Algorithmic Hotness: Young Women’s “Promotion” and “Reconnaissance” Work via Social Media Body Images

Abstract

This article examines how the circulation of images on mobile and algorithmic social media platforms is gendered. We draw on data from a research project that examines the interplay between promotion, drinking culture, and social media. In this project, informants documented flows of images between their social media accounts and a nightlife precinct. We show how the human capacity to use bodies to affect other bodies, and to make critical judgments about bodies, is vital to algorithmic media platforms that aim to profit from calculative judgements about the affective dimensions of human life. We propose an expanded register of "body heat" on social media as both the symbolic labor of producing, maintaining, and digitally mediating a body that conforms to heterosexy visual codes and the affective labor of using a hot body to affect other bodies through movement, touch, and excessive consumption. The escalating capacity of social media platforms to calibrate flows of attention depends on the "hot" bodies of users and user's work in curating "hot" body images to upload. Hot female bodies are critical to nightlife promotion via social media, in attracting viewer attention. Hot female bodies are also key to moments of nightlife reconnaissance: they are registered in the databases and sorted by the algorithms of social media platforms, enabling viewers to make judgments about the desirability of locations in the nightlife precinct.

How do social media-related attachments and assemblages encourage or reduce drinking among young people?

“…In our data, particularly girls are concerned about images in which they are represented in the online environment as intoxicated. Therefore, rather than acting as actants that celebrate heavy drinking and encourage young people to drink more, Stella's, Jasmine's and Maya's citations above exemplify assemblages in which the online pictures of intoxication act as mediators that prevent young women's drinking (Carah and Dobson 2016). Our male interviewees are not as worried concerning the online representations about their drunken behavior as our female interviewees are.…”

“…Our analysis further reveals that these assemblages are gendered. As neoliberal discourses and ideals ambivalently praise young girls as success stories of new capitalism, objectify their bodily looks and moralize their sexuality (Dobson 2014;Carah and Dobson 2016), it is no surprise that our female interviewees monitor and control their online self-presentations concerning drinking more than male interviewees. As the assemblages that circulate in surrounding society tend to attach young women's heavy drinking to stigmatizing and derogatory trajectories, it is understandable that this makes young women avoid behavior that could end up being translated into shameful connections.…”

Emerging social media ‘platform’ approaches to alcohol marketing: a comparative analysis of the activity of the top 20 Australian alcohol brands on Facebook (2012-2014)

“…Interactions signal to the News Feed recommendation algorithm that users on the platform find the content engaging, thereby making it more likely to be displayed to other users. The effort to generate organic reach has stimulated culturally-embedded marketing tactics such as "influencer marketing" (where brands informally contract with people who are influential within their peer networks to promote their brand) and event sponsorship (Carah 2015, Carah et al 2014Carah and Dobson 2016;Nicholls 2012). …”

Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media: Towards Theorising Public Lives on Private Platforms

“…In the sections that follow, we outline in more detail these two critically important perspectives on social media's digital intimate publics: digital intimacy as social capital and digital intimacy as labour. We highlight the need to hold these together in order to help us think through the constitution of digital intimacies on social media as intertwined processes of human socialisation, subjectification, algorithmic sorting, and machine-learning (Bucher, 2012(Bucher, , 2017Carah & Dobson, 2016;. We intend these perspectives to take up both parts of a conceptualisation of public intimacy in terms of space and property (Fraser, 1990;Berlant & Warner, 1998;Warner, 2002;Berlant, 2008).…”

“…They code lived reality. Promotional labourers like influencers, models, celebrities, photographers, stylists, designers, musicians, writers, and so on mobilise their intimate lives as flows of content that capture attention (Duffy & Hund, 2016;Carah & Dobson, 2016;Abidin, 2018). In many cases, these promotional labourers perform identities that draw on the resources of consumer culture, and therefore reproduce it (Hearn, 2008;Banet-Weiser, 2012).…”