Computing the Social: How Capitalism and Taste Shape Computational Social Science

Abstract

The contemporary prevalence of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods has resulted in a rich literature on the factors that shape computational research. Based on 24 months of digital ethnography of a university laboratory and in-depth interviews with its members, this dissertation makes two arguments. First, it asserts that disciplinary aesthetic orders are significant drivers of computational social scientists’ theorizations. These aesthetic attachments shape how social phenomena are conceptualized by computational social scientists. This has implications for how scholarship has linked algorithmic injustices to cultures of computing: providing social science education to platform designers may be insufficient by itself for creating just and equitable technologies. Second, this research highlights that computational social sciences are inextricably tied up with logics of capitalism, because social media platforms function as laboratories of ‘the social’: they selectively carve out sociality and transform it in order to make it knowable with computational methods. Social media platforms, in this context, do not merely serve as tools for research but actively manufacture the very objects of analysis, shaping the domain of the ‘social’ itself.