Ephemeral visibility and externally visible production: How algorithmic automation accelerates fans’ data work

Abstract

Algorithmic rankings like streaming charts automatically convert users’ behavioral traces into orders of content, shaping their public visibility and motivating fans’ data work to promote favored cultural products on rankings. Building on social acceleration and the sociology of quantification, we take a media sociology perspective to examine how algorithmic automation accelerates public visibility and fans’ data work. Based on netnography of a Chinese idol group INTO1’s fans, we theorize that algorithms, a technological acceleration in audience data production, trigger two changes in public visibility encountered by fans: ephemeral visibility and externally visible production. They further accelerate the pace of fans’ data work, reflected in generating more data in less time, speeding up reaction, organizing data work by time intervals, and adding additional and indirect data work. While prior algorithm studies emphasize opacity, we highlight the important yet underexplored speed aspect of algorithms and its social impact on the time dimension.