Questo articolo rilegge la letteratura critica e sociologica su algoritmi e IA alla luce di teori... more Questo articolo rilegge la letteratura critica e sociologica su algoritmi e IA alla luce di teorie sociali antropocentriche intorno al potere e alle sue dimensioni. Utilizzando come punto di partenza la classica distinzione concettuale tra potere di (agency) e potere su (dominio), illustro due teorizzazioni principali dell'agency degli algoritmi, che qui chiamo "reticolare" e "culturale", e concettualizzo quattro dimensioni del dominio algoritmico: coercizione opaca, autorità computazionale, condizionamento strutturale e governamentalità dei dati.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Apr 1, 2016
This article consists in a case study analysing three Italian digital newsrooms. The research inv... more This article consists in a case study analysing three Italian digital newsrooms. The research investigates the ways in which editors in chief and newsrooms use Twitter. The journalistic use of Twitter has been the object of a growing number of researches in several national contexts. Their results are hardly generalizable and largely context-dependent. This work observes the choices made by editors in chief concerning their use of social media profiles both on the level of newsroom and from an individual perspective. Following the literature, this analysis points to two theoretical lines: the level of interaction towards Twitter followers and the distribution of soft or hard news. The empirical investigation is based on semi-structured interviews with editors in chief and social media managers as well as on the analysis of tweets produced by their Twitter accounts. Results show that, in the flow everyday newsroom production, Twitter works prevalently as a way to distribute contents. On the contrary, journalists\u2019 individual profiles present legitimation practices regarding both their personal brand and journalism itself
Ogni giorno miliardi di sistemi automatizzati contribuiscono alla costruzione della società, trac... more Ogni giorno miliardi di sistemi automatizzati contribuiscono alla costruzione della società, tracciando distinzioni algoritmiche tra il visibile e l’invisibile, il rilevante e l’irrilevante, il probabile e l’improbabile; le nostre scelte e abitudini generano trame di dati con cui gli algoritmi tessono vite digitali, come abiti su misura. È il machine habitus che riproduce disuguaglianze, plasma comportamenti e opinioni collettive, spesso in modo opaco e con conseguenze imprevedibili. Per comprenderlo serve una sociologia degli algoritmi, proprio come quella delineata da Massimo Airoldi in questo libro.
Sociological theory is often perceived as the semi-obsolete heritage of 19th and 20th century thi... more Sociological theory is often perceived as the semi-obsolete heritage of 19th and 20th century thinkers: good enough to make sense of power, social structure and face-to-face interactions, but substantially inadequate to interpret the now overwhelming technological mediation of social life. Perhaps for this reason, the social sciences see a proliferation of midrange theories of "the digital" following the hype around the technological trend of the momente.g., AI, crypto, blockchain, metaverse. "New technologies reshape society; therefore, brand new concepts and theorizations are needed to make sense of it" appears to be the doxa guiding recent scholarship. Yet, is this always true? Does a digital society necessarily require "digitally native" social theories?
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 1, 2016
In contemporary hyper-connected societies, a peculiar paradox characterizes the collective repres... more In contemporary hyper-connected societies, a peculiar paradox characterizes the collective representations gravitating in the social imaginary. On the one side, they rapidly spread and evolve through communication on social media; on the other side, they are objectified in the form of digital data organized in textual databases, persistent and searchable. This article aims to present a quantitative text analysis technique known as «topic modeling» – which allows the fast exploration of «big» text data while taking into account the polysemic and relational character of language, thus fostering an interpretive gaze. Topic models are increasingly employed in the fields of digital humanities, political sciences and cultural sociology. Here, I will illustrate the methodological implications of topic models using a non-technical language and focusing, in particular, on applicability to online communicative interactions. I will present a case study consisting in the analysis of about 420k unique tweets regarding the 2016 edition of Festival di Sanremo. Through topic modeling, I inductively reconstructed the main frames employed by more than 88k users twitting about this media event. Subsequently, I was able to automatically identify the prevalent frame adopted by each Twitter user involved in the digital discussion.
From the recommendation of cultural content to the identification of potential criminals, a growi... more From the recommendation of cultural content to the identification of potential criminals, a growing number of activities are ordinarily delegated to algorithms and AI systems. These are narrated as neutral technologies which make complex processes more efficient and lead to objective results. However, a wide literature argues that algorithms are social products that reflect the particular interests, cultural assumptions and biases of individuals and organizations. The present contribution aims to deconstruct in a Foucaultian way the algorithmic neutrality myth, illustrating its genesis, discursive facets and weaknesses, also drawing from a series of empirical cases. In the conclusion, we propose a counternarrative of the algorithm focused on explainability and collective sovereignty.
Sharing the "historicist challenge to analytic philosophy" (Glock) we investigate the p... more Sharing the "historicist challenge to analytic philosophy" (Glock) we investigate the philosophical production (and, to a lesser extent, some non-philosophical works as well) on Ludwig Wittgenstein from a distant reading perspective. First, we provide a description of the "Wittgensteinian field" by analyzing several data provided by the Philosopher's Index, an electronic bibliographic database especially devoted to philosophy. Then we analyze these data by using statistical tools (such as for example topic modeling) and we interpret the results historically and sociologically, along the lines of Bourdieu on Heidegger, Lamont on Derrida, Gross on Rorty, and Collins on the whole philosophical tradition.
Recommender systems are a widespread type of online algorithm, which suggests personalised conten... more Recommender systems are a widespread type of online algorithm, which suggests personalised contents to "digital consumers". By automatically creating links between items-such as Amazon products, TV series on Netflix, music artists on Spotify-recommender systems co-construct today's social imaginary. They contribute to shape pop cultures' "webs of meanings" and trace new symbolic connections shared by media publics. Starting from a recent literature about online algorithms' power and diffusion, this article aims at problematizing the relationship between recommender systems and social imaginary. The case of the recommender algorithm employed by YouTube, the world's most popular video sharing web platform, will be presented. Here, it will be interpreted as a twofold technology: on the one hand, the algorithm impacts on the users' digital experiences; on the other hand, it represents a brand new source of real-time data about the trajectories of ...
Questo articolo rilegge la letteratura critica e sociologica su algoritmi e IA alla luce di teori... more Questo articolo rilegge la letteratura critica e sociologica su algoritmi e IA alla luce di teorie sociali antropocentriche intorno al potere e alle sue dimensioni. Utilizzando come punto di partenza la classica distinzione concettuale tra potere di (agency) e potere su (dominio), illustro due teorizzazioni principali dell'agency degli algoritmi, che qui chiamo "reticolare" e "culturale", e concettualizzo quattro dimensioni del dominio algoritmico: coercizione opaca, autorità computazionale, condizionamento strutturale e governamentalità dei dati.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Apr 1, 2016
This article consists in a case study analysing three Italian digital newsrooms. The research inv... more This article consists in a case study analysing three Italian digital newsrooms. The research investigates the ways in which editors in chief and newsrooms use Twitter. The journalistic use of Twitter has been the object of a growing number of researches in several national contexts. Their results are hardly generalizable and largely context-dependent. This work observes the choices made by editors in chief concerning their use of social media profiles both on the level of newsroom and from an individual perspective. Following the literature, this analysis points to two theoretical lines: the level of interaction towards Twitter followers and the distribution of soft or hard news. The empirical investigation is based on semi-structured interviews with editors in chief and social media managers as well as on the analysis of tweets produced by their Twitter accounts. Results show that, in the flow everyday newsroom production, Twitter works prevalently as a way to distribute contents. On the contrary, journalists\u2019 individual profiles present legitimation practices regarding both their personal brand and journalism itself
Ogni giorno miliardi di sistemi automatizzati contribuiscono alla costruzione della società, trac... more Ogni giorno miliardi di sistemi automatizzati contribuiscono alla costruzione della società, tracciando distinzioni algoritmiche tra il visibile e l’invisibile, il rilevante e l’irrilevante, il probabile e l’improbabile; le nostre scelte e abitudini generano trame di dati con cui gli algoritmi tessono vite digitali, come abiti su misura. È il machine habitus che riproduce disuguaglianze, plasma comportamenti e opinioni collettive, spesso in modo opaco e con conseguenze imprevedibili. Per comprenderlo serve una sociologia degli algoritmi, proprio come quella delineata da Massimo Airoldi in questo libro.
Sociological theory is often perceived as the semi-obsolete heritage of 19th and 20th century thi... more Sociological theory is often perceived as the semi-obsolete heritage of 19th and 20th century thinkers: good enough to make sense of power, social structure and face-to-face interactions, but substantially inadequate to interpret the now overwhelming technological mediation of social life. Perhaps for this reason, the social sciences see a proliferation of midrange theories of "the digital" following the hype around the technological trend of the momente.g., AI, crypto, blockchain, metaverse. "New technologies reshape society; therefore, brand new concepts and theorizations are needed to make sense of it" appears to be the doxa guiding recent scholarship. Yet, is this always true? Does a digital society necessarily require "digitally native" social theories?
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 1, 2016
In contemporary hyper-connected societies, a peculiar paradox characterizes the collective repres... more In contemporary hyper-connected societies, a peculiar paradox characterizes the collective representations gravitating in the social imaginary. On the one side, they rapidly spread and evolve through communication on social media; on the other side, they are objectified in the form of digital data organized in textual databases, persistent and searchable. This article aims to present a quantitative text analysis technique known as «topic modeling» – which allows the fast exploration of «big» text data while taking into account the polysemic and relational character of language, thus fostering an interpretive gaze. Topic models are increasingly employed in the fields of digital humanities, political sciences and cultural sociology. Here, I will illustrate the methodological implications of topic models using a non-technical language and focusing, in particular, on applicability to online communicative interactions. I will present a case study consisting in the analysis of about 420k unique tweets regarding the 2016 edition of Festival di Sanremo. Through topic modeling, I inductively reconstructed the main frames employed by more than 88k users twitting about this media event. Subsequently, I was able to automatically identify the prevalent frame adopted by each Twitter user involved in the digital discussion.
From the recommendation of cultural content to the identification of potential criminals, a growi... more From the recommendation of cultural content to the identification of potential criminals, a growing number of activities are ordinarily delegated to algorithms and AI systems. These are narrated as neutral technologies which make complex processes more efficient and lead to objective results. However, a wide literature argues that algorithms are social products that reflect the particular interests, cultural assumptions and biases of individuals and organizations. The present contribution aims to deconstruct in a Foucaultian way the algorithmic neutrality myth, illustrating its genesis, discursive facets and weaknesses, also drawing from a series of empirical cases. In the conclusion, we propose a counternarrative of the algorithm focused on explainability and collective sovereignty.
Sharing the "historicist challenge to analytic philosophy" (Glock) we investigate the p... more Sharing the "historicist challenge to analytic philosophy" (Glock) we investigate the philosophical production (and, to a lesser extent, some non-philosophical works as well) on Ludwig Wittgenstein from a distant reading perspective. First, we provide a description of the "Wittgensteinian field" by analyzing several data provided by the Philosopher's Index, an electronic bibliographic database especially devoted to philosophy. Then we analyze these data by using statistical tools (such as for example topic modeling) and we interpret the results historically and sociologically, along the lines of Bourdieu on Heidegger, Lamont on Derrida, Gross on Rorty, and Collins on the whole philosophical tradition.
Recommender systems are a widespread type of online algorithm, which suggests personalised conten... more Recommender systems are a widespread type of online algorithm, which suggests personalised contents to "digital consumers". By automatically creating links between items-such as Amazon products, TV series on Netflix, music artists on Spotify-recommender systems co-construct today's social imaginary. They contribute to shape pop cultures' "webs of meanings" and trace new symbolic connections shared by media publics. Starting from a recent literature about online algorithms' power and diffusion, this article aims at problematizing the relationship between recommender systems and social imaginary. The case of the recommender algorithm employed by YouTube, the world's most popular video sharing web platform, will be presented. Here, it will be interpreted as a twofold technology: on the one hand, the algorithm impacts on the users' digital experiences; on the other hand, it represents a brand new source of real-time data about the trajectories of ...
Per comprendere se oggi la sfera virtuale sia in linea con quanto osservato nella realtà della Co... more Per comprendere se oggi la sfera virtuale sia in linea con quanto osservato nella realtà della Convenzione Nazionale abbiamo analizzato i tweet pubblicati dagli account ufficiali dei tre candidati alla segreteria PD a partire dall'inizio della campagna elettorale (vale a dire, dal 6 Marzo in poi). Queste "tracce digitali" della campagna sono state analizzate su due fronti: da un lato abbiamo studiato le interazioni dei candidati con 'il popolo della rete', dall'altro abbiamo identificato le parole chiave che caratterizzano i cinguettii dei tre sfidanti.
Non solo i confini tra situazioni sociali online e offline sono sfumati dal punto di vista dell’a... more Non solo i confini tra situazioni sociali online e offline sono sfumati dal punto di vista dell’attore/utente (e fuorvianti per studiosi e analisti), ma – questo è il punto cruciale – vi è una mutua influenza tra questi due mondi comunicativi solo apparentemente separati e separabili: quello che accade su Facebook influenza il mio comportamento offline, “entra” nelle mie interazioni analogiche quotidiane, e viceversa.
La penetrazione sempre più capillare dei social media nella quotidianità ha portato le nostre vi... more La penetrazione sempre più capillare dei social media nella quotidianità ha portato le nostre vite, le nostre “vere” vite, ad immergersi sempre più placidamente nel territorio digitale. È difficile ricordarsi se una conversazione abbia avuto luogo su Facebook, via SMS, via WhatsApp, via Skype, telefonicamente o dal vivo; forse questo perché non percepiamo nessun confine significativo tra situazioni sociali delimitate elettronicamente e fisicamente.
Nella pratica, il lavoro invisibile e costante degli algoritmi online ha come prodotto finale i v... more Nella pratica, il lavoro invisibile e costante degli algoritmi online ha come prodotto finale i video che ci vengono presentati nell’homepage di YouTube, i post in evidenza sui social network, i pop-up pubblicitari nei siti che visitiamo, l’ordine con cui vengono elencati i compleanni dei nostri contatti su Facebook e, in generale, gran parte di ciò che ci circonda nella nostra esistenza digitale. Ad essere attentamente calcolato non è solo l’”ora”, il presente, ma anche ciò che “potrebbe interessarci” immediatamente dopo: gli accessori per l’aspirapolvere appena acquistata su Amazon, un altro brano blues su Spotify, una nuova serie tv su Netflix.
Se Google Earth fotografa la faccia “materiale” e statica del mondo, il web e i social networks ... more Se Google Earth fotografa la faccia “materiale” e statica del mondo, il web e i social networks registrano la faccia “immateriale” e fluida delle culture, delle norme sociali, del consumo, delle vite come sono narrate dagli esseri umani in prima persona, e dunque delle loro identità. Questo articolo è uno studio e una riflessione teorica sull’identità sociale tra rete e realtà.
Il Festival di Sanremo è un evento ibrido, pensato per la radio, portato al successo dalla televi... more Il Festival di Sanremo è un evento ibrido, pensato per la radio, portato al successo dalla televisione e, oggi, caso esemplare di Social Tv – la convergenza tra mezzo televisivo e social media. Molto si è detto sulla risonanza di #sanremo2016 su Twitter, sui personaggi più menzionati, sul sentiment delle serate e, in generale, su quanto quest’ultima edizione sia riuscita a catalizzare il dibattito digitale. Poco, invece, sui pubblici coinvolti e sulle sfaccettature dei loro discorsi – insomma, su come gli utenti Twitter hanno “incorniciato” l’evento e i suoi protagonisti. Per toccare questi punti vi proponiamo l’analisi di un corpus di 362.868 tweet unici (esclusi i RT) relativi ai cinque giorni di #sanremo2016 (9-13 Febbraio), confrontati con 23.544 tweet unici pubblicati il 14 Febbraio 2015 e facenti riferimento alla serata finale della scorsa edizione. La scelta di escludere i retweet dal campione mira a far emergere più chiaramente l’eterogeneità delle voci dei 130.169 autori “materiali” dei tweet monitorati, mentre il confronto con Sanremo 2015 punta a evidenziare l’evoluzione della copertura Twitter delle due edizioni targate Carlo Conti.
Sunday Assembly is an atheist church, defined by its members as a “secular community that meet re... more Sunday Assembly is an atheist church, defined by its members as a “secular community that meet regularly to celebrate life”. Born in UK in 2013, it is now composed by almost 100 local assemblies worldwide, mostly located in the US, UK and Australia. These “churches without God” organise social activities and events promoting individual well-being and communitarian solidarity. Sunday Assemblies foster collective rituality without supernatural doctrine, as well as a shared belief in humanity rather than in deity. A relevant part of this community-building process takes place online, particularly by means of Facebook pages – which are locally managed in accordance with centralized directives. Is this belonging without believing? Is Sunday Assembly a case of new individualised religiosity? Or is it an example of “spiritual atheism” instead? Moving from these questions, the present work consists in an explorative investigation of the ways members represent their adherence to such communities and relationship with institutionalized religiosity. Through the unobtrusive analysis of almost six thousand online comments collected on all Sunday Assemblies’ Facebook pages, we identified and quantified the main themes and frames occurring in digital narrations. We did so by applying a quantitative text analysis technique known as topic modeling. This way, it has been possible to reconstruct the meanings attached to Sunday Assembly from below, and interpret them along two main analytical dichotomies: religious vs. atheist participation; individual self-fulfilment vs. collective solidarity.
Ogni giorno miliardi di sistemi automatizzati contribuiscono alla costruzione della società, trac... more Ogni giorno miliardi di sistemi automatizzati contribuiscono alla costruzione della società, tracciando distinzioni algoritmiche tra il visibile e l’invisibile, il rilevante e l’irrilevante, il probabile e l’improbabile; le nostre scelte e abitudini generano trame di dati con cui gli algoritmi tessono vite digitali, come abiti su misura. È il machine habitus che riproduce disuguaglianze, plasma comportamenti e opinioni collettive, spesso in modo opaco e con conseguenze imprevedibili. Per comprenderlo serve una sociologia degli algoritmi, proprio come quella delineata da Massimo Airoldi in questo libro.
We commonly think of society as made of and by humans, but with the proliferation of machine lear... more We commonly think of society as made of and by humans, but with the proliferation of machine learning and AI technologies, this is clearly no longer the case. Billions of automated systems tacitly contribute to the social construction of reality by drawing algorithmic distinctions between the visible and the invisible, the relevant and the irrelevant, the likely and the unlikely – on and beyond platforms.
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this book develops an original sociology of algorithms as social agents, actively participating in social life. Through a wide range of examples, Massimo Airoldi shows how society shapes algorithmic code, and how this culture in the code guides the practical behaviour of the code in the culture, shaping society in turn. The ‘machine habitus’ is the generative mechanism at work throughout myriads of feedback loops linking humans with artificial social agents, in the context of digital infrastructures and pre-digital social structures.
Machine Habitus will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, media and cultural studies, science and technology studies and information technology, and to anyone interested in the growing role of algorithms and AI in our social and cultural life.
Introduzione all'antologia "Datacrazia - Politica, cultura algoritmica e conflitti al tempo dei b... more Introduzione all'antologia "Datacrazia - Politica, cultura algoritmica e conflitti al tempo dei big data" (D Editore, 2018) http://deditore.com/prodotto/datacrazia/
Digital Youth Subcultures. Performing ‘Transgressive’ Identities in Digital Social Spaces, 2023
Rap music is one of the main components of hip-hop culture, together with break-dance and graffit... more Rap music is one of the main components of hip-hop culture, together with break-dance and graffiti; this music emerged in the United States during the late 1970s, but has quickly spread throughout all the continents. But what is rap? Music genres have always revealed boundaries which are not only fuzzy in their definition, but they are also often intended as stakes in dialectical processes involving the different actors animating musical scenes, and rap too has been and still is clearly exposed to these dynamics. During the last decade, however, the emergent role of social media and digital platforms opened a new phase for these processes, because it provided them with a new stage and battleground. The chapter aims at reflecting on this topic by focusing on the Italian rap scene. Originated as a grassroots urban movement in the early 1990s, and become mainstream in the 2000s, also Italian rap music has recently entered a novel phase of its relatively short life, that is, a "YouTube era." Key names of the 2010s Italian hip-hop scene have become nationally famous mainly thanks to the enormous circulation of their videos. "Old-school" Italian rap videos are also widely present and commented on the platform. Nowadays, two generations of Italian rap lovers interact publicly across YouTube's techno-social contexts, fighting on the authenticity and street credibility of national and international artists, while continuously negotiating the boundaries of a subcultural taste regime in constant transition. This chapter analyses the discursive boundary works, forms of aesthetic resistance and manifestations of symbolic violence characterising the Italian rap subculture on YouTube, based on a mixed-method analysis of a large sample of comments and metadata extracted from the platform.
The essay outlines the main aspects of the two-volume special issue "Istituzioni e conflittualità... more The essay outlines the main aspects of the two-volume special issue "Istituzioni e conflittualità: una prospettiva interdisciplinare", depicting the conference from which it has proceeded and highlighting its interdisciplinary nature. The two authors therefore describe the ten articles included into this publication, integrating them in a coherent general framework.
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Papers by Massimo Airoldi
Is this belonging without believing? Is Sunday Assembly a case of new individualised religiosity? Or is it an example of “spiritual atheism” instead? Moving from these questions, the present work consists in an explorative investigation of the ways members represent their adherence to such communities and relationship with institutionalized religiosity. Through the unobtrusive analysis of almost six thousand online comments collected on all Sunday Assemblies’ Facebook pages, we identified and quantified the main themes and frames occurring in digital narrations. We did so by applying a quantitative text analysis technique known as topic modeling. This way, it has been possible to reconstruct the meanings attached to Sunday Assembly from below, and interpret them along two main analytical dichotomies: religious vs. atheist participation; individual self-fulfilment vs. collective solidarity.
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this book develops an original sociology of algorithms as social agents, actively participating in social life. Through a wide range of examples, Massimo Airoldi shows how society shapes algorithmic code, and how this culture in the code guides the practical behaviour of the code in the culture, shaping society in turn. The ‘machine habitus’ is the generative mechanism at work throughout myriads of feedback loops linking humans with artificial social agents, in the context of digital infrastructures and pre-digital social structures.
Machine Habitus will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, media and cultural studies, science and technology studies and information technology, and to anyone interested in the growing role of algorithms and AI in our social and cultural life.
http://deditore.com/prodotto/datacrazia/