As part of the second Midweek Conversations session, we were pleased to present a working paper from the ALGOFEED PRIN Project, featuring the collaborative efforts of four MSMC members —Airoldi, Caliandro, Gandini, and Rama— alongside esteemed academic colleagues from outside the School. This initiative highlights the growing network of MSMC’s research collaborations, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on key issues in digital media and consumption.
Working paper from ALGOFEED PRIN project
Airoldi, M., Caliandro, A., Gandini, A., Rama, I., Russo, A., & Punziano, G.
This paper challenges theories of liquification of consumption in the age of platforms by providing unique empirical evidences of the combined role of social structures and digital infrastructures in the governing of content consumption patterns online. Through a mixed-method research design combining one year of YouTube data donated by a quota sample of 110 individuals from two Italian regions with survey data and follow-up qualitative interviews, we show, on the one hand, how gender and cultural capital differently (and yet significantly) affect individual trajectories of video consumption and, on the other, how this social structuration is mediated and opaquely articulated by platform infrastructures. Our qualitatively driven digital investigation advances previous research by illuminating the longitudinal evolution of actual consumption practices involving a wide range of cultural content (876,106 YouTube videos) with an unprecedented level of granularity and analytical resolution. We discuss our findings in dialogue with a multidisciplinary literature on the social and technological shaping of digital consumption. We contribute to consumption theories by revitalizing and revising post-structuralist perspectives in sociology and consumer research in light of ubiquitous platformization processes.
