Using Facebook and Twitter today, like we do these days, liking and sharing and retweeting, it again came to me how complex these basic actions actually, fundamentally are. We click an update to express support, to say “me too”, or just to send a social presence (phatic) style of update: our connection is still working. I am reading what you are saying. In some cases a like or retweet is an endorsement, sometimes not. Sometimes we spread the word because we cannot get our mind around a particular issue or piece of news: could some of you take a look at this, and say if this makes any sense, or not? Many of shared and circulated items are there just for the joke. Tension release and laughing together is important for creating feeling of community.
At the same time, much of these nuances go unnoticed. We just judge the communicative situation, evaluate our social contexts, possibly tweak a bit the distribution range (a closed group, just the closest friends, just the family, all friends, public, etc.) – and then go with the flow. Media is social and our social world is media these days. However, I think it would help to teach, educate and engage more in discussion about “algorithmic literacy”: about our strategies and abilities to read the system that supports, delimits and underlies our media-merged existence today.
This is just a short, late-night note, but I spent a minute trying to find a good primer to contemporary, social media and games related algorithmic literacy, and could not find one. Maybe you can point me to relevant direction? (Blog comments are closed, but my contact details in all leading platforms are readily available.) There are plenty of studies that focus on media literacy, computer literacy, even some on game literacy – but algorithmic literacy focused studies and popular presentations are apparently still harder to come by.
What I mean by everyday algorithmic literacy relates to, for example, how people may strategically follow, like or access social media updates of others, in order to tweak their automated news stream or filter settings: by communicating to the system that I am interested in messages of certain topics, or coming from certain persons, groups or organisations, I am able to influence how my “social graph” develops – until the system logic is again changed, of course. I am not sure how common such “theorycrafting of social media” is these days, but I suspect that pretty much everyone who actively uses these systems instinctively develops some silent knowledge about how their actions produce consequences in their info-sphere, or communicative spaces. Getting that discussion into more self-aware and public ground would be useful. I am sure there are several smart people and teams on social data analysis and information or games literacy fields, at least, who must have much to say on this topic.
Today researcher Sanna Malinen defended her PhD thesis in the University of Tampere. The opponent in the public defence was professor Pekka Räsänen from the University of Turku, professor Frans Mäyrä acted as the custos. The abstract and download link to the full, PDF version of the dissertation, titled Sociability and Sense of Community among Users of Online Services, are below:
frans goes blog 
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