Surely, you’ve done that thing where you hit Google in order to diagnose disorders in yourself or others. For example, just the other day, I was delighted to diagnose a neighbour (who irritates me greatly) as suffering from Exercise Addiction with a side order of Narcissism.
So too, with business or professional disorders. I tend to use search engines to see if an obstacle besetting my professional practice is part of a broader pattern of symptoms experienced by a community of users or whether I am just singularly unlucky. I found that when my searches yielded countless stories on online forums of fellow customers of Microsoft being locked out of their accounts for mysterious reasons, or complaints from a number of authors that self-publishing platform Lulu had not been paying us, then I felt a dark and gloomy satisfaction knowing that I wasn’t the only one* grappling with these things.
So it was, while grinding my teeth in frustration at the obduracy of Twitter algorithms in refusing to recognize the brilliance of my Tweets and to boost them, that I turned to searching the internet to see if anyone else was noticing just how many of us creative practitioners were losing visibility and engagement due to social media algorithms.
Somehow, while plunging down a search engine rabbit hole, I came across a beaut paper called Attached to “The Algorithm”: Making Sense of Algorithmic Precarity on Instagram by Yim Register, Amanda Baughan, Lucy Quin, and Emma S. Spiro.
To quote from the Abstract:
“This work explores how users navigate the opaque and ever-changing algorithmic processes that dictate visibility on Instagram through the lens of Attachment Theory**.” (P. 1)
The authors had conducted research on how Instagram users were affected by Instagram’s unpredictable but controlling algorithms by analysing 1,100 posts on r/Instagram made by a community of Instagrammers who were congregating on Reddit to swap notes on how to get the best out of – and cope with changes to - Instagram’s algorithms.
“We found that the unpredictability in how Instagram rewards or punishes a user can lead to distress, hypervigilance, and a need to appease “the algorithm”. We therefore frame these findings through Attachment Theory, drawing upon the metaphor of Instagram as an unreliable paternalistic figure that inconsistently rewards users.” (P.1)
I found the linking of the word ‘precarity’ to a discussion of algorithms to be both interesting and apt. The authors explain their usage of this word by pointing out that social media algorithms are:
“… opaque—meaning their innerworkings are unclear to the user…” (P. 3)
“… precarious—meaning they are often subject to change (sometimes without notification).” (P. 4)
A combination of these two dynamics adds up to an experience of precarity for an Instagram user who is trying to design social media strategies and craft Insta-friendly posts in order to attract followers, engage customers, and/or connect to social networks or communities of practice. Not knowing how to ‘please’ the algorithm so that it shows your posts to an optimal number of eyes makes it hard to strategise and create suitable content. And dealing with an algorithm that is prone to change its priorities without warning means that any productive social media strategy can be suddenly overturned and rendered useless.
“Creators rely on visibility, engagement, and loyalty to increase their financial prospects, and changes in the algorithms are directly tied to such metrics and therefore business success.” (P. 4)
Thus, algorithmic precarity becomes tied to financial precarity. This happened to me (and much of what is written in ‘Attached to the Algorithm’ can be directly applied to Twitter’s algorithms and the Tweeters they affect). My posts on Twitter were humming along quite nicely for a few years. Nothing I posted went viral, but I was picking up good quality followers and the engagement with my posts was regular and also of good quality – resonant, friendly, interesting, and interested. This directly flowed on to sales of my self-published books on my website and tickets to my online events. These didn’t add up to anything massive in terms of numbers of attendees or revenue, but - still - the income defrayed a few costs and, most importantly, awareness of my writing and my online facilitation flushed out the few precious clients who were able to pay me more grown-up money for mentoring and facilitation services, which was where I was trying to make my real income. In terms of a sales funnel, social media drove awareness of me and my skills; a portion of my social media followers sampled what I was doing at my events or through my writing; and a portion of those hired me to deliver services. As a creative process – and my whole business model was set up to entrench writing, experience design, and creative facilitation as central to how I spend my time, my energy, and make my living – social media helped me to find an audience and readership who was engaged, supportive, appreciative, and, in bringing their own considerable creativity to bear on their engagement with me, reciprocally inspiring.
Then it suddenly stopped. Shortly before Elon arrived to entrench Twitter as a den of trolls, my engagement completely fell off a cliff even though my Twitter strategy hadn’t changed. Other friends and associates told me the same thing had happened to them. An independent game designer, for example, for whom sales of his games was an important component of his income told me that he had lost nearly 50% of views and engagement with his posts and that, correspondingly, sales had plummeted. The effect was bewildering, frustrating, and depressing. Worst of all, none of us seemed to be able to figure out what to do about it due to the opacity of the algorithm and its design.
“Instagram is killing my small business and MANY others.” (2020)” (Instagram user quoted on P. 8).
The authors of ‘Attached to the Algorithm’ sum up the sentiments of this and other r/Instagram posts as “Users express burnout, exhaustion, pointlessness, and helplessness in trying to keep up with the algorithm.” (P. 8)
Given that the subtitle of this Substack is ‘human agency in a digital world’ I was interested to see in a couple of comments from Instagrammers quoted in this paper that described their anxiety around appearing bot-like (and therefore punishable) in the eyes of the algorithm:
“"...I answer all my messages at once, not throughout the day, so it could easily look like I’m a bot I guess? Plus I’m not on every single hour, I visit it in like the morning & at night, and sometimes don’t post for days, so I guess another possible sign to IG that I could be a bot... though I’m legit not, I’m a human." (2020)” (Instagram user quoted on P. 7)
The authors write:
“We observe that users articulate strategies to resist being seen as bot-like, and to “prove” that one is a human to the algorithm.” (P. 7)
Proving that you are a “legit” human to an algorithm: Where does this leave one’s sense of agency?
“We observed that users felt disconnected from their own reasons for using Instagram, simply trying to ‘stay afloat’ and not be ‘punished’ as opposed to guiding their own goals for growth, connection, advocacy, or expression. The helplessness we observed demonstrates the lack of user agency and feelings of control over their own experience.” (P. 13)
Experiencing a disconnect from motivation, inspiration, rationale, and experiencing, instead, a mad scramble to avoid punishment diminishes agency.
“Our investigation reveals a variety of distressed responses to user perceived algorithmic precarity. As evident in the language of Reddit data, Instagram users overwhelmingly view platform engagement through a punishment and reward paradigm, seeking to ‘be treated well’ and ‘not get in trouble’. They also describe a helplessness and lack of agency to control their success and desired outcome on the platform.” (P. 12)
This comment about agency, when viewed against the quotes above about users trying to avoid being seen as bots, gave me an insight: Feeling a lack of agency dehumanises you; it diminishes your sense of being a human with a life lived according to personal values that may be unaligned to the goals of a corporation that owns a social media platform. A human whose choices, experiences, and motivations actually counts for something.
Alongside agency, another casualty of Instagram’s (and, for me, Twitter’s) algorithmic precarity is trust. In describing one style of insecure attachment – avoidance – the authors had this to say:
“A key characteristic of avoidance is the perception that it is not worth the effort to get one’s needs met—because the avoidant individual has observed enough evidence to discount that possibility. Trust has been repeatedly broken and the only option for the avoidant individual is to disengage.” (P. 11) (My highlighting.)
I’ll admit that I recognised my own reaction to social media that set in during 2023 was one of disengagement for the reasons quoted above. Precarity and opacity undermine trust. How can one trust an entity who – apparently randomly – withdraws the things you need – the visibility and engagement that drew you to social media in the first place? And how can one trust something opaque?
Having started out as an avid user of social media many years ago, I am now gradually but steadily disengaging from using it. I don’t see any other solution – I don’t want to sink time and energy and creativity into digital platforms that bury my content. What’s the point? Of course, this has been extremely bad for my professional practice – I can no longer promote what I do at scale and this has caused problems that I am not sure how to fix. On a personal level, I feel deeply sad about all of this – as well as its utility as a marketing tool, social media was something that I used to enjoy very much; it provided inspirational content and wonderful connections. But I no longer find that inspirational content – I assume they’ve been buried by the algorithms too - and those wonderful connections no longer see what I post.
If you are interested in the experience of social media users then I can recommend ‘Attached to the Algorithm’. It’s an interesting read. I recognised much of my own professional frustration and personal sadness in the experience of the studied Instagrammers and found the authors’ commentary to be a useful lens through which to view something that has been a huge disappointment over the last few years.
*More about my misadventures with Microsoft, Lulu, and Amazon soon.
**“Attachment Theory… focuses on human relationships and bonds, and evolved to explain how early childhood experiences later affect adult relationships and dynamics.” (P. 3)
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Postscript:
While I was writing this piece I listened to an interview on the 7am podcast that featured Tim Burrowes talking about the tension between Facebook and the Australian media. I found this comment very interesting:
“You'd see some sort of change to the algorithm, and then suddenly traffic would just drop. And, for the publishers who relied on advertising for their main source of revenue, which, you know, has really been the biggest story of digital media, that would have a big effect each time. So, we’ve seen this sort of reliance, but also, I suppose, a kind of increasing distrust from the traditional media of what might happen next from Facebook. And at the same time, this sort of resentment that they've ended up relying on them and really having helped build the platform themselves by providing that content and that engagement.” – Tim Burrowes from 7am podcast
There would seem to be a world of difference between a news outlet producing journalism on a mass scale and a solo artist promoting their wares on Instagram. But I was interested that Burrowes highlighted issues with the algorithm affecting visibility and engagement and also a growing lack of trust, both of which were mentioned above as being part of the experience of Instagrammers. I also liked that Burrowes mentioned that, by providing content and engagement, the users of social media actually help to build a platform.