Social drivers and algorithmic mechanisms on digital media

Abstract

The fast and barely regulated adoption of algorithms in digital media has raised concerns about their role in well-being both at the individual and collective level. We illustrate digital media as having algorithmic mechanisms that are powered by social drivers, creating a feedback loop that complicates research to disentangle the role of algorithms and already existing social phenomena. Our review of the causal evidence on how algorithms affect well-being, misinformation, and polarization suggests that the role of algorithms for these phenomena is far from straightforward, and that substantial further empirical research is needed. Existing evidence suggests that algorithms mostly reinforce existing social drivers, which stresses the importance of reflecting on algorithms in the larger societal context including individualism, populist politics, and climate change. We present concrete ideas and research questions to improve algorithms on digital platforms and to investigate their role for current problems and potential solutions. Finally, we discuss how the current shift from social media to more algorithmically curated media brings both risks but also opportunities if algorithms are designed with the aim of individual and societal flourishing rather than short-term profit.

Algorithm-Mediated Social Learning in Online Social Networks

“…Our functional misalignment perspective generates several future research directions (see also Outstanding Questions). First, it is important to better understand exactly how much variance is explained by content algorithms vs. human social learning in their joint influence on people's behavior on social media (Brady, Crockett, et al, 2020;Metzler & Garcia, 2022). We encourage cross-disciplinary studies to investigate this interaction more precisely through field experiments, laboratory experiments, and computational models (Eckles et al, 2018).…”

The new technological condition: From actor-centered to data-driven and future-oriented technology

“…Not only the new media but also the traditional media provide their information to the public indirectly through search engines. The collection, categorizing and processing of data is characterized as "content curation" (Groys 2012: 12;Metzler & Garcia 2022). The course of the technological processes of algorithmic curation of information is determined by the architecture of the network after the "great unbundling" 8 of information, its aggregation and recombination in the search engines or the social media.…”