less when the actions and interactions of employees are objectified and when worker evaluation is based on automated, quantified, digital monitoring, as already identified by Zuboff in the 1980s (Zuboff 1988). In Amazon, any minute warehouse workers stand still is automatically documented by their scanners, is recorded in an 'inactivity protocol' and may be grounds for dismissal (Scholz 2017). Other employers use software that randomly takes screenshots of employees' computers and send them to managers. Action and interaction, when translated into digital data objects or logjects, can be known, characterized, measured and compared to norms (and also judged and governed, as shown in chapter 5). As ever-more interactions are computer mediated, this process goes much further, as any information the parties exchange is documented, turning into a durable object that may be searched, copied and distributed to (in principle) unlimited audiences. When interactions leave digital records, digital surveillance for economic purposes (discussed in depth in chapter 6) and governmental purposes (chapter 5) are much easier. This trend is exacerbated when facerecognition technologies are integrated into surveillance cameras installed in public space, turning offline interaction and movement in public space into data objects, as happens in Dubai or in the Israelioccupied Palestinian territories.

room's walls or interviews for profile stories have influenced how one was perceived. However, digitalization increased the salience and importance of the exhibition of self at the expense of selfpresentation. Goffmanian presentation of self has taken place within the context of situated interaction, and hence while monitoring the reactions of the audience and constantly adapting the performance accordingly (for example, by using remedial rituals once a false impression was made: Goffman 1971). This is not the case with exhibitions of self, which consist of stable objects, more similar to films than to theatre shows. Hogan claimed that individuals shape their exhibitions of self by producing reproducible artefacts to represent themselves and submitting them to 'exhibition sites' such as SNSs, where they are selectively presented to particular audiences by curating algorithms. The role of algorithms means that unlike Goffmanian performers, actors cannot tell or predict when and to whom their digital exhibition of self will be or has been presented: these data objects are no longer contained within a situation. Delegating the presentation of self to data objects saves much time and effort: instead of telling about themselves time after time to multiple potential partners, dating website users compose a single profile, which presents them in their absence to a huge number of potential partners (and also to matching algorithms that decide to which users their profile will be presented in the first place). Similarly, employees and jobseekers present their professional self on Linkedln and academics use ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Academia.edu to present their specializations, publications and network ties. Studies in different countries showed employers often search online information on job candidates and use it to evaluate them, decide whom to invite for an interview, or identify sensitive issues to bring up in the interview (Berkelaar 2014; Berkelaar and Buzzanell 2015; Hedenus and Backman 2017). The digital exhibition of self changes power relations in job interviews as jobseekers assume employers are aware of their private lives, and thus confess 'problematic' information irrelevant to their professional qualifications such as unusual political views, leisure interests, sexual orientation, social ties or even family inheritance conflicts (as these may pop up while searching a person's name on Google due to the digitalization of legal databases). Some recruiters actually expect these confessions as evidence of the candidate's honesty (Hedenus and Backman 2017) . Looking at strangers' exhibitions of self is now similarly common before business, political

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From interaction to exhibition: the interaction -ob;ect duality

Objectification of interactions also influences the presentation of self, another focus of symbolic interactionism, which is similarly objectified. Bernie Hogan (2010) called it the 'exhibition' of self: rather than presenting oneself through ephemeral performance in front of those co-present in the situation, the presentation of self was delegated to durable objects. Exhibitions of self existed before the digital era: photos on one's office pinboards, pictures on one's living

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and romantic meetings. The reduced capacity to segregate audiences may then have a structural influence on life chances, making it hard to resist discrimination based on inconspicuous factors. People even show one another online profiles as a way to tell people about others they met. Hogan's analysis of the 'exhibition of self' brilliantly showed why and how digitalization transforms impression management and its challenges, and how this shift from performance to exhibition of self resulted in the context collapse discussed above. However, the cases on which Hogan focused - the submission of self-representation to exhibition sites, such as the construction of personal profiles on SNSs or dating sites - are special cases which are not representative of all others, and are not necessarily the most theoretically important or interesting ones. Two corrections should be made: first, not all the information included in an individual's exhibition of self was indeed submitted by the same individual to exhibition sites. As the cases above indicate, parts of the exhibition are submitted by others, such as a photo from a drinking party uploaded by a friend, or a legal record uploaded by a firm owning a legal database. Second, and more importantly, even to the degree that individuals do shape their own exhibition of self, they do not only do it reflexively, as a conscious act of presenting their self to diverse unknown audiences. When SNS users participate in an online public mediated interaction (RSVPing to an event, or reacting to something others have said or done through textual comments, photos, emoticons, likes or sharing), they manage impression on two different dimensions. First, they manage impressions vis-a-vis a few known alters with whom they knowingly interact, while adapting their presentation of self to the audience and the situation. Second, this mediated interaction transforms into a durable, searchable object that joins their algorithmically curated exhibition of self and might be presented to an unlimited number of unknown alters at unpredictable times. Interaction is simultaneously the production of public data objects that join the exhibition of self. The vast majority of our online exhibitions of self is the by-product of quasi-contextualized social interaction with known alters - joking, showing support, gossiping, criticizing, having fun or arguing. Isolated acts of selfrepresentation and self-branding through the conscious construction of an exhibition of self, such as the design of a personal profile or a

personal website, are the exception, not the rule. Digitalization did not so much replace the presentation of self in interaction with the reflexive construction of an exhibition of self, as Hogan suggested, but rather objectified the presentation of self in interaction and added it to the exhibition of self. It introduces a duality of interaction and object. Nils Klowait (2019) noticed that ICTs may be used to reframe situations, for example when a video camera transforms 'a university lecture' into 'a lecture being recorded' or 'producing a video lecture'. Meyrowitz (1985: 44-9) similarly suggested that there is a 'need' for a single definition of each social situation, and that when communication technologies merge different situations and audiences, a clear new definition of the combined situation emerges. However, the duality of interaction and object introduced by digital documentation challenges the very idea of a single, unambiguous framing: digitally mediated interactions are simultaneously social interactions and the collective production of objects, and the participants take into consideration different audiences (although to different degrees). Even if interactionists have taken objects seriously (as claimed by Tavory 2018: 128; also Jerolmack and Tavory 2014; Pinch 2010), interactionists keep asking how objects shape or structure interaction without noticing the blurring distinction between them, or more accurately, the duality of interactions and objects. It might be tempting to search for answers outside interactionism: at a superficial glance, the capacity of digital technologies to break interaction's temporal boundaries may seem like yet another demonstration of Latour's claim that through the material world and its durability, 'at time t, I find myself in contact with beings who have acted at t-1, and I fold the situations together so that I myself will act under another form at t+l' (Latour 1996: 239). Latour suggested that the material world not only bounds interactions but also stabilizes their results, as otherwise 'the social is not solid enough to make interactions last' (p. 234 ). Only when interactants produce material durable objects (e.g. change the material design of a space by installing locks or a wheelchair ramp) can they shape future interactions. 'Any time an interaction has temporal and spatial extension, it is because one has shared it with non-humans' (p. 239). These non-humans stabilize identities, roles and hierarchies, thus relieving actors from having to renegotiate them each time anew, turning 'complex social

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life to a complicated one' (p. 234 ). When people delegate their will to material objects such as locks or hydraulic door closers, the objects keep working for them in the future even in their absence, relieving them from further human interactions (deciding who may enter and keeping the door closed without arguing). However, the case of digitally mediated interaction and digital traces goes much further than Latour's account: what is stabilized and objectified here is neither the interaction boundaries nor its results, but the interaction itself, with all its textures and dynamics. The pandemic and the future

In March 2020, while I was working on this book, my university, like many others, responded to the coronavirus epidemic by switching to Zoom-mediated online classes. However, some students reported e peri cncing bandwidth problems, while others were young parents I ·k d at home with their babies. To make it easier for students during this hard time, professors were asked to record their lectures to allow those who did not make it to access them later. Students who skip classes are nothing new, but recording gave them access to much more than summaries or notes taken by their peers: they gained access to interaction itself, including jokes, questions, discussions and my occasionally odd facial expressions, which they could have shared with non-students without my knowledge. Lectures turned into the collective production of an object, the lecture's recording. A few days later a lockdown was announced. From that moment on interactions of all kinds, including work meetings, psychotherapy sessions and family gatherings, moved online to video calls or video conferences. In the middle of one Zoom-mediated family dinner with relatives sitting in five different homes I was embarrassed to find out that the whole event was recorded. What happened? Within a few days the pandemic caused multiple organizations, groups and individuals to substitute video conferences for the now forbidden face-to-face meetings, and once interaction is digitally mediated and so easy to objectify, there are always good reasons why it actually should be objectified, why it could be nice or helpful to have it available for future use. The pandemic might have offered us a glimpse into the future. The more interactions turn into objects, the more urgent is the need to properly theorize the interaction-object duality and understand its effects.

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The effects of the interadion-objed duality

The interaction-object duality influences what happens within interactions, as it introduces new opportunities and risks. lnteractants are influenced by the potential of objectified interactions to be of interest and value to others, and hence a potential resource in competing for attention and recognition; and by their potential to reflect (positively or negatively) on the interactants' public image while being decontextualized and added to their exhibition of self. These influences are patterned in a way that might change power relations. The cases presented below demonstrate that objectified interactions are inherently different from ephemeral ones on two theoretically consequential dimensions: their temporality and their 'bracketability'. Interactionists assumed that interactions are at least somewhat bracketed from the wider social life and its macro-level power relations. Below I suggest that post-situational interactions are no longer as easily bracketable from outside power relations, as anyone who joins the interaction changes the power relations within it, a point I demonstrate in detail. lnteractionists also zoomed in on situations bracketed in time. Below I show how the interaction-object duality transformed the relations between past, present and future: when the present is constantly objectified, objectified interactions may gain new audiences and hence new meanings, grant interactants recognition and social value or deny them. Actors are at least partly aware of these possibilities, which introduces future orientation into interactions, as interactants increasingly experience present interactions as future assets or liabilities once exposed to presently absent audiences. More importantly, objecti-fied interactions play a role

in restructuring temporality, that is, drawing lines of continuity between past and present other than those drawn by human memory and theorized by interactionists. As a result, the past may act on the present in less predictable ways. The 'Men on Facebook' page demonstrates how the objectification of interaction reshapes the dynamics of sexual harassment interactions: when harassment interactions are objectified, some of those harassed creatively exploit the capacity to break the interaction's boundaries and expose it to wider audiences. First, screenshots published on the page show that some harassed women told their harassers in real time they would publish the conversation in 'Men on Facebook'. This shaming threat uses the porous boundaries of

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digital incera ·tioo chat is, th p tential of a ny obj rifi d intera tioo to b come publi to deter hara er by thr atcnin • to da mage their pu Ii exhibition f self. Thi trar gy was do um need in diver oth r ont xt : wh n itizen turn rb ei.r am ra t p !ice men a od oldier during d 111011 tration or military raid a ro s the world, but a l o in mundan interperso nal confli t . m u e live streaming a llowing the interaction to b m nit red by mul tipl non -present ther in r a l rim ; in rher ca es th thrc t rema in unrea lized but till p werful. T hi sou 11eillance trat gy (Mann ·t a l. 20 3) co unter stare power by u ing the p w r f th n rworked di ita l amera to bjectify intern ti n an d break th ir b L111d ries. Power objectin ati n tnreaten r lation within int racti n tran form th ir bracketing. e nd, om haras d worn n repli.ed t their harassers wittily n I deri. i ely sp aking over their head (e.g. whil u ing A wery prose or laughing at their in a rticula cy, ignorance mi spelling, rud n , and la ck of sry le) to a u li n which wer obvi u ly not th haras r : they spoke at the ha rassers but not with them as the main audien e to whom they p rf rm d were the group m mber th e future aud i n f the bje tined intera ti n. To thi audi n e th y p rform d female as ertiv nc lf-c nfid nee and intelle tual up ri rity while offering th m ntertaining, njoyabl onsi t d of men in obje t to read. n ther imagi ned a udi n ne d f ed u ation. Thu when a boy d ma nd ed a irl 'explain' why he r j cted him , h r pli d I' ll make it !ea r ro you an I to a ll the moron who will r ad my Fae bo k po t wh 11 1 po t rhi hat: J d n t owe you a nythin . The bjectincation f interacti n al o in vo lve · ri k. for whi h th a e f s ring ffer a go d exampl e. E posing th nak d body (fully r pa rtly, during lovemak ing r from a af di tance) creates a mom ent of intimacy, in e it reveal to a particular alter wh, t i hidden r m a ll oth r . Vi rbal pre i n f ffe ti n r u I attra tion imi la rl y r ate intimacy throu h di c riminati n. a e intima y ha inv lv d ri k for the rep utati n of ln a ll the h ·tero ·exual teenage girls due to e ua l 'd ubl ta ncl ards', a male partn r c uld alway ki s and tell. Thi i · xacerbated in e ting, a media ted, l je tin d fo rm f intimate intcra tions. xting ha h come a hi hly comm n pra ti ce am n 7 r enagers a nd young ad ults worldwide a th hange f u liz d image a gifts ha be < m a tand , rd ·omponent of cultura l d ting ript .9 ln s xting, intima y i not b uncled within icuat d int ra ti n: it turn into th

When Interactions Become Objects

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production of an object, which can then be stolen, published by the partner as 'revenge porn', used for extortion, or presented to other boys (without digitally sharing it) as a status symbol, an evidence of 'what you are capable of doing, making a girl take a picture of her breasts and give it to you' (Harvey and Ringrose 2015: 360). Once objectified, intimate interactions are much less easy to bracket from power relations external to the interaction. Kiss and tell is nothing new, but as boys have an obvious interest in making up stories, they were taken with a grain of salt as long as they were not supported by material evidence. When boys distribute photos of girls showing their breasts, performing fellatio or simply showing sexual interest in boys over IM (Harvey and Ringrose 2015; Schwarz 2011), it is a different story: these are material evidence, easy to distribute and hard to refute. Rather than telling about sexual conversations or interactions with girls, they show their traces. Another source of risk is that the capacity to distribute evidence to unbounded audiences of strangers corrodes the shield of urban anonymity. Once documented, interactions between strangers may spread and eventually arrive at the parties' acquaintances. Once identified, parties may be held accountable and subjected to informal, disproportional punishment. This logic of shaming is best demonstrated by the story of a South Korean girl whose dog allegedly defecated on the subway train in 2005. After refusing to clean up after her dog, she was photographed by another passenger. The story was published on a local blog, went viral and ended up in the news. The public outrage was so strong she dropped out of college (Solove 2007). Had it remained a bounded interaction, this relatively minor act of incivility would have probably infuriated those co-present only to be soon forgotten without consequences, as the interaction parties were strangers in an urban space and unlikely to meet again. However, to her chagrin, this interaction was objectified and turned highly consequential. This form of peer law- and norm-enforcement has been repeated in many similar cases all over the world, ranging from trivial rudeness through racial hate speech to sexual assaults. In all these cases, situations are no longer as bracketable from outside power relations as they were, due to the interaction-object duality. The increased and unbounded accountability introduced by the interaction-object duality is especially consequential in employment relations, not only during recruitment, but also later, as interactions outside the work sphere turn into grounds for dismissal. For

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example, during the 2014 war, Israeli Jews had access to Facebook interactions among their Palestinian Arab co-citizens and could read them without knowledge of Arabic (using the embedded automatic translation feature). Thus, backstage interactions of one politicalnational community were taken out of context (thereby transforming their meaning), copied and distributed online, and judged from the political perspective of another national community. In dozens of cases they were presented to the employers of Palestinian Israelis, who were urged to dismiss 'the enemy' by Jewish customers, co-workers, or organized political groups who used the searchability of digital data objects to systematically search for Palestinian Israeli employees who appear to support the Palestinian side, and their Jewish employers (Schwarz and Shani 2016). Some were indeed dismissed. The risk of objectified interactions finding their way to unintended audiences is hard to avoid. Indeed, it is theoretically possible to always take into consideration that any mediated interaction may become public. However, much digitally mediated communication is not about transmitting information. Like much offline interaction, IM and SNS conversations are used to create and maintain solidarity and collective identity, which are often organized around unique local interaction styles (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003 ). Using these styles and choosing phrases that would not be chosen when speaking to an undifferentiated audience is a source of intimacy and trust. This explains scandals such as the conversation leaked from a WhatsApp group of young Tory activists who humorously discussed 'gassing chavs' and 'shooting peasants' (Kentish 2017). IM chatting has different social functions and meanings from letters or email: it is experienced as oral and shares with oral communication its informal style and its turn-taking structure. 10 By changing the temporality of interactions, objectification thus introduces increased accountability into everyday life. Not only can statements and reactions reach unintended audiences at different times and places, they can also be re-examined by co-interactants in retrospect. When all the information exchanged in interaction is objectified, people may be held accountable for every tiny action or remark, which is quite unusual in ephemeral talk, and they may be held accountable by people not monitored in real time as co-interactants. This accountability applies not only to statements, but also to gestures, such as Face book 'likes'. Likes are gestures of approval,

the online parallel of thumbs-up or nod gestures. Offiine, nodding plays a central role in symbolic interaction as a way to show interest and sympathy. Nods may have implicit or ambiguous meaning, and they are aimed mainly at the p al·er and occasionally at other intern tion partic , but are rarely m nicored by those not present .in the interaction. C ntrariwise, oolin u ers b Jd ther a untabl for texts, photos or pages they liked, and a wrong like may be answered with strong sanctions such as ending relationships or dismissal from work, as happened to analyst Peter TerVeer, who was fired from the Library of Congress after 'liking' a same-sex parenting Facebook page in 2012 (Middleton 2012). This happens because, unlike ephemeral nods, Facebook 'likes' are documented, counted, and reported to Facebook friends of the liker, the liked and anyone exposed to the post. Thus, increased accountability is exacerbated by the specifics of Facebook's code de ign. This may be compared with a world in which a student nodding in agreement while listening to a critical presentation during a seminar would automatically send a transcript of the critical paper to all her relatives, who might feel uncomfortable with contents deriving from a different social world. Yet users fail to take this increased accountability into account, as they often 'like' posts they would have never considered posting themselves. Users are even held accountable for the composition of their egocentric network, as the latter turns from a metaphor into a public data object (as discussed in chapter 3 ). Users may be urged to cut ties with controversial Facebook friends, such as friends who cheated on their partners, or celebrities accused of misconduct, under the threat of being viewed as supporting them and punished for it. This is part of a new regime of truth, in which the production of truth in everyday life increasingly relies on the use of objective material evidence as arbiter in everyday disputes. To take an example from my own observation:

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In the early evening I take a bus from the university to the city. On the seat before me a girl in her twenties, apparently a student, is speaking loudly with a guy over the phone. He blames her for 'playing games' as he came down-town 'especially for her' but she didn't meet him. She first says she 'didn't remember' they arranged to meet; she worked late, had to wake up early, and it didn't work out for her to meet him. He insists they did arrange to meet. The conversation could have ended here, word against word. But then she suddenly looks at her smartphone she used for talking, finds evidence, and starts referring to their

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documented IM conversation to prove him wrong ('you have the whole correspondence!'). She cites her own message ('I finish around eleven thirty, let's talk later and see how we're doing and if we can meet'), his message ('I came to the city for you - when do u finish?') and finally the message she sent after working past midnight, saying it's too late. She analyses the evidence and uses it to support her narrative that they did not have a date, and that he tried to manipulate her into meeting him although she had to wake up early the next morning.

1997) and consequently for status and recognition. This results in a shift in modes of attentiveness: when interactions turn into objects that may have social value, interactants turn more attentive and alert to valuable (funny or insightful) moments in interaction on which they may capitalize. The mode of attention that views interactions as Bestand ('standing reserve' of resources) from which value can be extracted is no longer endemic to journalists, novelists and social scientists, as laypersons too turn into miners or hunter-gatherers of valuable moments (Schwarz 2012). Knowing that interactions may produce value may influence the dynamics of interaction, encouraging interactants to maximize the value they produce (for instance, by choosing a witty style, as evident in the 'Men on Facebook' example), that is, to rationalize interaction. This is not surprising: when interaction turns into the co-production of objects, producers are not indifferent to the symbolic exchange value of their products, as 'the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations' (Hardt and Negri 2000: 293 ), not only for corporations that capitalize on our everyday interaction but also for the interactants themselves. The objectification of interaction also gives rise to new forms of crime. One form is productive violence, in which acts of martial violence, sexual violence and bullying ('happy slapping') are documented by the perpetrators themselves, for the value of the product as entertainment (as reality porn or action films). As productive violence grows common, courts in different countries have recognized documentation as a motivation for crime (Schwarz 2012). Another form is image-based sexual abuse (McGlynn and Rackley 2017) such as down-blousing, that is, taking photos of women as they bend over and momentarily expose their breasts. Performances that go out of control for a moment used to be embarrassing but largely harmless: even if anybody noticed the gaffe, this ephemeral performance remained at worst as a vague memory of one or a few individuals. However, when networked digital cameras are always at hand, moments like this are documented for their value, objectified, disseminated online, and consumed repeatedly for sexual arousal, that is, turn into pornography. As voyeurism turns from an act in interaction into the production of objects, the risks involved for women soar accordingly. To conclude: the diverse cases reviewed above - shaming, sexting, image-based crimes and political persecution, as well as witty

In the past, the very act of documenting or collecting evidence in everyday interaction was dubious; it was perceived as a demonstration of extreme mistrust, which is out of place in most relationships. However, the interaction-object duality of digital interactions means that evidence is produced automatically. As a result, the use of material evidence in everyday life is being legitimated and normalized. As every lawyer knows, material evidence is subject to interpretation but the room for interpretation is limited: the couple above could not have argued about what they actually texted, only about the meaning of their words. Similarly, the status of gossip changes: when supported by material evidence, it is much harder to refuse to believe it in order to allow others to save face or to save the relationship. The camera phone introduced intentional documentation of evidence in diverse everyday situations: arguing with service providers or police officers, checking damage after a minor collision, or even socializing (where making a memento of a fun evening legitimates documentation that may later become evidence), 11 while common apps make it easier to record phone calls, even all phone calls by default. In computer-mediated communication, evidence production is indeed the default, and hence requires no reason or excuse even in contexts where suspiciousness deviates from prescribed emotional scripts. Objectifying interaction also transforms interaction dynamics by opening new future opportunities. Since teenage boys may boost their social status by getting nude selfies from girls (Harvey and Ringrose 2015) or logs of their dirty talk on IM (Schwarz 2011 ), some of their interactions with girls are directed towards this goal (for girls, getting documented love statements serves the same goal). More generally, the capacity to capitalize on interaction applies to the most mundane interactions. Joking offline may make a person perceived as funny by those present, but when the same joking takes place in self-objectifying interaction, it may be shared with others on social media, helping the joker to compete for attention (a scarce resource online: Goldhaber

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humour and deciding everyday disputes about the past - demonstrate how the objectification of interaction transformed the internal dynamics of interaction and the consciousness and orientation of the actors. I want to dwell now on two aspects with special theoretical significance. Bracketability. As shown above, objectification reshapes power relations, since interaction is no longer walled in and hence can no longer be bracketed from the power relations outside it. It can always be made accessible to others who are not co-present but may change the balance of power within the situation (e.g. by engaging in formal or informal punishment). Importantly, this is not about calling others to join the interaction, but about making the whole interaction accessible to others as an object. The porosity of the objectified, digitally mediated interaction influences power relations in interaction so much that it undermines the very logic of bracketing situations that underlies symbolic interactionism and microsociology in general. Temporality. A second theoretically significant dimension reshaped by the objectification of interactions is social temporality, that is, the relations between present, past and future. First, the future: the cases detailed above demonstrate how objectification encourages an increased future orientation, experiencing present interactions as future assets or liabilities, risks and resources, by imagining what may happen if these interaction-objects are made accessible to possible future audiences. Second, the past: while focusing on the openness of the present, interactionists have admittedly recognized that 'action is sedimented temporally' as 'what has happened previously sets expectations for what will come' (Fine 1991: 167). How can past interactions shape present ones? The classical interactionist reply is that the past keeps living in the present thanks to human memory: we remember the personae of alters, the roles they played, the definition of the situation, and so forth. More sophisticated theoretical constructs developed by interactionists more recently to conceptualize how the past shapes the present, such as interaction ritual chains (Collins 2004) or idiocultures (Fine 2012), similarly rely on the faculty of the human biological memory. However, turning interactions into networked digital objects means that the past may influence the present through the 'connective' digital memory (Hoskins 2018; see discussion in chapter 3). Unlike biological human memory, digital memory exists as objects outside the individual (the biological organism), and this independent existence often awards it

higher perceived reliability and objectivity; its traces of the past are far more detailed, and they may be mediated over the network to wide, unknown potential audiences. The interaction-object duality thus remoulds the role of the past in social life. Turning interactions into objects introduces openness to interactions, but not the one identified by interactionists, which lies within the situation (as meanings, social roles and social institutions are not fully predetermined and may always be renegotiated); this is another kind of openness, external to the situation and deriving from the possible collapse of its boundaries, as the objectified past may appear in unexpected times and places with unexpected results. As interactions are translated into objects more than ever before, biological memory is not alone in drawing lines of continuity between past and present, as the interactionist literature assumed. A swarm of data objects, objectified interactions and memories, joins biological memory, once objectified interactions exist (and keep shaping the future) independently of the consciousness of the interactants. While human memory has always been mediated through and distributed with objects (e.g. van Dijck 2007), these objects were clearly distinct from the interactions they represented: objectifying interactions was much rarer and more partial. Now the past shapes the future not only through the interaction's consequences and results (such as the institutionalization of social roles through interaction: Berger and Luckmann 1991) but through the interaction itself, which was given objective existence and life of its own and ceased to be situated in time. This may mean that the past may act on the present in less predictable and predetermined ways. In the digital society the past has never quite passed: it keeps replicating, flowing in networks and popping up unexpectedly 12 as a result of the objectification of interaction.

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Digital mirroring An important way in which ephemeral interactions make a durable impact on the future is by shaping the emergence of the self. For interactionists, interactions are where we negotiate and co-create not only the world but also one another. lnteractants not only negotiate their roles within the interaction: at least some interactions teach them who they are beyond the interaction. Ephemeral interactions

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may thus shape a self with relatively stable characteristics, a sense of continuity across situations. Mead (1972(1934]) and Cooley (2017(1902]) suggested this happens since alters in interaction offer us mirrors, as their reactions to us teach us how we are perceived. The self, as Mead famously suggested, consists of this perceived image, the organized set of assumed attitudes of others towards oneself (the Me) and one's spontaneous reactions to this image (the I). External perceptions of the self are often performative, shaping the self in their own image - a point later developed and explored in depth in studies of 'labelling theory' and the 'Pygmalion effect' , 13 even though the Meadian model allows the I to react to the Me in multiple other ways. However, this complex process is assumed to take place among humans, as only they are capable of meaningmaking, perception and giving one another recognition (bear in mind Mead's debt to Hegel's ideas on external recognition as the source of self-value and -identity). In the digital world, interaction partners are often non-humans. For example, in financial trading, algorithms are interaction parties for all purposes: they are preprogrammed both to interpret the meaning of the actions of other traders in order to predict the market and respond accordingly, and to manage impressions and shape the meanings others (humans and algorithms alike) may ascribe their own actions. Thus, trading algorithms conceal the true meaning of their actions (e.g. by splitting up large orders) and make false impressions (e.g. by sending fake orders to influence stock prices and cancelling them before execution) while trying to uncover similar deceptions by other algorithms (MacKenzie 2019) . Autonomous vehicles are similarly programmed to infer the intentions of drivers in other vehicles and to communicate. Digital technologies thus not only reshape interaction between humans, but also widen the range of interactants, allowing algorithms to take part in symbolic interaction. Some non-humans, such as Twitter bots, interact with humans while pretending to be humans. The idea of computers as interaction parties is not so strange: since the 1980s interactionists have recognized non-humans as interaction parties, often without giving up Mead's view of reflexivity and symbolic interaction as uniquely human. What matters, they claimed, was not whether non-humans have cognitive faculties, but whether humans project human capacities and actor status onto them, whether humans ascribe them autonomous, independent action which may

thwart human projects (Cerulo 2009; Owens 2007). Computers can thus count as social beings and partners for meaningful interaction, if only people ascribe them sociality (Gilbert et al. 1990: 244 ). Yet it is one thing to say that algorithms qualify as interaction partners and another thing to assume they shape human selves. Surely, traders experience 'the market' projected on their screen - an algorithmically calculated and accumulated being - as an interaction partner (Knorr Cetina 2009), and surely this interaction provokes reflexivity and teaches them about themselves and the human weaknesses (fear or arrogance) behind their false decisions (Ailon 2019), but this reflection is not about how others perceive the self, as in the Meadian model. Can digital non-humans play this role too? This may happen since digital systems often keep record of their activity, automatically translating human actions into data objects. When all actions of every individual user are registered, many websites, applications and other digital systems systematically analyse these data to probabilistically ascribe users identity (including ethno-racial, age and gender identity: Cheney-Lippold 2017) in order to allow 'personalization' (offering different users different contents, offers and advertisements, thus rationalizing the digital economy and increasing profits). Importantly, some systems offer the users themselves access to some of these analysed data. Self-tracking systems (Lupton 2016) are a good example: they look at users, interpret their actions and tell users who they are. Having their analyses made automatically without human intervention grants them authority and an aura of objectivity. Mead believed the self 'arises through the taking of the attitudes of others' (1972(1934]: 174), when we infer how others in the community view us, and respond to this image. Now this community of others may also include non-humans with which we interact. For example, musical taste as an aspect of the self emerges in the interaction with music streaming websites, such as Last.fm (just as literary tastes and the reading self have long emerged in interaction with school and neighbourhood librarians). This dynamic was studied by Nedim Karakayali and his collaborators (Karakayali et al. 2017), and the following account is based on their findings, while reinterpreting them (as they subscribed to a very different theoretical perspective, without referring to Mead or interactionisrn). Last.fm monitors ('scrabbles') the music to which users listen on different platforms and uses these data to ascribe users identity. Based on these

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inferred identities, users are offered recommendations, which starts a circle of recursive feedback: users react to these recommendations, and their reactions are registered by the system and influence future recommendations. Karakayali et al.'s study demonstrated how self-reflection, selfchange and the emergence of self are shaped by the reification of taste as a digital data object. Last.fm offers users access to their personal profiles documenting all the music they have listened to. When selftracking technologies quantify and objectify the flow of human action to portray representations of users (e.g. of their calculated and reified 'tastes') which are presented to users (and sometimes to others, as part of users' exhibition of self) - then a Meadian self emerges. Users ascribe meaning to these objectified representations of themselves, and respond to them while interacting with the website. Simply put: systems like Last.fm offer digital mirrors for the emergence and development of the self. In digital mirroring, algorithms join the community of alters who offer individuals reflections of themselves as points of reference for the development of self-identity. Last.fm reflects user selves in two ways. First, through recommendations: the website reacts to each user personally by offering them music recommendations that reflect the identity the algorithm ascribes the user, and users indeed interpret these recommendations as identity ascriptions. 14 Second, by showing users their own documented listening history and analyses of these data: user tastes are classified into different kinds and their level of 'coherence' is measured and presented to users. Looking at this mirror, users try to understand what it tells them about themselves. Some construct narratives to give coherent meaning to their allegedly incoherent choices. Some are unhappy with what they see in the mirror (with their documented listening patterns or with the algorithmic recommendations they receive which don't seem to match the kind of people they want to be). Consequently they change their listening habits: they struggle to 'diversify' their taste, add absent genres and restrict listening to artists they over-listened to (Karakayali et al. 2017). In the case of Last.fm, the algorithmic gaze does not mediate a human gaze, at least not the gaze of any individual human being. The other that mirrors users and allows their selves to emerge and develop is a non-human algorithm. In other cases, the algorithmic mirror mediates a human gaze while transforming it. This happens,

for example, when we learn about how others in the community respond to us as we encounter their objectified responses to our algorithmically curated digital exhibition of self on SNSs. Another way we learn about the attitude of the community is through metrics that algorithmically aggregate human evaluations of digital representations of our self and actions (such as ratings or 'likes' counters). Digital mirroring takes place, then, not only in self-tracking apps (Lupton 2016), but also in recommendation systems, SNSs or other personalized services: whenever users feel they are told something about themselves by the way apps or websites view them, classify them and treat them. Personalized advertisements are another case of digital mirroring: aware of personalization, some internet users find the assumptions algorithms make about them offensive and wonder whether they reveal something real about themselves. When Amazon's recommendation system is confused by a transgender user and fails to reflect her gender identity, her experience is not so different from when she interacts with people who make similar mistakes (Bucher 2018: 102). Finally, users sometimes playfully ask algorithms to mirror them, as in the case of common Face book chain status updates that promise to reveal 'who are your closest friends' by copying a text (such as 'when the Covid-19 lockdown is over, I'll first have coffee with @'), and tagging the first names offered by Facebook's algorithm, which are assumedly your closest friends, based on the history of your objectified interactions. In these cases of algorithmic mirroring, algorithms objectify and analyse the interactions of the self to produce knowledge of the self. In the case of Twitter bots, digital mirroring may be effective without this knowledge: having multiple others reacting aggressively to one's political tweets, challenging their legitimacy or sending death threats (as bots sometimes do), may well influence one's political sense of self. Digital mirroring teaches us an important lesson about interactions in general: since alters in interaction are always imagined (we only react to them as objects reflecting in our consciousness; we cannot know their attitudes towards us, only infer them), the humanity of alters is of little importance. Computers can be not only interaction partners but also mirrors constitutive of the self. In the digital era, computer systems offer both alters (in interaction with which we discover and develop our selves in digital mirroring) and media (as mirroring among humans is mediated through and informed by the interaction-object duality, through algorithmically curated

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exhibitions of self and objectified reactions to them). Mead's anthropocentrism must then be jettisoned.

agency and freedom), but it requires no substantial theoretical revision. Conversely, the objectification of interaction and the blurring of the distinction between interactions and objects requires rethinking the relevance of interactionism today. Possibly the most consequential and unique aspect of digitalization and probably the most under-recognized one, the interaction-object duality, challenges our capacity to think of interactions as bounded, bracketable units of analysis, the building blocks of social life (although in a manner and to a degree determined by the particularities of code 15 ). Objectification challenges both the temporal bracketing of interactions (introducing new temporality with new and less predictable lines of continuity between past, present and future) and the analytical bracketing of interactions as sites of negotiation over meaning which are bracketed from extra-situational power relations. The latter has always relied on fiction, as the autonomy of interactions has been limited and partial, and yet it justified the methodological-analytical strategic choice of a micro perspective focusing on interactions as its unit of analysis. Has interactionism lost relevance outside the walled-in society?

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A future for interactionism? As shown above, digitalization challenges some of the most fundamental premises of symbolic interactionism: that social life and social action take place in interactions, which are their basic building blocks; that interactions are well-bounded in time and space and consist of a finite, known number of participants who monitor one another within situations and move from one situation to another (thus, situations offer a shared context for the collective meaningmaking that underlies human interaction); that situations and roles within situations are defined through situated neg tiation; and tlrnt the self develops and emerges through interaction with hum an alters. The iety we live in is no longer the walled-in society poi:trayed by Goffman, where in teracti ns took place either in front of a stable and knowable audi ence bounded within walls or in the anony mous urban pc1 blic pace where rransi ni encou nters a ·e soon forgotten. offman's world reflected i.mmel's view of mod ernity, which characterized the mod ern seLf a multidimen ional individLial and unique (as every individual is uniquely pos.iti ned at the intersection of a different set of segregated social ircles), and reli ed o n a modern material structure, the densely popu lated modern city and the physical separation of work, home and third places. However, the material structure of interactions and audiences in digital space works differently. As we have seen, digitalization in itself, mediated interaction, and even th desi gn of spe ifi digital platfor ms that makes audiet1ce egrega ion much ha rder, do not really threaten the intera tioni t framework. G ffman h ims -Lf studied structural configurntions such as the total institution (theorized based on his empirical study of a closed psychiatric ward: Goffman 1961), where inmates cannot hide information from staff, cannot effectively segregate audiences, and are denied most means of self-presentation. Drawing a comparison between digital society and the total institution may tell a disturbingly ad cory abou tbe challenge digitalizati n po es to human age ncy and freedom (a rhe capacity to manage multiple per onae and contr I one's presentation of s lf is an important source of

Protentions One possible answer is that mediated interaction is not truly unbounded; instead, it has boundaries which are always prone to be violated, a potential which shapes mediated interactions. As Iddo Tavory (2018) suggested, protentions (that is, the anticipation of the future in the present) shape interaction (for example, when women do not stop unwanted sex out of fear that it might then turn into a violent rape, even when there is no indication that it would: Tavory 2018: 121). Like rape culture, the objectification of interactions informs protentions: it opens multiple possible futures and encourages interactants to develop a sense of this new game, in which interactions may be made accessible to unknown audiences. These multiple futures are taken into consideration and influence interactions in the present: as shown above, objectification reshapes i~teraction's internal dynamics and power relations by introducing nsks and opportunities, mining or maximization of value, and actors' consciousness of increased accountability. 16 While the future biography of the interaction qua object is indeed unknown, as actors interact with one another they imagine possible biographies

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When Interactions Become Objects

of the interaction-object and rely on these assumed biographies in interaction. Digitalization thus reorganizes the relations between present, past and future: past interaction-objects are integrated into present interactions, which in turn are shaped by expectati ons about the roles they may play in their objectified form in future int rn tion . Put simply, the first answer is that interacrionism is still relevanr, as long as we account for changes in . cial temporn lity, a temporal continuity increasingly relies on objectified int r ctions rather than solely on human biological memory. If we only remember the future-in-thepresent and past-in-the-present that actors take into account, we may still study bracketed interactions as our units of ana lysis. This answer is not quite wrong, but it misses something important: surely, the objectification of interactions and the collapse of situation boundaries influence the cons iousness of interactants in the present, but they also have other social impacts which are independent of this consciousness. As shown above, actors often fail to predict or imagine the futu re social biographies of interaction-objects: who wi ll join them. o r wi ll be exp ·ed to them, and what will be tb.e social impacts of this e posw·e. Whil people ti ll constantly interpret the social action of one another and negotiate the social world, this interacting is no longer coorah1ed within countable interactions and situated with situations. Accounting for consciousness is not enough, as the change in temporality cannot be reduced to its representation in consciousness: it is ontological, not only epistemological.

follow interactions' actual path and the shifting status of their situatedness, and the actors' shifting perceptions of and negotiation over its boundedness. A digitally mediated situation should thus be viewed as a fragile accomplishment not only because its definition can always be renegotiated, as interactionists have long claimed, but also because its boundaries and situatedness are always fragile and porous. Following the paths of interaction as it moves along the continuum and is being situated and de-situated, stabilized and destabilized by new audiences and interactants and their new interpretations, turns into a new intellectual project for contemporary interactionism.

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Post-situational interactionism

Classical symbolic interactionism was a product of its time, reflecting a modern urban existence segregated into well-bounded life-spheres and within them interactions bounded by material walls. To remain relevant, contemp rary interactionism must theorize and account for the interaction-obj ect duality and adopt an analytical and methodological strategy that follows all social biographies, potential and realized alike, of different interactions/objects in different contexts. This post-situational interactionism will not bracket situations a priori but instead follow the attempts of acto1·s (whose success is often partial and tempo1·ary) to bracliet it to negotiate this bracl~eting1 7 and t'o /,real~ its boundaries. Rat her than assume that interaction take plac i.n bounded situations, tb is trategy wou ld

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Owning situations

The interaction-object duality also urges interactionists to address structural questions. For example: interactions are believed to be negotiated, but what happens when they are objectified and owned by business firms? These firms now control who may access past interactions and which audiences are exposed to them. This is determined by computer codes unknown to users and commissioned by firms to maximize profits. Both the external boundedness and the internal structure of interactions are thus moulded by business firms who own our past interactions as intellectual property. What happens when policing big data systems use objectified interactions and digital exhibitions of self for algorithmic risk assessment (Brayne 2017)? How can the objectification of interaction impact the relations between majority and national minority groups during conflict? While each of these questions deserves its due attention, my point here is that the interactionist view of power as an intersubjective accomplishment, an emerging property within interaction (Collins 2004; Prus 2005), is challenged when the most basic features of interaction itself (such as who its participants are) cannot be taken for granted, as they turn highly volatile, subjected to constant change, governed by corporations through the design of digital code, and strongly informed by power relations. A post-situational analysis of interactions must then take into account a context which goes way beyond them. Chase interactionism

Latour (1996) claimed that the interactionist model of constant negotiation has always failed to faithfully represent human societies

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because it ignored material objects. While not quite accurate and fair, this critique is also not completely groundless. Contemporary interactions are unprecedentedly intertwined with objects, as they themselves are transformed into objects. Unlike the walls and locks analysed by Latour, these objects do not stabilize interaction but rather des_tabilize it introducing anxiety and uncertainty, and yet they pose mteracti~nism no less of a challenge. Standing to the challenge requires a post-situationist perspective that follows the emerging ~iographies of interactions, their boundaries and boundedness (viewed as a temporary shared accomplishment rather than an a priori postulate), while bearing in mind the material and social structures and the power relations that shape th m. Po ' t- ituational. interaction~sm should explore the protentions of intera tants regardmg the possible future biographies of interactions in their objectified form, which shape interactions as they happen, but it cannot stop there. Instead of static bounded situations as the building blocks of sociality it must focus on interaction-objects as its objects of study, chasing these moving objects that emerge and transform, never permanently stabilized in their meanings and participants as long as their digital traces exist: an interactionism of a chase.

3 When Networks Materialize: Rethinking social ontology beyond the individual and the collective 'I dare say you're wondering why I don't put my arm round your waist', the Duchess said, after a pause: 'the reason is, that I'm doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?' 'He might bite', Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have the experiment tried. 'Very true', said the Duchess: 'flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is - "Birds of a feather flock together"'. 'Only mustard isn't a bird', Alice remarked. (Carroll 2015: 72)

Flamingoes and mustard both bite, and birds of a feather might not be birds at all. Metaphors are indispensable components of the scientific imagination in general and of our sociological imagination in particular. But as many words have both metaphorical and literal meanings, confusion and imprecision lurk when we cannot tell which is which. Shifting between metaphorical and literal senses may be so smooth that even the speakers themselves may fail to notice it. This chapter tells such a story: how the network turned from a sociological metaphor that helps in imagining society into its material infrastructure and, even more important, into concrete performative data objects, that is, material representations of social life that transform, reorganize and remould the social life they represent. The ontological status of networks has changed; but there is more than this: if networks are not what they used to be, the role they play in sociological theory might need to change as well. This change may have implications for the fundamental level of social ontology. All sociological theories engage in social ontology (or at least in quasi-ontological model building): they tell us what

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so that new material arrangements do not merely offer new (allegedly weaker) forms of collectivity in novel forms of human associations, but join humans to form the not-only-human association of connectivity. However, we gain little by saying that connective sociality is produced by 'sociotechnical assemblages', that is, heterogeneous combinations of human and non-human elements producing social relations and flows of affect (which is always true in a sense); to truly understand the peculiarity of the connective and its social ontology we must recognize the new and unique roles materialized social networks take in shaping these associations. Below I explore the transformation of networks from a metaphor into concrete infrastructure and data objects; the meaning of this transformation; and its theoretical consequences. I first briefly review the history of the sociological use of the network concept and its oft unnoticed transformation from a metaphor into a data object, then discuss the rise of the connective, and finally explore its wider theoretical significance.

The Durkheimian ontological idea that 'society' exists has increasingly caused discomfort within academe and beyond. It has been under attack from both wings: from the right (Margaret Thatcher's famous claim that 'there is no such thing as society' but only 'individual men and women' 1 is typical of the individualist ontology of neoliberalism which has transformed our common sense) and from the left (a multitude of nominalist-constructionist and postmodern critiques have challenged the ontological status of collectives). The network metaphor allows social scientists and laypersons to think about the social world as consisting of more than isolated individuals, and yet to refuse to ascribe collectivities existence. In this tradition, which harks back to Simmel (1955[1922]), society is no longer compared to a machine or a living organism but neither is it a war of all against all (as in the ideal market); it is conceptualized as a dynamic yet structured space of relations. Structured ties are given ontological primacy over both groups and individuals, as both are defined and shaped by their positions in networks of relations. 2 The network metaphor also succeeded for its explanatory force; it has allowed sociologists to explain conduct not through the assumedly stable characteristics of the individual actors (that is, their shared group culture or individual idiosyncrasies), but through the formal structure of their relations, thus simultaneously avoiding two forms of essentialism: psychological essentialism and 'groupism' (the sin of imagining society as consisting of clearly distinct, stable and homogeneous groups: Brubaker 2004). Its explanatory power was famously demonstrated in classical works such as that of J. L. Moreno (1934), a psychologist who developed the sociogram method and applied it to explain school run aways not through individual features of pupils but through their po ition in the network of interpersonal 'attraction' and 'repulsion' ties; and that of Elizabeth Bott (1955), who explained differences in the division of labour within couples as an effect of their ties with others: couples with dispersed social networks had lower conjugal role segregation than couples who lived in the close-knit communities in which they grew up. Later theorization distinguished between the qualitatively distinct roles of strong and weak ties (Burt 2005; Granovetter 1974) and developed a formalist conceptualization of power in terms of network position (Burt 1995). Graph theory offered mathematical tools for analysing networks and measuring 'centrality', connectivity and cohesion (e.g. White and Harary 2001), while computer technology made it

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The network as a metaphor The network is among the most common metaphors in the social sciences. It is highly effective, and its usage is as flexible as networks arguably are. Its flexibility and vagueness made it into a metaphor for everything, in both popular and academic discourses and across disciplines, although in multiple and sometimes contradictory senses, even within the very same texts (Cavanagh 2007; 2013; Nas and Houweling 1998). Yet two families of uses can be roughly distinguished: the first (and larger) family assumes that all societies are network-like and uses the metaphor to solve general problems in sociological theory, whereas the second claims that only contemporary societies are network-like, using the metaphor to characterize the uniqueness of contemporary societies and contrast them with their predecessors. Thinking of all societies as networks has several advantages: empirically, this strand of formal-structural analysis has proved explanatory power. Theoretically, it allowed sociology to jettison old presumptions which proved hard to maintain in late modern, complex societies, and to align our conceptualizations of the social world with changing political sensibilities.

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possible to map and analyse huge networks. Sociologists thus participated in the creation of an interdisciplinary network science that translates problems from multiple disciplines into formal-structural network terms. For this strand of research the network is nothing but a model, a representation or a visualization of social interactions and affinities. It has no existence other than through its constant realization in interaction, the documentation of which draws a dynamic representation of this flexible social structure. Or more accurately, social structures: the networks studied by SNA scholars change shape depending on the dimension of social relations researchers choose to focus on. Edges may represent different kinds of emotional relations (like trust or sympathy), cognitive relations (name recognition) or interaction relations (financial assistance, sexual relations or information sharing) within different time frames (last week, last year), resulting in extremely different networks. While different dimensions may be added into a single schema or matrix of networks, such a representation can never be exhaustive, and for a theoretical reason that has nothing to do with the researchers' diligence or limited data: the network does not exist in the world, it is merely a representation of social relations, and the latter have in principle an unlimited number of dimensions. Social ties in the wild are not a durable object: the network merely represents the flows of interactions and relations within a particular past time frame, or flows of emotions at the present. These ties are brought into being only when reified, that is, when researchers collect information about these flows and choose to represent them as a network. Surely, in some sense, entities may be viewed as existing without necessarily being material or durable. Elder-Vass (2010) suggested that things exist when they matter, when they have causal effects, powers and properties that cannot be ascribed to the parts they consist of, but instead derive from the way the parts are related to one another. SNA scholars repeatedly show that relations and network positions do matter and have explanatory power. Yet 'networks' here means patterns of ties or interactions. It is ties and interactions (ways in which the parts relate to one another) that exist, and nothing but them. Importantly, these ties do not usually join to form wholes that do things, 'collective agents' with joint effects. Researchers in the SNA tradition view digitalization and SNSs as a methodological window through which they may look at

metaphorical networks that existed long before the internet or SNSs. This is an unprecedented opportunity, since online interactions document themselves and translate into data objects (as discussed in chapter 2) and since people increasingly produce detailed accounts of their egocentric social networks for functional reasons (to manage these connections, they register them as 'contacts' or 'friendships' in online platforms), accounts which are assumedly better than those produced to help network researchers. What they miss is that, unlike the metaphorical networks inferred through questionnaires, networks of SNA followers and friends have a material existence (as data objects stored in databases), and that they do not merely describe past interactions but also shape future ones, which are generated by algorithms based on these data objects. Another, even more abstract use of the network metaphor was developed by ANT to conceptualize distributed causation and agency. Contrary to humanistic views that trace action back to human subjects who manipulate objects, Bruno Latour and his collaborators view agency as distributed within a network of human and non-human actors, and strive to give sociological accounts in which 'all the actors do something' (Latour 2005: 139). Here the network offers a good metaphor for the not-only-social construction of reality. However, Latour insisted these networks only exist within sociological accounts: 'the network does not designate a thing out there that would have roughly the shape of interconnected points' (Latour 2005: 140). For ANT, digital objects or SNSs are not the network (they are not different from other actors that contribute to shaping what happens), as 'network' remains purely a metaphor.

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Becoming a network society

The second family of metaphoric uses of 'the network' views it as a metaphor not for the social world at large, but for a certain historically emerging type of society and its unique forms of organizational structure. Flexible, flat and decentralized forms of management, governance, administration, employment and social coordination that characterize post-Fordism, neoliberalism or late modernity are compared to networks to distinguish our 'network society' from the stable bureaucratic hierarchies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The work of Manuel CasteUs (2010), who used the network metaphor to explain globalization, organizational change

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and transformations in the structures of power and production in contemporary capitalism, is probably the most familiar exemplar of this family, but it is certainly not alone. Barry Wellman similarly used the network metaphor to explain individualism and the demise of groups, claiming that 'this is a time for individuals and their networks, not for groups. The all-embracing collectivity [... ] has become a fragmented, personalized network. Autonomy, opportunity and uncertainty rule today's community game' (Wellman 2001: 248) . In the study of politics, the network metaphor is used to conceptualize pluricentric, decentralized forms of governance after the zenith of the nation state (Jessop 1995; Rhodes 2007). In the study of capitalism and business firms, the adoption of network-like, flat and flexible organizational structures is viewed as streamlining capitalist production, adapting it to developed consumer societies, and making capitalism less susceptible to the alienation critique that plagued Fordist capitalism. 3 The network has been used as a metaphor for changes not only in macro structures, but also in the micro-level textures of sociality: for the rise of a nomadic human existence of shifting between transient ephemeral ties typical of Bauman's liquid modernity, which are project-based, intense but uncommitted (Wittel 2001). Whereas SNA viewed networks as a way to represent all forms of human association, including cohesive groups, these scholars viewed networks as a distinct form of human association. Unlike the first family, this version, which also gained popularity outside academe, does not hold that collectives are in principle ontologically fictitious and should be replaced with the more faithful representation of the network metaphor. It rather holds that collectives and bounded organizations are decaying, dissolving (and, in some triumphant versions, losing their oppressive power) and being replaced by networks. Many scholars have recognized that this use of 'the network' also has a justificatory or 'ideological' function: associating structural transformations with the internet gives them legitimacy (e.g. legitimating the increased-exploitation-for-reduced-alienation deal offered to employees), whereas viewing social order as spontaneous, decentralized and self-regulating like networks renders it apolitical and criticism-proof (Fisher 2010; also Cavanagh 2007; 2013; and even Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). The internet contributed much to the popularity of the network metaphor, since it is widely perceived as a symbol of our time, both

an agent of social change and a model for society, reorganizing society in its own image. This view has been promoted by both the internet industry and social scientists. But how does the internet as a concrete network connecting computers across the globe - not to mention the particular networks inscribed in SNSs - relate to the shift into metaphoric networks, the network-formed social structure of the 'network society', 'network governance' or 'network organizations'? Some scholars ignored the question altogether, implying the two have little in common. Others viewed material computer networks as both reflecting the (metaphorical) network society and facilitating it. Rainie and Wellman (2012) viewed the internet and SNSs as mere manifestations or instantiations of the emerging network sociality. They stressed that the internet revolution came several decades after the beginning of the 'social network revolution', that is, the structural shift from bounded groups, communities and organizations ('little boxes') into the dispersed networks of networked individualism. The internet facilitated and accelerated this process, but it was first generated by earlier structural transformations in the family, media, economy and employment and by pre-digital transportation and communication technologies. Their 'networked societies' are not simply societies using computer networks: network here is first and foremost a metaphor representing a form of social organization. Manuel Castells (2000; 2009; 2010) offered a more materialist stance: he viewed digital ICTs as the 'material basis' (Castells 2010: 442, 500) of the network society and its 'space of flows', and hence its defining feature (Castells 2009: 24). He suggested that material digital networks contributed to the rise of metaphorical global networks of trade, finance, communication, crime and so forth; to the shift from Fordism to Toyotism and from bureaucratic organization into 'networks' of suppliers and subcontractors; and to the networking culture of SNSs, which he identified with increasing freedom, autonomy and counter-power (Castells 2012). At the same time, Castells did acknowledge long-term cultural, economic and political processes that predated digital ICTs behind the rise of the global network society. He suggested that, while the network form of social organization is nothing new in itself, digitalization enabled its 'pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure' (Castells 2010: 500) through its technical capacities to manage complexity and communicate swiftly. However, his writing often shifted between network-like societies (that 'do not need a formal leadership'),

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material digital networks and SNSs, without much care or reflexivity (e.g. Castells 2012: 249-50). Social organization is supposed to simply reflect the morphology of material networks, and SNSs are hailed as carriers of freedom and counter-power without closer analysis of the complex interactions they facilitate between material computer networks, code/algorithms, representations of metaphoric networks and human actors. Even the most materialist version of the second family missed the materiality of data objects.

many factors accelerating and fostering the overdetermined historical shift from bounded groups into individualized dispersed networks (Rainie and Wellman 2012; for a different version: Castells 2010). Digitalization thus not only documents and visualizes metaphorical social networks but also transforms them. And yet, there is nothing peculiar about the fact that social networks may vary historically in their characteristics. After all, networks are networks are networks. Or are they?

Performativity

While the first family views SNSs as a methodological opportunity to study metaphorical networks, the second family views them as both manifestations and agents of its thesis on the rise of metaphorical networks as a particular form of society. Both failed to seriously look at what happens to metaphorical social networks when they are coded into SNSs used for social interaction and managing ties, and when they are documented as data objects within these SNSs. Some scholars recognized that digitalization and SNSs may not only reflect our metaphorical 'social networks' (the structure of our social ties and interactions) but also shape them, remoulding our patterned relations and interactions. For example, Facebook may enlarge our egocentric social networks of weak ties, as it allows users to maintain a larger number of ties with little investment of time and effort. It also protects ties from decaying and dissolving when parties leave the social institutions they once shared, 4 revitalizes latent ties, and increases the number of people with whom we discuss important matters (our 'core discussion networks': Hampton et al. 2011). SNSs influence metaphorical network structure even when simply making users knowledgeable about it: giving users access to visualizations of the egocentric networks of themselves and others may encourage them to transform these networks (Grabher and Koenig 2017; Sharone 2017). SNSs may also be performatively shaping social networks in ways that make them converge with the theoretical assumptions of SNA (Grabher and Koenig 2017; Healy 2015), for example when they suggest users befriend their friends' friends (thus closing 'forbidden triads'), or when suggesting users befriend those who share their taste preferences or exposing them to content based on their network position (thus inducing homophily). Finally, as suggested above, digital networks are believed to be among the

From metaphors to data objects At first glance, maps of 'friends', 'connections' or 'followers' on Facebook, Linkedln or Twitter seem very similar to the maps of familiarity, interaction or trust drawn by social network analysts. However, ontologically the difference is huge: the latter are external representations of the social world, whereas the former are data objects that are part of the social world and influence it. My list of Facebook friends is not simply a description of the people with whom I am familiar or with whom I have communicated. It is a record in a database, which determines the information and interactions to which Facebook's algorithm will expose me, and the audiences who will be exposed to my own actions and interactions (as shown in chapter 2). Even when users search for information published by strangers, they receive personalized results based on geodesic distances, that is, on their objectified social networks. Objectified networks influence not only algorithms but also users, since SNSs often publish these representations or parts of them. The objectified network thus turns into a part of the exhibition of self (Hogan 2010); users are held accountable for it, and shape it accordingly (see chapter 2). 5 Other maps remain in the back end but have no smaller impact on algorithmically regulated flows of data and interactions. One example is tie strength values calculated based on the volume and quality of past interactions within each dyad. SNSs prefer to expose users to those with whom they have communicated most intensively and extensively, while relying on SNA theory and methods. As a result, small accidental and contingent differences in interaction volume between ties may be consequential: some ties will be recorded as stronger, hence partners will be increasingly exposed to each other's online presence, possibly strengthening the tie in a recursive process,6 whereas other

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ties will be likelier to fade away. Similar Matthew effect (that is, richget-richer) dynamics are common whenever representations of the social world are reified and act performatively. 7 Whereas the maps constructed by SNA scholars usually had no performative impact on the social world, the network maps produced by SNSs are used to manage and shape social relations, not only to represent them. Every action mediated through the material digital network creates a digital record, changes the network map, and thus remoulds the relations between the nodes involved in the interaction and those around them (not only relations between different users, but also relations between users and non-human objects such as photos, brands, groups, causes or events). The result may be compared with a city where people to whom you did not nod or say hello lately will start disappearing from the streets you walk down and be replaced with friends of people you did nod to. The contrast with SNA maps is stark. Social networks turned from schemata or metaphors representing the social world into things, durable data objects operating within it, not unlike the objectified interactions discussed in chapter 2. Their new social roles have wider social ontological implications, since digital networks participate now in the construction of quasi-collective or compound actors. The material infrastructure of concrete digital networks connecting computers, data objects which are reified performative representations of the once-metaphorical networks of human interactions (which are now mediated by the material network infrastructure), and digital algorithms that regulate networked relations and interactions - all these participate now in the linking of individuals, their actions and mental states into something bigger, the very same core question of social ontology presented above. As David Beer and Roger Burrows (2013) suggested, following Scott Lash (2007), information, data and digital code gained a new ontological status, as 'social associations and interactions are now not only mediated by software and code but they are also becoming increasingly constituted by it' (p. 63 ). While it is debatable whether information has ever been 'just epistemological' (or more generally, whether we can and should imagine representations of the world as merely representations, 'withdrawn from the midst of beings themselves': Foucault 2005: 63 ), it is quite clear that once the context of social action is shaped by algorithms through calculative manipulation of data, the ontological status of data cannot be

ignored. Put simply: data do not only represent reality, they are a constitutive part of it. I wish to go further, pointing to the fact that many of these ontological data consist of objectified representations of metaphorical social networks. But how has this transformation of social networks influenced social organization? Much of the literature has explored how computer networks (the network as a material infrastructure) influence social organization. For example, Wellman suggested that computer networks as a material infrastructure encourage the transition from bounded collectives anchored in physical space to mediated, interestbased, sparse networks (e.g. Rainie and Wellman 2012), whereas Castells claimed they promote globalization through decentralized organizational structures (Castells 2000; 2009; 2010). However, the question before us is different; our main concern is not the influence of the network as a material infrastructure per se, but rather the performativity of the network as a metaphoric representation of social relations turned into a performative data object (e.g. friendship networks in SNSs), and its role in regulating and remoulding social relations and social interactions in the present based on their past counterparts. This question is important, since it poses the biggest challenge to the unreflexive application of SNA to digital societies. The next pages explore the possibility that social networks' objectification paved the way for a new form of sociality, which can be called 'connective sociality'.

Connectivity The term 'connectivity' was recently offered as a solution for two separate, parallel problems in memory studies and social movement studies. In both debates, the notion of connectivity solves similar problems in a similar way: it explains recent social transformations (in memory and in political organization and protest) by pointing to a new level of analysis for the study of culture and social action, allegedly distinguished from both the individual and the collective. Thus, the notion of the connective offers sociology a new ontology and an alternative object of research. I suggest that this level is shaped not only by computer networks but also (and more importantly) by reified representations of metaphorical social networks. In studies of connective life, networks should be viewed not as mere

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metaphors, but rather as constitutive components of social reality. A close look at connectivity takes us beyond the level of material digital networks as infrastructure (discussed by Castells). It explores how metaphorical networks are objectified as data objects and how the interactions between these data objects, algorithms and human actors create new forms of social association and coordination. When the metaphorical network turns into a data object which organizes social interaction over computer network infrastructure, a new form of sociality emerges. In this connective sociality, the network apparatus (which consists of networked material infrastructure, algorithms, users, and the network as a data object, that is, the objectified representation of social relations) regulates the flow of information and interaction. It thus enables and shapes the coordination of action and cultural negotiation among large (although fluid and contingent) sets of individuals, that is, a new form of wide-scale coordination of action and meaning which does not rely on collectives and collective institutions. Below I discuss two instances of connective sociality: connective action in contentious politics, and connective memory. The case of connective political action demonstrates how connective action differs from both individual and collective action, whereas the case of connective memory is offered to study how connective representations differ from both individual and collective representations. But before delving into the cases, let me make a disclaimer: by doing so I in no way intend to claim that collectivity as an ontological layer of reality had once existed and then ceased to exist as a result of digitalization. Since the 1970s, Durkheim's ontology of the collective, and dualism between the collective and the personal, society and the individual, have been the object of strong and convincing criticism; social theorists of various schools have developed diverse theoretical constructions (such as 'social networks', 'habitus' (Bourdieu 1977) and 'structuration' (Giddens 1976)) to overcome it and explain 'collective' phenomena in non-dualistic terms. Yet collective phenomena have existed in the sense that they have had emergent properties and powers not possessed by their parts (Elder-Vass 2010). I do suggest that the materiality of digital social networks and their design radically transforms archetypical 'collective' phenomena and the key mechanisms that intertwine human actions and mental states, the hanging together of human lives (Schatzki 2003), in new ways that require new theorizations.

When Networks Materialize

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Connective action

Contentious politics and political protest are emphatically collective phenomena: collective endeavours to reshape collective life (the political sphere) while acting on behalf of collectives. While economists attempted to explain this often risky activity in terms of rational individuals pursuing self-interest (Olson 1965), sociologists (starting with Durkheim 1995[1912]) have often viewed collective action as shaped by collective identity and collective emotions (e.g. Goodwin et al. 2001). Contemporary social movement scholars seeking to characterize recent transformations in their field describe an apparently paradoxical reality: on the one hand, there seems to be a surge in protest, waves of wide-scale contentious politics throughout the world: the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the Indignados. On the other hand, these protests do not seem all that collective, as they do not seem to have shared unified messages or demands, organization, leadership, or a movement identity uniting a bounded collective of protesters. Bennett and Seger berg (2013) provocatively suggested these are indeed not new forms of collective action, but rather a new phenomenon, 'connective action'. They chose this term as this new phenomenon relies on digital networks that connect people and allow them to initiate protest and personalize and disseminate messages at low cost while using non-political networks of weak ties for political communication and mobilization. Indeed, these were not the only scholars to identify such transformations in the form and content of contentious politics and to attribute them to digitalization and the following reduction in the organizational and participation costs of protest (e.g. Earl and Kimport 2011 ). Other scholars offered other terms (such as 'cloud protesting': Milan 2015), yet substituting 'connective' for 'collective' is symbolic: it portrays a narrative in which flexible, loose networks replace bounded collectives as a point of departure for political action. Political entrepreneurs of connective action may not even strive to build cohesive collectives, but rather to build loose (but as extensive as possible) networks. The social movement literature portrays this shift in organizational terms, while relying on insights from resource mobilization theory: connective action emerges when protest can succeed independently of social movement organizations (SMOs). Digital social media reduce

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dramatically the costs of protest, both personal participation costs and organizational mobilization and communication costs (Earl and Kim port 2011 ). Since protest may succeed with fewer resources, organizations (such as SMOs, labour unions and parties) that used to be indispensable for the accumulation and appropriation of resources lose their monopolistic position and some of their importance (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Juris 2005). Connective action thus represents an alleged democratization of the capacity to organize wide-scale protest. The digital network and digital platforms such as SNSs significantly facilitate recruitment, coordination and the dissemination of messages: a message that evokes strong resonance can virally spread to huge audiences with relatively small investment. Ordinary citizens may thus initiate protest without building or recruiting political organizations. Both the 2008 anti-FARC mass protest throughout Colombia and beyond it (with reportedly millions of participants) and the 2011 social justice protest in Israel (which was the largest protest in the country's history) were initiated by an ordinary, relatively young citizen who managed to mobilize masses using Facebook. Connective action as described by Bennett and Segerberg is not always initiated by a single individual, yet its leaders are typically neither formally chosen by SMOs nor anointed by the mass media, but rather emerge from the network by becoming central nodes or 'microcelebrity activists' (Tufekci 2013 ), accumulating ties that give them access to the attention of wide audiences and thus political influence and power (which sometimes excel those of their organizations: von Bulow 2018). The main social movements behind the American Occupy and Spanish Indignados protests had no official membership or formal affiliation; they were networks. While organizations still play a key role in contentious politics, they lose their monopolistic position. This is highly consequential, since SM Os have engaged intensively in constructing communities of struggle and their collective identity. Bennett and Segerberg suggest that this no longer happens in many contemporary cases of connective action: these no longer rely on a 'we' sharing a social identity and political claims. These authors suggest that many contemporary movements do not share collective action frames and concrete claims but only highly abstract, inclusive and vague frameworks (e.g. 'social justice', 'we are the 99 per cent'), which individual participants may easily personalize. These vague slogans are then concretized by participants in sundry different ways,

resulting in a diversification of the message. This helps messages spread, since participants (at least late modern ones) are more eager to spread messages when they can personalize them to accurately express their individual style, creativity, position and emotions. On a smaller scale, personalization also occurs when people share campaign materials on SNSs while adding their personal commentaries; create their own version of memes (humorous images); or slightly change the suggested text of an email they send to a minister or a corporation while responding to a call to 'tell them what you think'. All these practices are based on the material affordances of the digital, as digital data objects can be easily and quickly copied, manipulated, edited and distributed. All share a similar dynamic of imitation among networked individuals which is not mechanistic but involves constant adaptation and personalization, reminiscent of the imitation processes described by Gabriel Tarde a century ago (Tarde 2010) and resurrected in recent scholarship on virality and memes (Sampson 2012; Shifman 2014). Connective action thus represents a different relation between the individual and the social whole, a different logic of social coordination. Thanks to personalization, Bennett and Segerberg claim, people may disseminate political materials not out of commitment to a collective identity and ideology but as an act of personal expression and self-validation. These authors describe it as the individualization of the framing, as collective action frames are replaced by 'personal action frames' . While this wording may be slightly exaggerated, we may surely speak instead about 'personalized action frames'. For Limor Shifman, this explains the appeal of memes within and beyond the political sphere: memes allow users to simultaneously express their uniqueness and their connectivity; establish themselves as unique and creative individuals and build a network of relationships and belonging to a community; direct to themselves part of the public attention that a memetic object (such as the memetic political message 'we are the 99 per cent') enjoys, and in doing so further increase the public attention given to that object (Shifman 2014: 30--4, 171 ). Thus, the motives and incentives for activist participation are also changing. As a result, loose coalitions join to form shared protests without forming a shared, clear and distinct collective identity or a clear framing (which is always at least somewhat exclusionary). Activists at the British Storm the Banks protest (Bennett and Segerberg 2013), the American Occupy Wall Street movement or the

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Israeli social justice protest came from diverse backgrounds, bringing multiple different agendas that co-existed in the same demonstrations, precisely because they did not form a collective. Finally, lacking stable collective identity, collective action frame or durable organizations, connective action is claimed to encourage sporadic participation without long-term commitment, 'sudden waves of protest' (Bennett and Segerberg 2013) or 'flash activism' (Earl and Kimport 2011 ), 'extensive' rather than 'intensive' (Lievrouw 2011: 175). The introduction of new forms of online protest that require minimal investment of time, risk and effort into expanding repertoires of contention further facilitates sporadic participation. Connective action, the argument goes, makes it much easier to generate a momentary wave of protest and take crowds to the streets, but far more difficult to establish a long-term movement. To conclude, the story about the shift from the collective to the connective explains simultaneous transformations in multiple dimensions of protest, including organization, identity, messages, leadership, recruitment, motivations and resilience. Bennett and Segerberg identified important transformations, yet their analysis did not realize the full potential of the connectivity concept to enrich the study of social movements. This was partly because of the status of the network in their account. Openly influenced by Castells, they claimed that the digital network offers a material infrastructure for political action and consequently becomes a formal model for the social organization of the 'network society', in a metaphorical sense. Like Castells', their narrative is focused on the network as a metaphor, a new organizational form, while constantly switching between metaphorical and material networks. In a sense, they offer an adaptation to social movement studies of Bauman's (2000) narrative of the flexible 'liquid modernity' of postFordist societies. This further reduces the role of the digital network in the narrative: it merely helps extend to yet another sphere a broader social transformation in which 'formal organizations are losing their grip on individuals' and bounded groups give way to large-scale, fluid social networks (Bennett and Segerberg 2013: 28). The digital network plays a rather limited role in this process: a tool that enables it without really shaping it. In their narrative, the true motivating force behind these transformations lies elsewhere: since the late modern subject is too individualistic to be mobilized to collective action, the argument goes, connective action emerges as an

alternative. 8 The narrative of cost-reducing technological change is crudely stitched to (and subordinated to) the metanarrative of structural flexibilization and the individualization of identity. However, the key to the uniqueness of connective action lies not in its (metaphorically) network structure, but in the concrete network apparatus, which consists of the network infrastructure (the internet), SNS code, users, and social networks as objectified representations (maps of SNS contacts). This apparatus plays now a vital role in the production and coordination of wide-scale social action and, more generally, in shaping the relations that bind individuals into wider social formations. To understand connective action we must, then, be more attentive to its textures and dynamics and to the ways digital networks (their platforms and codes) construct the coordination of social action. We must ask: which technologies afford what types of sociopolitical coordination of action (that is, different ways to bind together individual actions in ways that affect the public sphere and struggles for power and justice within it), and how do digital network technologies differ from their predecessors in this respect? In the previous chapter we saw how the walled-in society was organized by certain technologies and is coming to an end through other technologies. Here I focus not on the capacity of different technologies to bound situations, but on their capacity to connect individual actions, enable mutual influence and aggregate them to have a wider effect. First, the network plays a constitutive role in the memetic distribution of political contents (including political framings of the situation, information on recent developments, jokes, symbols, memes, information on planned protest, documentation of past protest and actual network activism such as letter campaigns or orchestrated profile picture changes). Unlike broadcast, where distribution is decided by a few powerful gatekeepers, in SNSs anyone can distribute political messages in principle, but success is not guaranteed. The scope of distribution and its trajectories are a cumulative effect of multiple decisions taken by multiple actors, a system of double curation, two forms of gatekeeping (Nahon and Hemsley 2013) working in tandem: algorithmic curation which determines which users will be exposed to which contents; and crowd curation, the accumulative effect of user decisions as to which of the contents presented to them they should further distribute by liking or sharing them, and whether to edit, personalize or reframe them. These user decisions then inform future algorithmic curation in a

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cyclical process. 9 Algorithmic curation aspires to predict whether a user U will be interested in an object O while relying on the objectified representation of their social network - both on formal 'friendship' or 'following' ties and on maps of documented past interactions between U and other users, and between O and other users. The metaphorical networks of SNA thus turn into performative data objects that co-determine which messages, digital protest initiatives, news, claims, jokes or protest event invitations will reach which audiences. Furthermore, while the rise of connective action relies on the reduction in the costs of action, organization and recruitment and the ensuing lower dependence on organizations, importantly for us, this reduction only happens since the metaphorical network has been materialized, allowing social movements and individual activists to utilize objectified, egocentric networks of weak ties which are inscribed as data objects in SNSs, in order to disseminate their political messages and organize. Connective action moves on unpredictable paths (political initiatives and messages may become viral and travel long distances) since messages in SNSs spread through objectified networks of weak social ties, and their paths are co-determined by all responses of all users to all kinds of materials, political or otherwise. These paths are especially effective and unpredictable since usually these objectified social networks are not specifically designed for political communication: as a result of double curation, paths used to exchange photos of children or maintain professional ties can easily become channels of political messages and organization. This happens because, unlike offline interaction in modern society, which is often specialized and segmented into life-spheres and shared foci of interest, algorithmic curatorial decisions are often blind to these sociocultural boundaries, and make decisions based on quantitative, meaning-blind measures of geodesic distance and tie strength, that is, based on objectified networks. Importantly, double curation means that culture is just as important in connective action as it has been in collective action (despite the view that the connectivity thesis is anti-culturalist: Gerbaudo 2014; 2015). 10 The flow of political messages and emotions in connective action is contingent upon their cultural resonance with users, without which users will not further distribute them. Those user-curators also engage in revising messages, reframing movements and adapting them to future audiences in their networks, a decentralized cultural work which is highly consequential for connective action. What

binds individuals into connective action is not only the structures of materialized networks but also the actions and decisions of users who play with cultural meanings, as introducing materiality does not mean banishing humans from the story. This double curation system turns into a main mechanism for the allocation of attention in contemporary societies. Attention is a key resource for social movements, and digital participatory media liberate social movements from dependence on mass media gate keepers, opening new paths to acquiring attention thr ugh vira li ty, activist micro-celebrity (Tufekci 2013) and SNS algorithm that allocate the attention of users. The objectification of social networks is instrumental in this process: the double curation of SNSs may simultaneously focus the attention of multiple individuals on a single issue or claim, yet this multitude is not a durable 'collective' but a computational effect, constantly recalculated and remoulded by the algorithm based on the stream of constantly generated user content (not only political content: dancing kittens and global diseases compete for the same attention) and the reactions of users. Thus, connective (or pseudo-collective) associations constantly take and lose shape, just as political contents take and lose shape while undergoing 'personalization' (as digital contents can be easily copied and manipulated without investing much time or effort). Furthermore, each political message moves on a different trajectory and is hence shared with (and developed through creative mimesis by) a different set of users or 'calculated public' (Gillespie 20146). These sets are not collectives: they constantly shift through algorithmic recalculation, yet they rely on a contemporary mediated version of an old technique of collectivity. The interaction ritual is a technique producing solidarity and binding different people together by having them share a focus of attention and an emotional experience towards this focus of attention, while being aware of sharing this focus (Collins 2004: 48). However, in connective sociality this production of solidarity happens in a post-situational interaction (see chapter 2) constructed by the materialized network apparatus that determines which individuals may share which focus of attention. Indeed, as social movement scholars since McAdam (1986) have repeatedly shown, recruitment to social movements has always been influenced by the structure of (metaphorical) social networks; however, the objectified social network works differently. For

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example joining a Fae bo k gro up r likin g a m v m nr' page may in r -a e th ha nce C>f one' o-w rk r or di tant relativ b ing inf rmed that th movcm nr exists and that one ha join d it, ev ·a if one would not have c ns i u ly cho en t hare thi s informati n with th 'U1 (after all, p litics i. ften vi we I as a nsitiv topic to b a v ided) . Alg rirhmic c u ration thu s u es the use r 'social netw rk (a an objectified r presentation a da ta obj t) behind u er backs. A a res ult, th mobilized hum an a o ·iation i. an ffe t of th digital nerw rk (a a computati nal ap paratu that ombinc ode, network map , human act r , and th tbem). Hence, fl ibili ty and in ta bili ty ar nor imply cffe ts of a c ultural hift t wards ' liquid m d rnity'; they re ult from the mar rializarion f th ocial n rw rk and from the transition -rotn prot st by r ani za tions and co ll ective to protest by co nn ctiv · aggr ga tio.n . Ep chal c ha nge hould not be over rated: pre-digital twcnti ·th-century s ia l m vemcnt were not a lways rche trat d by fu ll y in. titutionalizcd rganizati os at lea t not in their arly cage . What i new i th matecializ. ti n f o ial n rw rk and the d vel pment of NS code that a llow individual t(> u the e t bjectified ocia l n twork f r recruitment to political initiative nd di tribution of p liti al m age a nd th r . ultcd r ·duction in organization o t and dece ntralization o onte ntiou p litics. nee SM s hav lost their privileged positi n, whi bother en ti ti e may repla ·~ them in coo rdin a tin g ci·1 I -~ tion ? Ln ome ases it is an online spac : a fo rum r a f'acehook pa 1 e r group u ed by activi ·ts co organiz a tion, ry tallize their idea , ac wm1l a re support a nd taple tog thcr i la t cl ::iction and tat menc of individual or ma ll group in diff rent pl:Jces into a ingle proje t. Pages a r n d in a igital ( oncret ) network of tie and the tr ngth f page oo ists in the numbe r and trength of th ir ti . . Wh erea olle riv• identiti es may cm P through intera ·ti 11 in th s nlioe pa e tb ir affordanc s a re not id ·a l for it. 'foJlowers' of th e page qua i-membcr , but this is not a formal rnemb r hip with rights and duties: ind - cl, th mea nin g of f llowing is vagu a mbivalent. This 1uasi-member hip i not binary either i_n term o f identi ty and b I nging or in t rms of xp ure to inf rmati o n: ach u. er is po ition d differently on a n a l ,orithmi ally a l ul ated membership onrinuum. o metim ( pc iall y during early stage of rganizing) th pag is rh only xi. t n o a politi a l initia tive,

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since its supporters do not know each other and are not included in a member register, so that the page's removal will completely cut the relationship between them. This gives SNS operators the power to easily dismantle networked associations, a point I discuss in the next chapter. In other cases, networked associations do not even have a shared page, forum or group (where there is still a thin form of membership) but only a hashtag that staples the actions of diverse individuals into a single project or movement (such as the MeToo protest against sexual harassment and assault). Hashtag activism is a prime example of connective action. The hashtag creates a shared space that brings ~og~t?er individual acts and gives them visibility. It encourages 1~d1~1duals to create personalized versions of common messages and d1stnbute them across their network through the very same memetic dynamics described above. Hashtags also make it easier for outsiders such as journalists to locate all micro participations, cover them and count them to estimate their power. Thus, hashtags help not only coordinate multiple claims and actions but also symbolically construct them as a single movement. This power is also measured algorithmically, and this measuring performatively changes what it °:1~asures: Twitter highlights trending hashtags, thus helping alreadyns1?~ hashtags to gain further momentum. In several cases hashtag act1v1sm h~s shaped the public agenda, given voice to silenced experiences of disadvantaged groups and brought about social change. In hashtag activism initiatives such as MeToo the collective of protesters was constructed exclusively digitally, as the hashtag created a virtual shared space of story-telling and protest. Such spaces can also be occupied by rivals, as white supremacist activists found out in June 2020, when K-pop fans added the #whitelivesmatter hashtag to countless unrelated tweets, thus thwarting white supremacists' political communication and coordination, preventing them from finding one another's messages. Yet, connective as hashtag activism may be, its most successful examples - #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter - spoke on behalf of established collectives that existed well before the hashtag, namely women and African Americans. This is an important lesson: the rise of the connective does not simply erase the collective, and my argument should not be misinterpreted as saying otherwise. Collective identifications did not disappear and are very unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future. But even in those cases when protest takes place

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on behalf of deep-rooted, well-established collective categories (such as national, ethno-racial or gender categories) , those participating in the protest are less likely to con titute a bounded grou 1 ; at least at tb orga nizati nal level, b unded co llectives partly give way to ever-chang ing, fluctu ating, c nnective mp lltationaJ aggregations of networked users, which are based on the materialized representations of their social networks. Ignoring the differences between metaphorical and digital networks and between the distinct roles they play in social movements has led researchers to miss or understate differences between digital dynamics and their predecessors. Thus Tony Sampson (2012) claimed that SNSs did not change the role of social networks, since social movements have always relied on 'networks' for recruitment and viral contagion of political ideas and emotions through Tardian imitation and adaptation; and that digital social networks only 'amplify', 'speed up' and 'intensify' this dynamics (pp. 125-6, 163-4 ). Castells (2012) similarly claimed that networked social movements engage in 'collective action', the dynamics of which is not fundamentally different fr om pre-digita l socia l movements: spreading emotions of rage and hope, poli tica ll y organizing around them, and building solidarity. Again, the digital network is claimed to only accelerate and streamline these dynamics. Castells gives material digital networks only a single and simple role in the plot: promoting networked organization as a late modern form of social organization, that is, bringing about the metaphorical network. Contrariwise, the above analysis views social movements in the digital era as a study case for a wider onnecrive logic in which what binds the actions of individuals into something bigger is neither stable institutionalized organizations with binary membership, nor bounded collectives sharing collective identities, but digital social networks (consisting of human and non-human, material and cultural com ponents) that co rdinate action, tra nsfer infor mation, a nd bind individuaJ peo ple and a rions into om putati oal aggrega ti ons. T h ·e netw rks are formed after maps crea ted by NA res arche rs but th y inherently differ from them in being performative, not only depicting social realities that preceded them but producing new pattern · of social organization. Protest seems to be no longer mainJy the story of immersion of individuals in a crowd that shares a long-rime collective identity and goals stabilized by orga ni zations, but rather the story of n tworked nodes transmitting and transforming messages to produce

sudden eruptions of polyphonic protest shaped by the materialization of networks. These new patterns of association do not obliterate their predecessors, but they gain increasing influence, even in spheres that appear to fall clearly within the realm of the collective, such as collective action. Neither do they obliterate culture: as the next section demonstrates, culture is not necessarily a collective phenomenon; the production and negotiation of culture too may take place at the connective level.

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Connective memory

The second domain in which sociologists identified a shift from the collective to the 'connective' is memory (Hoskins 2018) . While action and meaning are always intertwined, the case of memory shifts our focus from connective action per se to the level of connective consciousness. Much of our memory (that is, our encounters and engagement with the past and its representations) is now mediated by digital networks (by SNSs, databases, search engines and the like). People increasingly turn to the internet to recall or find out what happened in the (historical or personal, distant or recent) past, reminisce, recollect or commemorate. We use Google to find historical facts or learn about historic events (often overwhelmed by the richness of accounts, photos and first-person witnesses); look at WhatsApp logs to decide who's right in an argument or what our conversations with our partners looked like when we had just met; visit memorialized Facebook profiles of deceased friends to read the posts they uploaded when they were alive and exchange stories about their lives with other mourners; search our email to find when we first contacted a colleague; search networked photo albums of multiple friends to find who participated in a party two years ago and what they wore; or surprisingly recall a past experience when Facebook's algorithm reminds us it happened exactly four years ago. However, when memory scholars address the influences of digital technologies and network platforms on how we engage with our pasts, they face a challenge: some new memory practices do not easily fit into the binary categories organizing their field, such as the distinction between collective and personal memory. Since its dawn, sociology has studied memory (and collective memory in particular) as a key mechanism that helps shape collective consciousness and a sense of collective belonging and thus informs

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the identity and action of individuals. To this end sociologists have rejected the na"ive view of memory as a mere biological faculty of individuals, and focused instead on the sociocultural dimensions of our relations with our (always constructed and imagined) pasts, including both memory contents (traces and representations of the past, which have never been a mechanical reflection of reality but have always been shaped by filtering, narration, construction, imagination and reinterpretation) and mnemonic practices and technologies (the ways in which people engage with these representations or traces of the past}. A key distinction in the broad memory scholarship is the one between 'individual' (or 'personal') memory and 'collective' memory. To be sure, personal memory has a clear sociocultural dimension rendering it a legitimate subject for sociological inquiry; however, collective memory represents a distinct level of analysis; it is not a mere aggregation of personal memories (or 'collected memories': Olick 1999). This distinction harks back to Durkheim's view of human nature as double (homo duplex), individual and social. Durkheim famously stressed that collective phenomena are not aggregations of individual ones: society is not an aggregation of individuals, and collective consciousness is not the average of individual consciousnesses but their shared dimension originated in society. This attitude was borrowed into the sociology of memory by the founder of this subdiscipline, Maurice Halbwachs (e.g. 1992: 40), and still prevails; as Zerubavel (2003: 4) put it, collective memory is not 'a mere aggregate of the personal recollections of its various members'. In principle, the collective memory of a group may even contradict the individual memories of most group members (Sutton 2008). Collectives are 'mnemonic communities' that share both representations of the past and mnemonic practices (such as rituals) that summon the past in the present (Halbwachs 1992; Olick 1999). While collective memory is often assumed to lie within the consciousness of individuals, it is studied mainly in its more accessible manifestations in 'public culture' (Lizardo 2017), that is, in widely diffused cultural texts (Bourdon 2011) and publicly circulating signs (French 2012). This is possible because collective memory (and memory in general) does not exist only within people's heads; it has a material existence outside them in memory sites, mnemonic objects (or representations of the past} and mnemonic techniques for using mnemonic objects. Put simply: memory is mediated (Hume

2010; van Dijck 2007; Zelizer 1995). Indeed, all forms of memory may be viewed as mediated, as they are not merely cognitive faculties of individuals but distributed 'across neural, bodily, social, material and institutional resources' (Sutton 2008: 36), the effect of cultural mnemonic practices involving other humans and non-humans. This has been a strong argument why 'collective memory' exists: technologies of memory are not individual but collective phenomena (Olick 1999). Most crucially for us, a major mediation for collective memory as we know it has been mass media, so much so that collective memory and mass broadcast media are claimed to have been 'symbiotic' (Hoskins 2018), resulting from the co-evolution of memory and technology (Hoskins 2011). The mass media - news reports, alongside history textbooks, period films and so forth have played a constitutive role in the rise of modern collectivity and national consciousness (Anderson 2006[1983]), and in the construction, mediation and representation of collective pasts. The media documented events to draw a first draft of history and then kept editing and processing it while bringing it to wide audiences, serving as a 'vessel for shared recollections' (Neiger et al. 2011: 13). Television has also shaped the shared experience of historical events in real time by mediating them as 'media events' (Hoskins 2011). Members of modern collectives have shared not only technologies of memory, but also memory content, mediated representations of the past and its meaning. Through mass media, individuals have acquired public culture. This should not be misinterpreted as claiming that mere exposure to media necessarily results in 'internalization' and homogenization: different subjects relate differently to the same memory texts, yet exposure does result in familiarity with and relating to the same set of public culture. Shared familiarity with public culture does not constitute collectivity in itself (this requires a cultural process of social construction) but it is widely believed to contribute to this process. According to this narrative, nationalism, mass media and collective memory co-evolved as components of the same modern social order. But if collectivity as we know it is a modern phenomenon, maybe the binary of the individual and the collective is similarly not universal, and other levels may exist in societies shaped by other 'social, material and institutional resources'. The period from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth (the 'first' modernity, as opposed to our 'liquid' (Bauman 2000) or 'reflexive' (Beck et al. 1994) modernity) is often described as the age

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of the masses: powerful institutions, most importantly the nation state and its official textbooks, calendar, rituals and mass media, contributed grea tly co the cu ltivation and distribution f a shared (ofteo national) cu lture and memory. Th y offered both a shared set of memory objects and a bared repen ire of practice regLtlating the engagement with the e memories and tbe attitude toward them. The mem ry environment of the fir t modern ity consi ced of publi c ll ctiv· memory (which was symbi tic with mass media) alon gs ide private memory (of famili nd individuals) based on priv t media u h a the dia1·y and the photo album. Bur if indeed memory is a lways m diated and hap d by m ·dia if indeed different form of ial rganizati n dep nd on different technologies of memo ry (OLick 1999: 343), then memory must have been influenced by th dramatic changes media have recently und rgonc, parti ul a rly t he rise of s cia l media, where hyper-connectivity all w. the many to engage in shaping representations of the past whicb are likely to transcend he private realm. The ases of digitalJy mediated memory that opened this ·ubsecti n are not collecti ve: ther is no stable, bounded collective whose members are familiar with the same set of representations. Thi memory is rather personalized: ev ry individual has access to a different et of repre entations of th past, algor ithmically calculated ba eel on their n tworl- position. In the cases of SNSs, this set is calculated based on the materialized representation of users' n rworks their maps of ties as material data bjects . But neither is it p r anal memory, as it ranscends the individua l: it i not bounded within the private sph r , a nd i n t created or co ntrolled exclusively by che indj vidua l. In t a I, individua l re ollect and recon eruct the past by relying on repr entati n 0£ the past produ ed by a heterog ne u et 0£ actors human and non-hum an alike. Online they find an clectic aggregat i n of tra.ces of the past and perspectives on the past reated by themselves and by multiple alters, both individu als (from lose relativ to c mplete trang r ) and orga11.i2.ational men1ory agents (such as news organization o r commemoration i.n.itiative ). ch memory object in this mosaic is presnt set of indi vidua l , based n their nerworl positi n and on algocithmic curntion as our engageme nt with the past al o r lies on th srrucrnre of databases and the cod of algorithm chat earch a nd order 111 mory objects and objectified traces of the past (inceracti n -curned-obj t ). lad d , it i th

capacity of digital data to be quickly and easily searched through search queries that turned both the internet and local databases (such as hard drives) into popular archives of the past, which are constantly changing and always accessible to serve the emerging needs of the present. While some online memory objects were created in order to document the past, others are mere by-products of present-oriented communication, traces of the past resulting from the objectification of interaction discussed in chapter 2. The latter further challenge the distinction between the private and public spheres and between collective and personal memory, as personal impressions, recollections or traces of the past are disseminated as memory objects across networks and transformed into quasi-public memory (Reading 2009). Present interactions constantly pile up in digital archives, where (unlike traditional archives) the locus of memory is not isolated from social life (and the dynamics of connections in the present: Hoskins 2011): representations of the past produced by multiple networked individuals become increasingly available (Hoskins 2009). Like the social movements portrayed above, the resulting memory is highly contingent and under constant change: representations of the past presented to any individual change depending on the individual's network position, the algorithm code and the search query, and also transform as new traces and representations of the past are constantly added to the network. 11 While this memory is not shared as a whole, each of its components is shared with a different (and changing) set of individuals. Online representations of the past can be made accessible to a huge number of individuals, yet this does riot result in producing a bounded group that shares public culture, since different representations are shared with different (and constantly changing) sets of individuals.

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Central conflation

As a result, the modernist world of two distinct apparent levels of memory, which reflected the private/public separation of the walled-in society, has undergone a central conflation. On the one hand, personal biographical memory conflates upwards: no longer private, it is increasingly networked and co-authored. We now recall personal events in our past through their online representations (photos, videos and texts), of which many were produced or

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distributed by multi_ple alters, and ni a □ y others were produced by the ego in order to be shaced with alters on N s or fM. T he oth rdirected blog o r . N po t has replaced the secret diary. Al thes data bject ar ac ornpan ied by the mediated r actions of mu ltiple others they ev ked t bnt is the objectified Lnteractions initiated by their online di tributio □--. For exampl , th memory of one's grad uation includes now the comments of Facebook friends on the graduation photos, w hile the objectified memory trace of a _roma ntic break -up may includ the first objectified r:Nl reactions ,f relatives and I friends. Even artefacts created by ompl te strangers can join persona I mem ry: once, upon returning from a hoUd::iy ::ind r alizing 1 hadn't ph ro raphed the beautiful al{ in a lamander in the rain, I only needed a one-minute s arch to find photos of rhe same an, 1 hibians in the very same weather and landscape, taken by other travellers, and to add them to my personal folder for future recollection and to share my experiences with others. When so many personal memories are networked and searchable online, personal memory is no longer private: it comes out of the shoebox into the network (MacDonald et al. 2015). This upwards conflation is evident not only in conscious recollection or searches for information, but also in unintentional encounters with rei resentations of the past su mmon ed by a lgorithm (S hwarz 2014} . or example, Fa ebook syst maticaJly tries to introduce new memory pra cices by en.gagi ng u r ' witb algorith mically lected traces of their pa t, sendin users mes ages such as 'yo u posted this photo exactly years ago. We thought that y u'd Like to I ok ba k n it today (w hile suggestin g u · r reshare the a lgorithmically selected photo and their feelings towards it today), or sending them alg rithmically produced nostal ic s]jde how videos su h as 'year in rev iew' or ph to with a ce1·rain Face book fri end inviting them to eel -brace' the anniver ary of their on.line frie ndship. Users often cooperar and po t the e memoric t s har t hem with oth ; but even when they don't, th y are compell d to engage w ith v nt and people trom th ir pa t . H re again, personal memory tran n d the bol1ndaries f the privat phere. Lmportan cly, thi a lgorithmica lly g nerated r ollecti □ i shaped by th ma terialized n~tw rk: it_ is ba ed on these maps of ties an d intera ti o n that a lgo rithm d 1de whi h friendship, or photo hould be the objects of al orithmi.ca lly generated recollection (that is, which digitally aroused recollections would elicit users' attention and engagement).

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On the other hand, collective memory confiates downwards. Even the memory of big historical events is not shaped exclusively by authoritative memory agents who produce shared collective representations; it also consists of a swarm of networked representations and traces authored by heterogeneous actors and co-curated by algorithms and human users who decide which information to distribute and highlight. Historical events too are commemorated together with the ways ordinary people reacted to them in objectified interactions: we have retrospective access not only to the media events themselves (the joint spectatorship of which has constituted collectives in the first modernity) but also to the multitude of reactions to them and the objectified interactions around them. As a result, memory agents strive not only to shape collective memory but also to influence this online connective memory by fostering participatory memory work, aggregating multiple contributions into a mosaic of representations of a past event such as the police shooting of Michael Brown at Ferguson (Smit et al. 2018). Even bots that disseminate fake news participate in the co-creation of connective memory. At this intermediate level, memory is not bounded, either within the individual or within the boundaries of the collective (as different individuals from different nationalities, for example, may well share some of their networked memory objects and engage with them through shared practices). Personal and collective memory do not disappear, just as mass media are not going away or becoming insignificant, but they are being remediated and networked; central conflation turns both levels into connective memory. The term 'connective memory' was developed by sociologist Andrew Hoskins (e.g. Brown and Hoskins 2010; Hoskins 2009; 2018) to characterize digital memory that transcends the Durkheimian binary. Hoskins (2018) characterized it as a memory of the multitude. The multitude, unlike the masses or the people, is a plural and multiple form of organization that connects diverse nodes without unifying them or erasing their diversity and differences: nodes are unified through connections rather than through a shared identity (Hardt and Negri 2004 ). Connective memory does not erase the singular memory of individuals, as its shared dimension is not the unity of a collective but the hyper-connectivity of a network (Hoskins 2018). It is organized not around collective linear narratives but around databases (Hoskins 2018), which present a different view of the past with every search query.

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Rather than a top-down collective culture, the connective consists of an aggregation of multiple personal perspectives on the whole (Latour et al. 2012), woven together by the double curation of users and algorithms that decide which representations shall be made accessible or highlighted (and to whom) and which ones will be forgotten. The resulting memory is thus a connective achievement of the network, but this is neither the social network as a metaphor of offiine ties, nor the metaphorical network society. The nodes join to form a whole through the internet (a material network), the materialized representations of egocentric social networks, and algorithms governing network flows based on these materialized social networks. Connective memory thus relies on the same mechanisms as connective action, shares the same dynamics and produces similar forms of human association. However, unlike activists engaging in connective action, algorithmically calculated associations that share connective memories often remain 'without communitization' (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 213-18), that is, without their members being aware of belonging to these associations or feeling affective affinity. The connective memory thesis may be criticized for overstating the role of technology and understating continuity. Institutions such as mass media and the state, which have been major agents of collective memory, still play a crucial role in producing public culture. More importantly, the collective in 'collective memory' is not necessarily the concrete memory objects themselves, but rather the meanings given to them. Even if different algorithmically calculated sets of people have access to different objectified traces, representations and interpretations of the past, all these may still rely on (or be given meaning using) a shared collective set of cultural frames and metanarratives, both because institutions such as mass media and the state participate in interpreting some ('big') events; and because socialized individuals are familiar with collective cultural repertoires and apply them themselves. For this and many other reasons, the network did not eradicate collectivity and collective solidarity. Yet it would be completely false to ignore the diversity of concrete perspe tive on and representations of the past and view them all as interchangea ble. The connective memory thesis makes a real contribution to our understanding of memory today. It reveals how the materialization of social networks has transformed memory, as the way we engage with the past can no longer be subsumed under the dichotomy of the

individual versus the collective. The private sphere and collectivity may both be criticized as idealizations or myths, but this binary way of imagining society reflected (and buttressed) a certain institutional reality and a certain media ecology. The case of memory is especially important, since representations of the past play a crucial role in the construction of human associations. Sharing public representations of the past helps people experience themselves as belonging to the same collective. As shown above, the central conflation of memory derived from the same dynamics as recent transformations in contentious politics. This may indicate that the notion of the connective may be further generalized and account for 'extensive shifts in the very nature of the ways in which groups and "the social" are formed, encountered, and selfidentified' (Hoskins 2011: 278), the constitution of the social itself, beyond these two specific domains.

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Two technologies of the social In chapter 2 we saw how the meaning of interaction transforms when interactions turn into durable data objects. Chapter 3 has offered a parallel move, showing how the meaning of 'network' changes once networks as representations of the social world turn into data objects that operate within the social world. For several decades, sociologists have imagined society through the network metaphor, as edges (ties) between nodes (people). However, today social relations are digitally mediated to a high degree, and this mediation is governed by complex, multivariate and opaque algorithmic formulas applied to materialized, encoded representations of our metaphorical social networks. As a result, the network can no longer be imagined as merely human: social relations cannot be separated from the codes that organize and mediate them and govern them based on their representations. Moreover, the network turns from a metaphorical to a concrete one, and sociograms used by researchers to characterize and analyse social relations have begun to shape these relations, as they serve as a basis for algorithmic decision-making that mediates social life. We can no longer imagine social structure as a network of unmediated interactions, as surface networks of interactions are informed by hidden, objectified representational networks of coded sociograms. 12

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The network as a data object underlies the algorithmic decisionmaking that shapes information flows, consciousness and action, and which binds individuals and their actions to form wider associations. As a result, new forms of consciousness and action emerge, a the ca e of m mory and socia l movements demonstrate. The e form involve multipl individu a l who together ta ke part in political activity or in the production f cu ltural representation , and yet do not form a collccdve, at least n t in th sen e we u d to use this word. Following Hoskins, Bennett and Segerberg, I have called these forms of social association 'connective'. In the connective world there is a quasi-collectivity: different people work together to change the w rid, or together shape repr ntations of the pa t. However, the q uasi -coll ctives thus created are tenta tive precarious and not mon o lithic (a · different data object ar bar d by diHerent sets of individuals), since they rely on dynamic computational aggregation . hey are shaped by the flow of inf rmation and i.ntera tioos in tbe networl qua infrastructure, flows tba.t in turn are hapecl by network qua data o l jects (maps of con nections), but r different fr m that d ne by offline administrative mechanisms' (p. 4). Algorithms 're-mediate the re rd-k ping functi,on and standardizati n of bureaucratic mechanisms'; like bureaucracie before them, tl,ey are deployed to limit 'th · subjectivity of decision -making system '(p. 3), nd gain ground not thank ' to being more just and efficient but by giving legitimati n an l as a result of i omrn:phi pressur s. For aplan and boyd algorithms may be less tr:ansparent • nd hence hard .r to under tand and criticiz•tban traditional bureaucracies, but have no ltnique .lo Tic of their own. 1.1 AJ:c algorithmic a semb lage just another Link in a I ng cha.i1,1 of sociote hnical a semblag s thar have tried to ubject action and decision- making t pr: dural sy temizati n (Gillespie 2014a) or make it appear more systematic (Cap lan and boyd 2018)? ls there really nothing special about them? I wish to claim that algorithmic power moves in two opposite directions vis-a-vis Weber's ideal-type of bureaucracy: in terms of the relation between abstract rules and concrete reality, algorithmic p wer gers as lose a ever to the Weberian mod 1 yet fr m the p r pe tive of the relation between power and ca tegorization i.r mov s away from it. Fourcad and Healy (2017) identified t.llat, just like bureaucratic organi zation , a lgo.r itbmic sy tems sor peop le in order to decide how to treat them, but that unlike such organizations, digital sy tern , r pre ent individuals not through their group membership or p sition in a statistical di tribution but through precis set of individuaJ di ital re orcls; what i new is the capacity to u e aggregate ana lyses and inruvidualized records simultaneously.

In other words: algorithmic power works at the connective level (see chapter 3). Bureaucracy sorted people into nominal categories and gave similar cases (those falling within the same category) equal treatment. By doing so, it treated individuals first and foremost as group members. Contrariwise, algorithms can (and often do) treat individuals as unique and give them unique personalized treatment determined not by their group membership but rather by weighting multiple variables, including cardinal variables. This has significant implications for equality. For Weber, bureaucracy (at least in its ideal form) erases status differences: not making decisions case by case results in equality before the law and the levelling of the governed that he called 'passive democratization' (1978: 983-6). One might think that since computer systems always follow rules (algorithms), they too give similar cases the same treatment, which is true. The thing is that when individuals are represented by their full individual records (that is, by everything they have said or done before, in digitally mediated platforms or outside them, that was captured by digital surveillance), no two cases seem to be 'similar' any more. The group or category narrows significantly, in some cases to the single individual, meaning that no two users get the same search results, recommendations or advertisements. Even if two individuals are eventually treated equally, they are not necessarily 'similar' cases as they may not share any single characteristic. Whereas the unique treatment digital systems give each case derives in principle from (almost) uniform and consistent rules, the application of these complex sets of rules results in individuation (or 'singularization' (Reckwitz 2020), as every individual is represented differently by her singular data traces and hence governed differently), the very opposite of the massification produced by bureaucratic rules: being subject to equal rules no longer

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makes you anybody's equal. 16 This is a fundamental change in the relation between power and categorization: legal and bureaucratic power have acted on collectives by classifying individuals and cases into categories that were imagined as homogeneous. Algorithmic power acts on individuals that are perceived as unique for their personalized, algorithmically calculated, predicted risks and chances. This move echoes the shift away from groupism (Brubaker 2004) in the sociological conceptualization of cultural difference. When individuals are no longer

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perceived as generic group members, they are not known and governed as such. A unique individual can be known by weighting all records about the individual and her documented relations with other human individuals and objects, that is, her position in the materialized network (see chapter 3 ). The transition from bureaucracy to algorithms involves, then, an epistemological rupture, a shift from knowledge (and governance) of aggregations, based on stable classification systems, towards knowledge (and governance) of unique individuals with dynamic personal profiles (including risk profiles), based on constant surveillance and translation of their everyday activity into data objects. This is evident, for example, in insurance. Actuarial logic sought to address uncertainty at the individual level by finding regularity and predictability at the collective level (Barry and Charpentier 2020): while it is impossible to predict which individual will have an accident, it is statistically possible to predict the number of accidents per 1,000 male drivers aged 18-23 (which is higher than the rate for 1,000 female drivers aged 40-9) and calculate a suitable premium for each group. The bureaucratic solution of the insurance industry was risk classification: classifying customers into groups constructed as homogeneous, and treating all group members equally. Obviously, discrimination based on group membership (especially on ascribed group membership) violates core principles of liberal morality (e.g. punishing drivers who may personally be much more cautious than their group average), and hence many countries banned some forms of statistical discrimination based on race, genetics or gender.17 Algorithmic predictive analytics estimate the risk of individuals, not of aggregations: telematics data allow insurers to estimate the chance an individual driver will have an accident, a dynamic, personalized risk profile based on constantly accumulated data on the driver's driving style (speed, acceleration, lane switch), mileage, time of driving and type of road (Barry and Charpentier 2020). 18 Furthermore, big data analytics may use just any variable to improve prediction, even in the absence of a causal model. For example, each product purchased may help predict one's credit risk (Duhigg 2009). As a result, customers are no longer classified into tables (such as the old actuary tables classifying drivers based on age, sex and engine capacity), as no two customers have purchased exactly the same products. Big data analysis is used to discriminate between customers (through personalizing temptation, suspicion, risk and treatment)

and citizens (digital risk scores may influence how a suspect is treated during arrest, whether police open fire, and in non-democratic regimes even whether a person is held in pre-emptive detention). And yet, unlike past forms of statistical discrimination, this is not exactly collective punishment or discrimination: these algorithmic systems discriminate between people but not exactly between groups, as discrimination is usually based on behavioural characteristics of individuals. Indeed, in some cases individuals are eventually grouped into nominal categories: after all, corporations analyse buying patterns to predict binary future commercial opportunities and risks (such as 'pregnancy' and 'divorce': Ayres 2007: 34) while countries want to identify 'potential terrorists', or 'citizens' who have constitutional protection from surveillance. 19 But unlike the insurers' 40-9-year-old women category, people classified as 'future terrorists', 'prone to recidivism', 'pregnant women' or 'foodies' do not necessarily share any characteristic prior to being classified. These are not groups but rather derivatives (Arvidsson 2016), as the calculated probability of belonging to each of these groups may rely on thousands of different variables and heterogeneous pieces of data (even if the categories are retrospectively given labels as if they were groups based on sociological or psychological criteria: Kotliar 2020a). As a result, algorithmic discrimination is less likely to produce collective resistance. Algorithmic power and ideal-typical bureaucracy both stick to the rules, but these are different rules that produce very different social impacts. Bureaucracy promotes rationalization by categorizing people into groups and governing them as group members, whereas algorithmic predictive analytics, being a connective phenomenon, promotes rationalization by dismantling collectives and collectivelevel equality, and thus poses a significant challenge to resistance.

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Secret rules Algorithmic power diverges from the Weberian model also in the secrecy of its rules. For Weber, the public, calculable, regulative rules of liberal states and bureaucracies introduce a calculability of results (Weber 1978: 975), making the social world more legible and promoting the rationalization of the governed. When power operates through algorithms, individuals cannot calculate results despite being

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governed by rational, consistent rules, since these rules are hidden (and often too complicated to understand anyway). Machine learning may render rules almost indecipherable, as it produces algorithmic rules not set by humans, but induced automatically from a huge number of actual cases; these rules may consist of thousands or millions of variables (or worse, deep-learning parameters and weights with no obvious real-world references), and keep changing based on the constant flow of data (as lifelong learning systems may analyse cases in which their predictions failed in order to improve their models). Regulation protecting the 'right to explanation' has limited power to change this. 20 Unexplained algorithmic decisions leave people helpless in the face of denied credit or loan transactions, doors refusing to open, blocked IM accounts preventing them from doing their job or communicating with friends, or arrests due to automated suspicion, an opacity that calls to mind Little Britain's 'computer says no' catchphrase. Whereas algorithmic systems epitomize some components of the rule of law, such as consistency, they trample on others, such as 'reasoned elaboration' (Pasquale 2018), the requirement that judges should provide reasons for their decisions in any particular case. When rules are unintelligible, those governed by them are denied agency to improve their position or even effectively criticize power (Rona-Tas 2020). What deserves our attention is the common assumption that generative rules must be kept secret to remain effective, since otherwise they will be manipulated and fail to achieve their goals. This is noteworthy, since it is contrary to the common belief about regulative rules, namely that they are most effective when known to all. A long liberal tradition starting with John Locke claimed that the hallmark of legitimate law (contrary to despotic power) is that it is 'standing' and 'promulgated' (Locke 2003: 160). Algorithmic power relies on rules that are often secret, extremely complicated and constantly changing (in some cases automatically, using machine learning). Weber believed that rationalization relies on the calculability of results (1978: 975), but nowadays the rational action of users is often viewed as a threat to the rational projects behind algorithmic sy terns. It may be cl ear w by digital firms vi w it thi way: tran pare ncy helps finding detour that vio late the spirit of ru les but nor their letter. More intere ting, however, is how o m the people subjected to these rules accept their secrecy as legitimate after 300 years of liberalism? 21 A possible answer is that their physis-like

nature makes it easier to accept their secrecy: they do not consist of word that anyboc.ly an under tand but rather of comp uter code an d (unuke r gulacive rules) th y can be eff ctive without neces ari ly shapin reality, puni bing an I b ing rep resented in consciou ne preventing pos ibiJit ie of a tion bu also opening po, ibilirie of a ·tio n. W do not have to u_nd r tand mete rology to be infl uence I by the rain; and just as many of us do not understand the p ra ion of our cars and refrigerators, we do not feel the urge to und rsta nd the algorithms that rule our lives. 22 This use of secret rules gradually extends to the state, with American judges increasingly relying on proprietary paq ue algorithm ic mod ls pred i ting recid ivi m in bai l parole and eve n sentenci ng deci ions ( a rlson 20 L7; s me of th pr gra m hav I en accused of racia l bias: Angwin et al. 20 16). Havi ng id ntified the fun damenta l iffe_ren e berween a lgo rithms and (actual or ideal) bureaucrats helps us understand the uniqueness of algorithmic power as a modality of power. It is time now to see how this new modality challenges fundamental theoretical assumptions about power in general.

Power as potential or actual Does power exist before it is exercised? This question is among the most fund amental and most disputed in the sociological theory of power. Is power potential or actual? For Weber, power is a probabili ti p tentiality: in many social re lati onships . ome actors have a higher pro bability of carrying out thei r own will despite the resistance of some other actors t han the other way around. Weber (1978) famously defined power as this differential probability, an inequality which positively exists as an abstract potentiality even before a contested will has emerged and regardless of its content. 'imilarly, in on relati ns hip severnl actors have Iii her chan es of inA uencing the conduct of ce rta in o ther than the cher way aro und . T hi view of powe r and domin at io n a abstra t apaci ties is in line with our everyday notion of power, and was elaborated by later theorists such as Bourdieu and Lukes. By ascribing power a relatively stable continuous existence in time, even when it is not exercised, they have alJ owed power to explain ocia l repr d u tioo and ontinuity. Bourdieu' view o power in terms of capi ta l clearly b long to this p wer-a -p te ntia lity trad ition w hich abstracts power fro m

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its concrete qualities, hence tending to reduce it to a quantity (Allen 2003). This view of power as potentiality has encountered strong criticism. Does power exist even when unrealized? How can we know it? Is the exercise of power (in reality} nothing but a trivial realization of pre-existing power relations (as a potentiality}? Is power truly so abstract that it has nothing to do with the content of the will that an actor wishes to carry out or with the situation? Many disagreed. Foucault (1982: 788) contended that 'power exists only when it is put into action'; Allen (2003} claimed that power is not a 'capacity-in-waiting'; making an analytical distinction between potential 'resources' (the medium of power} and actual 'power' (the relational effects of the successful mobilization of resources in interaction}, he claimed that only in retrospect, once resources have been successfully mobilized, can power be falsely ascribed to and confused with resources (while leaving mobilization out of our sociological accounts). Hindess (1996: 15) insisted that the distribution of power among competing parties does not predetermine the outcome of all conflicts. This position was shared by Latour and many others. While the probabilistic concept of power has clear merits, having helped sociologists explain reality, its ontological status remained dubious: for Latour (2005) it does not qualify as a valid explanation but rather as what must be explained. Algorithms complicate the debate by challenging the very distinction between potentiality and actuality. They seem to close the gap between them, the 'distance' (Allen 2003} power must traverse to be realized, since an algorithm is by definition a generative rule, that is, a potential that automatically generates an infinity of actuals. Does closing the gap between potentiality and actuality solve the problem with power-as-potentiality? The ANT easy answer is 'no'. Algorithms in the narrow sense of the word ('sequences of if-then rules') do not act or have effects in their own rights: power should not be attributed to algorithms but rather to 'associations', heterogeneous sets of interrelated things and humans. Technically, this is true. Daniel Neyland and Norma Mollers (2017) studied the development of an airport algorithmic system for the detection of abandoned luggage and showed how it failed to fully realize the intention of engineers, since its operation and impact were shaped not only by abstract if-then rules but also by camera vibrations, reflective tiles and shadows. Input data (from cameras,

the Global Positioning System (GPS}, sensors and databases} taken to represent reality play a crucial role in the operation of algorithmic yst m . However, as illespie (2014a} noted, in the social sciences 'a lgorithm' i used in a much wider sense than among software engineers, as a sy ne doch or abbreviation for a 'sociotechnical assemhlage rh at in ludes algo rithm, model, target goal, data, training data, application, hardware - and connect it all to a broader social endeavor', a general name for systems engaging in the computational generation of knowledge and decision . Incle d, the her rag neity of digital systems is why their action a nd so ia I effect arc often surprising and unpredictable to the engin er th at buil t th em. Surely, they often fail (partly or completely} to produce the planned effect. Even successful detection systems have false positives and false negatives. We may safely say, then, that the power of engineers is not unlimited. But is this all we can say? Neyland and Mailers presented a distorted picture since (like typical ANT scholars} they focused on the development stage in which associations are being tied, before the network stabilizes. Once the system is set up and the main development challenges (e.g. translating the presence and location of people and luggage into relatively reliable digital representations} are solved, network operators may easily change the algorithmic rules (e.g. reduce the time elapsing before unsupervised luggage triggers an alarm, or the distance from owners at which luggage is considered un upervised}, automatically having an impact in the world in an unlimited number of instantiations. 23 Likewise, Sina Weibo may decide (on its own initiative or following government orders} that whoever writes 'Winnie the Pooh' will not only have their message censored, but also be unable to send text messages, post their photos to Weibo Instant Photo Singles groups, or make payments through the application, for a predetermined period of time. Indeed, these generative rules may fail to achieve the desired social goals: the system may punish parents choosing gifts for their children, while skipping those who misspelled their subversive political comments. And yet, mistaken as it may be, these rules will generate multiple actuals while influencing the conduct of multiple others and the course of events in an infinite number of cases. It is hard to disagree that whoever controls Weibo's system has power; that they have power also between instantiations, in moments in which nobody writes 'Pooh', and even before they have set these

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rules. They have power, not because other people are disposed to do as they tell them, as in Weber's probabilistic model, but because rules are surely to be realized. Indeed, algorithmic rules may provoke strong public opposition, the very opposite effect of the one intended (as algorithmic systems do not control the world but work within it in complex relations with multiple humans and non-humans); and still, it is hard to claim that the power to prevent a person from saying something or acting in a particular way is anything else but ... power. Old debates die hard, and those who wish may keep debating them. The 'actualist' camp may claim that the distinction between design and standard operation cannot be upheld in online machine learning systems that constantly revise their rules; and more generally that, from a purely theoretical perspective, the fact that a system has had a consistent, predictable effect so far does not prove that its effect will remain predictable in the future, since each application of the rule ties to the network new actants that may transform it. 'Potentialists' would retort that such an analysis sacrifices our very ability to explain reality and criticize power relations on the altar of logic. This familiar debate is as predictable as the operation of an algorithm. And yet, something did change. When influence over the conduct of others is dependent on and mediated by their consciousness, it is very difficult to causally attribute the conduct of others to external influence. At best, it may be conceptualized, following Weber, in probabilistic terms, yet, the potential 'probability' of following someone's commands or the 'disposition' to obey someone cannot be empirically observed. Only their actual manifestations in concrete decisions can be observed. Probability only emerges in retrospect, when bringing together decisions made in different cases and times post factum and comparing them with counterfactuals. As long as power qua potentiality was viewed as probabilistic, uncertain, non-mechanistic and acting from a distance, potentiality was (absurdly) only evident in its actual manifestations. At most, the existence of potential power could have been induced from parallel cases. These limitations surely assisted those having reservations about power as potentiality. When power as potentiality is no longer mediated by the consciousness of others but instead operates through a material medium that enables and constrains other people's possibility of

action, it is no longer probabilistic. It turns into a mechanistic power, that is, direct and certain force. Under these new circumstances, it is much easier to recognize the potential of power before it is realized. This no longer requires reification of statistics or metaphysical belief in invisible beings such as dispositions and probabilities. An algorithm is certain to enable and constrain the actions of countless similar others in the same way. Algorithmic systems can also distinguish between cases, but their personalized treatments are merely the necessary instantiations of a general, consistent set of rules (complex and dynamic as it may be) shaping the course of events and other people's possibilities of action, that is, exercising power. A possible alternative is to claim that control over digital systems is a resource rather than power. Formal regulative rules were long seen as resources (Sewell 1992: 8), and this view may be easily extended to generative rules. Allen (2003) insisted we should distinguish between power, which is the effective mobilization of resources in interaction, and resources, which are the media of power: only their successful mobilization creates qualitatively distinct forms of power such as domination, authority, seduction, manipulation, coercion or inducement. However, all the aforementioned forms of power are mediated by actors' consciousness. When power is no longer mediated by actors' consciousness, the uncertainty about mobilization reduces. This is post-situational power: as the mobilization of resources in situations becomes less uncertain, the situation loses its privileged status as the locus of power. Allen was right to insist that power is a relational effect in interaction, the mobilization of resources in concrete time and place, which is more than the trivial realization of potentiality. However, this position is challenged when some of the interaction parties are non-humans whose actions in any particular time and place are merely trivial realizations of abstract generative rules, and when the power of some human actors and institutions is mediated by these non-humans. At least in some cases, the distinction between power and resources becomes elusive and seems to lose validity and relevance, just like the distinction between potentiality and actuality. Surely, the wider social effects of the operation of algorithms in the long run are far from certain, and may well be undesired by the people who designed or commissioned them (who usually want more than simply influencing the conduct of others at the micro level, aiming

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their micro influences to achieve an accumulated effect to serve their wider projects). Whereas enabling and constraining other people's possibilities of action through design, discriminating in favour of or against them based on their algorithmic sorting, and denying certain individuals certain possibilities of action are all clearly manifestations of power at the micro level, they do not guarantee achieving their intended wider social goals. As Andreas Glaeser's (2003) study on the power of the Stasi shows, the long-term effects of power complicate the relation between power and knowledge. A ban on writing 'Winnie the Pooh' in IM may serve the immediate ends-in-view of the Chinese regime while also possibly weakening its governmental project in the long run. However, it would be a mistake to reduce power to effects that fit one's intention, interests and projects. This would result in a subjective, vague and self-contradictory notion of power, since anything that serves an actor's ends-in-view may eventually damage her long-term project in one sense or another. Algorithms do exercise power, and control over algorithmic systems shapes inequality in the power to shape reality, as these algorithmic rules decide whether we get a loan or get arrested as suspects, which products, news reports or potential partners are presented to us and which ones will remain unknown to us, which opportunities of action are opened to us and which ones are blocked. These algorithmic decisions are not the end of the story. People react to them, shaping paths of action within the (sometimes very wide) range of opportunities that remained open to them. In many cases people also have to react to the algorithmic classification and evaluation of others (for example, when police officers decide whether to embrace automated suspicions and how to act upon them; or when dating site users decide whether to message a potential partner given a certain algorithmically calculated match score and their algorithmic classification as 'more sexual' or 'less political' than average). The ways in which people engage with the digital complicate the picture portrayed by Lash (Couldry et al. 2016). When algorithms produce knowledge, scoring and classifications that are presented to users, they indeed offer users resources (in the sense of Sewell 1992): the actual effects of these resources depend on the cultural rules regulating their use, that is, on how people react to the ways in which algorithms have classified themselves and others. 24 However, this only applies to the extent that algorithmic power is exercised by offering humans information and classification to assist

human decision-making, that is, to the extent that it is mediated through human consciousness. As shown above, this is often not the case (e.g. when algorithms prevent, rather than prohibit, certain possibilities of action). When social actions and interactions are digitally mediated, they are subject to generative rules, and the capacity to set these rules is power. It is the power to rule, not in the traditional sense of the power to regulate, but in the generative sense. Even when rule setting itself is delegated to algorithms, human discretion remains involved (e.g. Seaver 2018). If kings such as Hammurabi who exercised power by setting regulative rules were called 'rulers', those who have the power to set generative rules are generative rulers. Like any ruler, their power is not unlimited. And yet, the power of generative rulers is unique: it is a potential, but one that automatically translates into an infinite number of actuals, thus reducing the uncertainty gap that used to prevail in the distance and time between rule making and rule enforcement or realization, between the potential and the actual.

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Conclusion Computer codes and algorithms exercise power in a variety of ways - shaping possibilities of action and blocking them, recommendation and distributed agency, subjectification, temptation and the regulation of attention - through stable rules set by human programmers and dynamic rules set by machine learning. They operate in cooperation with non-algorithmic technologies of governance and forms of power (even digital spaces such as platforms are not governed by algorithms alone: e.g. Gillespi 2018; Schwarz 2019). Yet, diverse as they might be, when view d together, algorithmic systems share some fundamental features regarding the relations between power, rules and categorization that clearly distinguish them from earlier modalities of power, such as bureaucratic power. They operate through generative rules, and despite sticking to rules they may govern us not as members of collectives but rather as connective individuals. The sociological theorization of power in the twentieth century focused on the question 'why are we bounded when we are freer than ever?', and was able to answer it by directing its sociological gaze to human consciousness and the ways in which the individual

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consciousness is not as autonomous as assumed by Enlightenment and liberal thought, but rather traversed by power and subject to outside influence. In the twenty-first century this no longer makes sense, as both the intellectual and the material environment have changed. First, it has long become rather trivial to 'reveal' that we are not autonomous individuals, whereas connective phenomena further highlight our interdependencies and mutual constitution; viewing autonomy as an outdated ideology which cannot be truly realized challenges views such as Lukes' 'radical' view of power, 25 whereas constant digital surveillance and mediation make it harder to believe we are freer than ever. Moreover, algorithmic forms of power that operate independently of human consciousness urge us to divert the theorization of power towards a different set of questions. In this chapter I have addressed some of these questions: how different modalities of power differently relate to rules, consciousness, legitimation and categorization, and how the digital mediation of social lives transforms the operation of power and paths for resistance, while redefining what 'ruling' means. The transformations of power discussed in this chapter rely on the same processes discussed throughout this book: the digital mediation of social action and interaction, their constant translation into data objects, and the translation of social networks into data objects that regulate connective lives. All these have turned our lives increasingly knowable and governable, and knowable and governable differently, in ways that necessitate rethinking key theoretical questions, such as whether power can exist as a potentiality. Logically, it is impossible to expect empirical developments of any kind to decide the theoretical debate on whether it is right to think of power as potential. Empirical reality is always open to multiple theoretical interpretations. Yet sociological theory is not pure philosophy. It is intended to serve the need to explain a concrete social reality. Foucault claimed that 'power exists only when it is put into action' (1982: 788), but when power operates through and is mediated by algorithms, the question of when exactly power is 'put into action' is not trivial, as the operation of power is no longer clearly sit uated in time and space. This is a real challenge that algorithmic power poses to certain theorizations of power. In a reality in which the gap between potentiality and actuality has decreased, the uncertainty between rule setting and its realization seems to have decreased as well. Control over algorithmic systems and their rules

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is the potential power to produce an infinity of actuals. It makes no sense to say that this power only exists in the moments the system classifies individual people and influences their lives and not between these moments, since this classification derives automatically from a decision made in a different time, and more generally from the power to set generative rules. As a result, 'generative rulers' gain increased social power, which operates differently from the power of ancient rulers, as it relies on rules of a different kind. Yet this metaphor may mislead us. Hardly any single individual is truly a generative ruler: algorithmic systems and their codes are collective organizational achievements, as different actors commission, write and revise codes and operate systems. Control over algorithmic power is thus distributed, just like control over state power. We may, then, better speak of generative ruling and its unique features. Generative ruling becomes a significant stratifying force in two ways: by shaping the life chances of those it governs, and in that some people are privileged to be exempt from being subjected to its opaque, physis-like and hard-to-resist power in some situations (Rona-Tas 2020). 26 In chapter 2 I showed how interaction ceases to be embedded in bounded situations situating them in time and space; this chapter has shown that power undergoes a similar transformation. However, whereas chapter 2 showed how this disembedding and the subjection to algorithms introduce increased uncertainties regarding the audiences of the presentation of self and the meanings attributed to interaction, this chapter has portrayed an opposite trend. Algorithmic power reduces some sources of uncertainty regarding the realization of rules. In a sense, this means that algorithmic power is harder to resist, both because it operates independently of the consciousness of the governed and because when the exercise of power does not take place in a situation, the obvious place and time for resistance are lost. And yet, certainty has its limits and resistance still takes place (through material 'detours' and otherwise), as algorithmic power acts on people who have consciousness and creativity and who produce knowledge about algorithmic power and develop strategies to cope with it. People are not merely users, they are not inmates in an algorithmically governed total institution, and moving between contexts provides them with a space for agency. They choose how to act within this space while relying on knowledge, meaning-making, framing and ideology - dimensions that a post-hegemonic view of

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algorithmic power may mistakenly lead us to view as outdated or irrelevant. And yet, a sociological theory of power in the twenty-first century must take seriously the material world and the differences between power exercised through the consciousness of the dominated, power exercised through mechanical physical objects, and power exercised through digital rules. These three forms differ in their operation and in how they are accumulated and resisted, and we must remain sensitive to these differences. Taking the material seriously does not mean simply repeating the ANT truism that agency and power are always distributed, but rather exploring how the particular materiality of digital systems informs power in qualitatively unique ways. The discussion of social capital in chapter 4 and the exploration throughout this chapter have offered several examples that go along these lines.

6 When Labour is Everywhere: Rethinking work in the era of workless labour

Work and labour (two words often used as synonyms) are among the most solid concepts that seem to melt into air in contemporary digital societies. On the one hand, some proclaim the 'end of work' (at least of work as we know it), and digital technologies seem to contribute to this trend by remoulding labour processes and the relations between capital and labour. On the other hand, labour seems to be everywhere: critical internet scholars make a convincing case that most of our actions and interactions online (and increasingly offline too) can be classified as labour, so much so that it becomes hard to tell what is not labour. This is, as shown below, an effect of the interaction-object duality discussed in chapter 2. These two accounts are not as contradictory as they may seem: in a sense they portray complementary dimensions of the very same processes. However, they compel us to rethink work, labour and their relations. Below I offer a conceptualization of work as distinct from labour and show how digital technologies contributed to the rise of workless labour in contemporary capitalism. But before rethinking these concepts, we must ask first: what are the main analytical and political uses of these concepts in sociology? What are they good for? For sociologists, they have two main meanings with different uses (and although 'work' and 'labour' are often used interchangeably, I distinguish between them by using 'work' for the first and 'labour' for the second). First, work is a life-sphere. This is an emic category that should be studied to understand how social life, time and space are divided into segments, and how these segments relate to one another (as in the

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'work-family conflict' or 'work-leisure balance'). This notion helps us understand how social life is experienced and organized culturally and spatiotemporally. Work as a life-sphere is contrasted to leisure and characterized by goal-oriented activity directed at satisfying life's necessities (this distinguishes work from 'play', where the activity is its own end, a distinction already made by Marx and Malinowski). Work in this sense often seems to be universal and transhistorical but is actually a historically specific social construction: whereas' people have always striven to satisfy their necessities (gathering or growing food, for example), the classification of all activities into two broad categories, work and leisure, is far from universal; it is a modern cultural distinction that emerged following structural transformations. Pre-industrial work and leisure had been intertwined. The separation of work from leisure (as cultural categories) and the working day from the rest of life (in the actual organization of time and space) took place following the disembedding of the economy as an autonomous sphere, the separation between economic relations of employment and other social relations, the growing prevalence of wage labour (which allows thinking of labour in the abstract and comparing qualitatively different works based on their exchange value, that is, wage) and the rational organization of time in the modern factory (Freyssenet 1999; Hemmens 2019; Rojek 1995). This abstraction of work laid the foundation for the view of work as the core of humanity (Marx (1968[1844])'s homo faber), the rise of the modern work ethic, and the construction of leisure as the realm of freedom, an unattainable ideal of free choice (Rojek 1995: 191). It also naturalized work, making it seem as if it were a universal category. Paradoxically, it is this naturalization and abstraction of work which allowed creative metaphorical and expansive uses of this abstract concept beyond the sphere of work that produced it, such as 'housework' (Freyssenet 1999). Yet the literal meaning of work in this first sense remains the part of life taking place within employment relations, in the workplace and during work hours. Digitalization makes work as a life-sphere more porous: in the post-situational organization of time-space (see chapter 2) leisure is increasingly penetrated by work and vice versa (e.g. Rosa 2013; Wajcman 2015), as the sites of labour, domesticity, social life and consumption are de-differentiated by digital media (Andrejevic 2010). The COVID-19 pandemic intensified this porousness for some employees: whereas waiters and production workers found

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themselves out of a job, millions of immaterial workers (Hardt and Negri 2000) have worked from home, participating in Zoom video-mediated meetings from their bedrooms and kitchens while simultaneously taking care of their children during school lockdown. When boundaries blur, people must develop techniques (such as wearing a tie while workin fr m the kitchen: Danna-Lynch 2009) to redraw the boundary between spheres. Yet these changes do not challenge the very concept of work; work in this first sense still exists, and the activities it includes are not very surprising. ' econd la bour is a proclu tiv a tivity, that is, on that rodu es surplu value. Thi is not an emic bur an ana lytical on ept d igncd ro perf rm the critica l-analyti al work of pointing to the source of value. In tbe Marxist traditi o, lab ur i th true ource f value. Marx's critique of exploitation in Capital is based on the assumption that the wealth of capitalists derives from the exploited labour of workers in the present ('living labour') and in the past ('dead labour', congea l d in th form of ca pital: Mar I 90-2). In this nse, any activ ity co ntributing to the valorizatiOll of apita l the producci n f exchange value, is labour, even if not experienced a such. Indeed, it is the latter a where th ritical-analytical p w r f th labo ur concept sbin es th mo t. For an activ ity to be labour it doc not necessarily have to be experien ed and r c gnized a 'work' or lab w·' : feminist 1arxi ts since the 1970 hav used th criti al p ten ial of Marx's an alytica l category of labour to claim recognition of women's unpaid 'housework' or 'domestic labour', while challenging the Marxist dichotomy between productive and reprod ucti ve labour (for a recent review: Boris 2019). This was the first of multiple creative applications of Marx's concept of labour, which may be analytically correct, yet diverge from the common sense, as they distinguish between work (as a phenomnological li fe-spher ) a nd labou r (a an analytical conce pt). Dallas myth e's (1.9 77) conrrov r ·ial ac o unt of watching adve rti sement as 'a udience labour ffers an ther ca . This is indeed the v ry power of analytical concepts: producing new insights about social reality that take us beyond our common sense. It was Durkheim's insistence on using analytical categ ries rather than lay categories (prenotions), for example, that allowed him to see nationalism and human rights as religious phenomena. In the case of labour, this power is not only analytical but also political: Marx's concept of labour (in its femini rand many other applications) served as a basis for claims for

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redistribution and recognition. But the source of power of analytical concepts is also their source of weakness. Attempts to apply Marx's analytical concept of labour to digital societies go so far away from work as a bounded life-sphere that it may lose much of its political and moral resonance. This is evident in the embarrassment of some of my students whenever we discuss the political economy of digital labour. Digital labour is a source of embarrassment also since some of its forms lack the most typical characteristics we associate with work in everyday life. As Ludwig Wittgenstein (2009) taught us, natural language categories are not analytical categories; different types of 'work' may share family resemblance even if no single feature is shared by all types, as sharing several features associated with work is enough to qualify activity as work. However, digital activities that qualify as labour according to the analytical definition lack too many of these features to be classified as work by laypersons. Some forms of digital labour (that is, digital activity that produces surplus value) lack features such as control by superiors, professional identity, wage and contractual relations, and even consciousness. Labour studies scholar John Budd (2011: 2) defined work as 'purposeful human activity involving physical or mental exertion that is not undertaken solely for pleasure and that has economic or symbolic value'. This definition consists of four features: purpose, exertion, instrumentality (which distinguishes work from autotelic play) and productivity. The last feature, which defines labour in the Marxist 'labour theory of value' tradition, used to be associated with (and to some degree dependent on) the others. This is no longer so, as digitalization weakens this dependency. Can a productive activity undertaken without consciousness of its productivity, and which lacks purpose, exertion and instrumentality, still qualify as labour? Can the Marxist labour concept retain its critical power even when departing from work in its lay common sense? This is the main challenge posed to the concept of labour by digitalization. Before addressing it, I wish to review more closely the influence of digitalization on waged and unwaged labour.

increases productivity by shifting work tasks from workers to algorithms. Mechanization and automation shift from blue-collar to white-collar and professional jobs (e.g. in law and finance, as shown by Baldwin [2019] in his recent take on Rifkin's [1995] 'end of work' thesis), as more sophisticated and less routine tasks can be delegated to computer software. Artificial intelligence (Al) allows the delegation of decision-making work to computers even when decisions cannot simply follow predetermined rules, since its complex, probabilistic, inductive decision-making models can simulate human intuition or 'hot cognition' (Baldwin 2019). The old Marxist argument that machinery robs craftspersons of their knowledge and skills can now be extended to various kinds of knowledge. Firms like Facebook and Amazon hire experts (such as professional journalists and stylists) to document their work and allow algorithms to inductively learn it in order to replace them (Bhattarai 2018; Nunez 2016). The process that philosopher Bernard Stiegler (2010) characterized as 'retention' and 'grammatization' of labour - that is, the objectification of workers' muscular memory and knowledge through its inscription within machines, resulting in the proletarianization of workers - has now extended to cognitive work, further strengthening dead labour's power over living labour. Does it herald the end of work? This thought arouses public fear, fuelling the careers of politicians (like Andrew Yang) and the media coverage of studies (such as Frey and Osborne 2013) that reaffirm this fear. The latter estimated the risks of different occupations being computerized by analysing bottlenecks on the way to computerization, such as manual dexterity, creative intelligence (e.g. originality) and social intelligence (e.g. negotiation and emotional support), concluding that 4 7 per cent of all jobs are at high risk of being automated relatively soon, within a decade or two. However, while many occupational tasks and several occupations are being replaced by algorithms, the general effect of this trend on work as a standard component of life remains very limited, and the end of work that futurists have proclaimed for several decades still refuses to arrive. Work may well stay with us, as it plays a key role in social organization that cannot be reduced to technical challenges. Second, algorithms introduce flexibility and deregulation into the labour market: digital platforms facilitate short-time, flexible hiring of workers regardless of their physical location and without ever meeting them in person (including workers living in poor countries, which threatens to increase inequality, unemployment and social

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Digitalization and waged labour Digitalization processes influence waged labour in three main ways, none of which requires redefining work or labour. First, digitalization

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discontent in the rich countries: Baldwin 2019) . In 'crowdworking' platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, work reverts to the protoindustrial model of piecework production: hiring freelancers without commitment and breaking down work into micro tasks which are sold separately, while skirting business regulation and labour laws. Worker_s are hired for a task rather than for a job (Vallas 2019), separatmg the modern connection between work and job in what Scholz (2017) called 'the end of employment'. Both in this model and in gig economy p latforms like Uber and Wolt, precarious temporary work replaces sta ndard jobs. Work relations on these platforms are governed not by negotiable work contracts or legislation (platforms often classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees to skirt legal protections such as minimum wage: Schor and Attwood-Charles 2017), but rather by the algorithmic power of codes, secret generative rules which are unilaterally set by employers or platform operators (in their new status as 'generative rulers': see chapter 5) and hence biased against workers (the rides offered to Uber drivers and the compensation they are paid are calculated algorithmically based on rules unknown to them; Amazon Mechanical Turk employers only pay employees if they are satisfied: Irani 2015; Mohlmann et al. forthcoming; Scholz 2017). These rules cannot be negotiated: they have a physis-like nature. Importantly, these trends do not rely solely or mainly on technological affordances; they reflect wider political, structural and cultural transformations: the weakening of organized labour, the general shift towards precarious labour, and the failure of most states (with few exceptions) to protect digitally mediated labour through legislation (Schor and AttwoodCharles 2017). The fragmentation of work into isolated tasks does not require redefining work, as work remains a life-sphere distinct from leisure that produces value, but it may not grant individuals the same sense of identity they used to receive from Fordist standard work . This explains why the two trends surveyed so far are sometimes viewed as manifestations of a broader process, the end of work. The Fordist standard of the mid-twentieth century - stable, full-time jobs that granted individuals identity, dignity, ethical value and a sense of one's place in society - turns into the privilege of a small elite. Digital technologies contribute only modestly to this transformation (identified by epochal scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Sennett and Ulrich Beck: Strangleman 2007), which derives from

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multiple political, economic, cultural and structural transformations in post-industrial capitalist societies (such as neoliberal dereg~l~tion and the internal transformation of capitalism in response to cnt1que: Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). Finally, digitalization influences labour when management tasks are delegated to algorithms. In Uber, algorithms replace taxi dispatchers and engage in micro management, assigning trips to drivers and dictating every turn in the route in shared ('UberPool') trips, thus reducing drivers' control of their work. Subje~tin~ labour to algorithmic power (see chapter 5) means that the application boss does not provide reasons or explanations for its decisions: the amount of work assigned to each worker, reward and punishment, are blackboxed and often seem arbitrary (Mohlmann et al. forthcoming). Similarly, Amazon's warehouse workers have little control over their work as their bodily movements and work pace are governed by their digital handsets. In these hyper-alienated forms of labour workers turn into (and feel like) quasi-robots. The Uber algorithm tracks workers constantly (each ride they decline, their speed and lane changes and the satisfaction of every customer) and use this surveillance to discipline and punish drivers. This happens due to the interaction-object duality (see chapter 2): once the activity of work is objectified, it can be automatically surveilled. This duality is also behind the most substantial influence of digitalization processes on labour: the objectification of interaction through digital surveillance introduces increased productivity into our everyday life, giving birth to new forms of unpaid labour.

The Glass diagram

ln 179 1 Jeremy .B ntham publi hed a n innovative pri o n_ pla n. At fast glanc , ir h isto ri ca l significance eem d ubtful : 1t wa hardJy ve r rea.lizcd (and nly 130 years later, in uba a nd Ulin i ). N verrbcl , Michel Fo u au lt (1977) fa mo u ly chose it to b th focus of Discipline and Punish. 'The Panopticon', he wrote, 'must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a m ch ni m of p wer r d ue d to its ideal for m' (p. 205). For Fo u au lt, B n tham 's P noptico n was the m st crysta ll ized man ifc ca ti o n £ a ti n, modern scheme of pow •r. oogl G las tb subj e t of thi s ffe r a compa rable diagram. T his seemin gly fail d projc t ffer · the

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most crystallized archetypical manifestation of digital surveillance capitalism. An official concept video Google published in 2012, before the launch, showed how the wearer sees the world through the smart glasses that offer him helpful information: telling him the Underground line is suspended and showing him the way on foot, ordering tickets for a concert upon seeing a street ad, helping him find a book in the shop, and taking photos and videos of interesting and beautiful sights (Glass was designed to take a photo with just a wink) to share them with others, that is, turning each and every experience of the wearer into a shareable object. 1 However, these objectified moments are shared not only with friends, but also with Google. In the video the device sees whatever the wearer sees, from the first stretch after waking up in the morning, constantly turning his life into data sent to Google as a source of profit while allowing it to provide the wearer with useful information. Glass also listens to the wearers at all times to be able to answer their questions, which may also support targeted advertising adapted to whatever the wearer sees, hears or discusses in conversation. The constant flow of information, if integrated with face-recognition software, could have offered wearers information about anybody in their field of vision while supplying Google with information about the social networks of the whole of humanity, taking the materialization of social networks (see chapter 3) to the extreme. Most importantly, Glass closely and constantly tracks user attention. Some even feared that Google intends to augment this attention tracking by using infrared eye-tracking technology to document what the wearer's pupils are focused on, a technology used by psychologists and cognitive scientists to investigate attention and the internality of subjects who cannot speak, such as babies. The vision of Glass was thus the productivization of human existence through its translation into data: productivization of our mundane social interactions, of the flaneur's aimless wandering through the boulevards, of the flows of human attention during our careless moments of staring into space in a cafe, a bus or a street. In this vision the distinction between the productive life-sphere of work and the unproductive life-sphere of leisure collapses, as the whole of human existence becomes economically productive for capital. Four decades ago, when Smythe (1977: 6) wrote that 'all non-sleeping time under capitalism is work time', it was a mere rhetorical exaggeration. Google Glass tried to turn it into reality (whereas smartwatches go

even further, monitoring the wearer's pulse during sleep to ensure that even this time will not remain completely unproductive). Media reports from the time Glass was launched (2013-14) agreed it was inevitab le that I s would becom a mainstream, ubiquito us gad et. As we a ll know, this usual deterministic pr. phecy failed this time: lass unleas h d n wave of resistanc · (public fea r of privacy violations, legislation restricting its use, businesses that banned wearing it) and ended up as a commercial failure. But the panic it aroused was more about the spying capacities Glass gave its individual wearers (taking photos surreptitiously by winking) and less about the spying capacities it granted Google to turn our lives into data as a source f r profit. As a result, Glass's vision - translating the totality of so ial life acti n and interacti n as well a human attention, exp ricnce and affecr into data obj ·ct raw mat ri al to be mined, ana ly d and proc sed c yie ld profits - has remained wltb u, , fragmented in enclles dev ice apps and featur . This is evident in th e long Ii t of permissions a ked for by mo t mobile app . mart spea l· rs connected to personal assistance se rvices sucb a Amaz n' Alexa ma)' reco rd and arc hive co nversati n taking place around them, in million of living rooms and o ut ide them (as tbey are installed in headphones and ven in •E ho Frame ' gla ses) . las i dead, long live Glass!

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Pollination and the productivization of everyday life The Glass diagram relies on the interaction-object duality: when actions and interactions are translated into durable data objects, leaving behind traces of data, they become increasingly productive, as these data obje ts may have exchange value. In this sense, the interaction-object duality renders labour ubiquitou , turning non-labour activities into labour. Studies on the political economy of SNSs, apps and smart devices identify at least three different (although intertwined) ways in which users become productive (although their status as forms of 'work' or 'labour' is highly debated): the conscious creation of media objects ('user-generated content'), exposure to advertising, and being wat hed . The creation of 'user-g nerated content' is the simplest case: digital technologies facilitate the production and distribution of media objects. Once the privilege of a few media professional , these

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activities turned ubiquitous. Purposeful production of objects falls easily within our commonsensical notion of work, and if these objects have a commercial value, their production can be easily viewed as labour. The interaction-object duality further facilitates this process: SNS users can easily share screenshots of their IM conversations, or videos of Zoom group meetings. This increased productivity challenges the old distinction between work and play or leisure activities. TikTok is a good example: the application's 800 million users constantly produce an endless trail of playful content, most typically 15-second lip-sync videos. But do they work? Making a video often consists of goofing around in front of the camera, an emphatically playful activity, that may take less than a minute. Obviously, for some exceptional users TikTok videos are the beginning of a career: while the lip-sync videos of Nepali Indian girl Nisha Guragain are no different from countless others, the viral success of one of them allowed her to accumulate objectified social capital (over 27 million followers) and a celebrity status she exchanged for work as a model and an 'influencer' (presenter in Instagram advertising). But what about less exceptional users who post silly videos or exchange jokes, rants and gossip on Facebook? Most 'produsers' who post usergenerated content have probably never thought of their activities as 'work' and are not rewarded for them, yet they engage in capital valorization, playing an indispensable role in the internet's political economy. Websites such as YouTube, Facebook and TikTok make most of their revenues from advertising (selling the attention of users to advertisers, just like commercial television), yet few people watch advertisements for their own sake. Whereas mass media invest in producing news and entertainment content and pay studios, actors, photographers, directors and journalists for producing content that would entice users, user-generated content platforms do not pay for the content but receive it for free from the users themselves. Facebook's ability to sell advertisements depends completely on the productivity of its users, who constantly produce photos, videos, jokes, rants and gossip that entice other users to use the website and view ads. Since these productive activities are voluntary, pleasurable and playful, they are sometimes termed 'playbour' (Kiicklich 2005; also Fuchs and Sevignani 2013), a concept I critically discuss below. Usually the production of user-generated content is not simply exploited labour but 'free labour', in the double sense of being

conducted voluntarily and without any compensation (Terranova 2004: 74; also: Andrejevic 2010; Cohen 2008; Cote and Pybus 2007) and hence ' infinitely exploited' (Fuchs 2012). Whenever users produce and publish posts, photos or videos they perform unremunerated labour in the culture industry. Indeed, Facebook's advertising revenues are less than $30 a year for each user: the value of each post is a few cents at most, but these add up to make a fortune. Digital technologies enable platforms to capitalize on these micro contributions: whereas some hoped that the capacity of digital technology to break down work into tiny components would result in shifting work outside market and proprietary relations (Benkler 2006), in this case (just as in Amazon Mechanical Turk) the result was the very opposite. YouTube was the first (followed by TikTok and Snapchat) to recognize the value produced by ordinary users and pay some users (those who produce unusually large audiences) a share of the advertising revenue their videos produce, which in some cases amounts to millions of dollars. However, the activity objectified in these videos may be nothing but playing. In the video game arcades of the 1980s, playing video games was neither work nor labour: it was a leisure activity of consumption that did not produce surplus value. This remained unchanged even when sometimes a few boys crowded behind a good player's shoulder to watch and admire him playing. Today, watching others playing video ga mes has turned into an important source of revenue for Google (Yo uTube), Amazon (Twitch) and Facebook. igitalization turned playing from an activity into the production of objects, as players can record their playing, stream and share it, and this mediated object has not only social value for the players (allowing them to compete for status in international markets) but also an economic exchange value - the value of advertising that can be sold thanks to the attention these videos can accumulate, whether it is a few cents or millions of dollars a month, as in the case of Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg ('PewDiePie'), who has accumulated more than 25 billion views in the last decade. When users are compensated, playing games (or any other activity) may easily change its phenomenology and directedness and be experienced as stressful work (cf. Parkin 2018). However, most platforms do not compensate produsers. The 'media objects' users produce include not only videos, posts or photos: thanks to the interaction-object duality, even commenting is productive. Comments on Facebook posts, the objectified online

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interactions they start, are also valuable content, as they may interest other users and make them spend time on the platform and be exp_osed to a~v~r_tising. Once media are interactive, an 'increasing variety of activities double as value-generating labor' (Andrejevic 2008: 42). Social interaction (from heated political Facebook debates to play~ul lip-sync) undergoes productivization, turning into the product10n of valuable objects, that is, labour. In the Glass diagram every funny moment in a conversation, every beautiful sight on the street, every witty thought while watching TV can be objectified and con~pete for attention in SNSs, thereby earning generalized social cap'.tal for the individual produser, while also generating financial capital for the SNS operator that sells the accumulated attention to advertisers. A sec_ond_ way ~n which users are said to become increasingly productive is by mcreased participation in what Smythe (1977) called 'audience labour', that is, exposure to advertisements. Smythe famous_ly suggeste~ the m_ass media produce audience-commodity, producmg and sellmg audience attention time to advertisers. Fuchs !2012) offere~ a simi_lar ac~ount of the internet's political economy: tf what websites sell is audience attention, then paying attention is a value-generating activity, a form of labour, and users perform labour not only while producing online content but also while consuming it. Once we use commercial media not only to consume entertainment !as in mass media) but also for sociability, communication and social mteraction, social interaction becomes increasingly productive. Importantly, . the SNS audiences sold to advertisers are highly segmented. While targeted advertising and segmentation are nothing new (newspaper sections are one obvious example), Google and Facebook o~er unprecedented levels of segmentation, presenting each user with personalized ads based on intensive surveillance of every activity of all users (and many non-users). As Arvidsson (20\6) puts i~, th~ se?ments sold to advertiser~ are_not a~tual groups but data-derivatives , users aggregated algorithm1cally mto heterogeneous categories ('micro-publics') which are assumed to share comm_o~ interests, based on algorithmic prediction that analyses their materialized network ties with other users and objects. This brings us to the third productivization path, which is at the heart of the Glass diagram: 'the work of being watched' (to use Mark Andrejevic's (2008) term). Unlike production of cultural contents or the exposure to advertising, this third kind of productive activity is

When Labour is Everywhere

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endemic to the digital world, and it p ses the biggest challeng to our notions of work and la bour. It rak place not only while browsing the web or using NS but througho ut our lives, even wh n we feel ffline (throu gh smart device · and apps ). Being watched is profitable, incc anything we tlo or ay can h Ip predi t us: every like, every . ac h query, every shop we vi it tells something about our interests nn