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Research article
First published online July 24, 2022



PHENOMENAL ALGORHYTHMS: THE SENSORIAL ORCHESTRATION OF “REAL-TIME” IN THE SOCIAL
MEDIA MANIFOLD

Ludmila Lupinacci https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4371-6768
L.Lupinacci-Amaral@lse.ac.ukView all authors and affiliations
OnlineFirst
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221109952
 * Contents
    * Abstract
    * Introduction
    * Happening now: social media and their alleged realtimeness
    * In case you missed it: fluid temporalities in the algorithmic media
      manifold
    * You are up to date: from the phenomenology of time to a rhythmic politics
      of temporality
    * Methods
    * Phenomenal algorhythms: social media as sensorially orchestrated
    * Real talk on real-time: instantaneity, freshness, simultaneity, and
      ephemerality
    * Concluding remarks: the sensorial orchestration of real-time
    * Funding
    * ORCID iD
    * Footnotes
    * References
    * Biographies
    * Supplementary Material

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    * Figures and tables




ABSTRACT

If our sociality is intertwined with the logics of social media, then the
examination of the temporalities that are immanent in these technologies
contributes to the understanding of our very conditions of existence. And even
if algorithmic sorting is increasingly employed to deliver what is “relevant” at
the “right-time,” the notion of “real-time” still permeates these platforms’
operations. Through a critical phenomenological approach, I examine the
interplay of chronological and algorithmic ordering. To operationalize the idea
of temporality as both subjectively experienced and always arranged by the
platforms themselves, I use rhythm as an analytical device. Based on accounts of
lived experience obtained through the conduction of the diary-interview method
with London-based social media users, I foreground how “the algorithm” is used
as a vehicle to make sense of platforms’ temporalities, reflecting struggles and
negotiations over social coordination and temporal control. I argue that
realtimeness is also rhythmic, and can therefore be scrutinized as a “sensorial
orchestration.”


INTRODUCTION

Social media platforms produce specific temporal configurations to foreground
their status as always-updating structures, which in turn encourages the
continuous quantifiable engagement that sustains their data-driven business
models (Chun, 2017). This article starts from the premise that, even in a
context in which algorithmic sorting is increasingly employed to provide users
with what is “relevant” to them individually at the “right-time” (Bucher, 2020),
the notion of “real-time” still permeates these companies’ operation and
rhetoric. To generate the data footprint required for their profitability,
platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter continuously deploy
time-sensitive prompts and socio-technical affordances that create a sense of
“presentness” (Coleman, 2018b, 2020a) Even though most scholars in the
humanities and social sciences seem now to agree on the plural and multiple
character of temporality (Jordheim and Ytreberg, 2021), algorithm-driven social
media add further layers of complexity to this debate—a discussion that matters
precisely because time is a fundamental parameter for the ordering and structure
of social life (Zerubavel, 1985).
Recently, there has been a profusion of scholarship discussing and theorizing
the temporalities of digital platforms and practices (Wajcman, 2015), including
the fluid state of the real-time, the present, and the now in social media
(Coleman, 2018a, 2018b, 2020a, 2020b; Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014; Weltevrede et
al., 2014) and, alternatively, the prominence of competing temporal regimes
emergent from the agency of pervasive algorithmic systems (Bucher, 2018, 2020;
Carmi, 2020). My aim is to contribute to these debates by tackling an aspect
that, I believe, has not been explored empirically until now—and, in turn, to
use these empirical observations to refine and expand our available
theorizations. Crucially, my focus is not on how an objective real-time is
constructed (or negated) by specific platforms, interfaces, or affordances. It
is, in turn, centered in exploring how it feels to use social media (as an
environment, not as discrete applications), how these platforms appear to their
users in their everydayness and habitualness, and whether realtimeness
(Weltevrede et al., 2014) is ever really fulfilled in this complex interplay of
chronological and algorithmic ordering.
At the core of this debate is the existential relationship between technological
infrastructures and the possibilities of sensibility and intelligibility
afforded by them (Bucher, 2018). That is, the power of social media is, at least
partially, linked to how they control what and when we see of the world.
Fundamentally, I argue, this is a phenomenological problem, marked by the
dispute over “the conditions for things showing up in the world and mattering to
us” (Hoy, 2012: 63). This article is, then, an attempt to respond to the demand
for a critical phenomenology of social media, which is not blind to the
productive and commercial forces that move those technologies while also
centering the experiences of being connected through them (Couldry and
Kallinikos, 2018). In broad terms, phenomenology is concerned with the
examination of how the world “appears” to our stream of consciousness
(Merleau-Ponty, 2012). The starting point of a critical phenomenology of social
media is the understanding that, in these platforms, “appearances” are never
neutral or organic (Carmi, 2020), as they “are always the result of prior
processing” (Couldry and Kallinikos, 2018: 150).
Although it has traditionally been criticized for its alleged solipsistic and
apolitical character, phenomenology is ultimately interested in the examination
of the structures of experience (Markham and Rodgers, 2017). Experiences,
although subjective and individual, are also organized in certain ways by
broader forces, being always contingent on processes of orientation (Ahmed,
2006). This issue is at the heart of what Highmore (2011) calls “sensorial
orchestration”—the arrangement “of what is seen or felt as notable, perceivable,
valuable, noticeable” (p. 23). In this article, to operationalize the idea of
temporality as both subjectively experienced and always orchestrated in certain
ways by the platforms themselves, I deploy the notion of rhythm as an analytical
device. It is the perceived temporalities of algorithmic media that I refer to
as “phenomenal1 algorhythms.” In this article, I explore when and how these
rhythms afford a sense of realtimeness. According to my analysis, this occurs
through the orchestration of different sensibilities, which I call
instantaneity, simultaneity, ephemerality, and freshness.
Finally, although much of the scholarship available paints a picture in which
discrete platforms can construct relatively enclosed and self-contained worlds
which afford particular experiences of time, this project challenges this
conception by looking at social media as an ecology of interconnected and
always-shifting platforms, practices, interfaces, and sites (Madianou and
Miller, 2013). Because my focus is on how social media are experienced in the
context of everyday life, rather than assuming rigid use of isolated platforms,
I am interested precisely in the combination of platforms and the movement and
transit between them in what is now our complex “media manifold” (Couldry and
Hepp, 2016).


HAPPENING NOW: SOCIAL MEDIA AND THEIR ALLEGED REALTIMENESS

Although different platforms have varied ways of sorting content (e.g. Reddit
“crowdsources” the ranking of posts through the upvote system), and even if
users are sometimes given the chance to choose between “chronologic” and
“algorithmic” ordering (as happens on Twitter by switching the timeline to
“latest Tweets”), digital media have been generally understood to privilege
real-time (Gehl, 2011). It goes without saying that real-time has a much longer
tradition in the history of computation and automation (Chun, 2011). In social
media, although, it generally encapsulates the promises of newness and nowness,
both in terms of content presentation and user interaction (Gehl, 2011). The
traction of real-time seems to capture a longing for speed (Wajcman, 2015) and
immediacy (Tomlinson, 2007)—referring here to both instantaneity and
non-mediacy, or a lack of mediative intervention (Scannell, 2014). In broad
terms, then, real-time reflects a promised “transparent technologically mediated
contact” (Chun, 2011: 88), and also entails a pledged direct experience of the
“now” (Coleman, 2020a).
Despite the obvious stickiness of the term, Weltevrede et al. (2014) correctly
suggest that, analytically, real-time “does not explain, it needs to be
explained.” In critically examining the concept, they argue that “media do not
operate in real-time, devices and their cultures operate as pacers of real-time”
(Weltevrede et al., 2014: 127). Their notion of pace focuses on the speed of
change of the content presented, which directs attention to how realtimeness is
organized through various infrastructures. They conclude by defining
realtimeness as a socio-technical construction that is both embedded in and
immanent to platforms and their cultures (Weltevrede et al., 2014).
The structuration of temporal experiences by social media is also the concern of
Kaun and Stiernstedt (2014), who explore how Facebook’s business model—focused
on speed, immediacy, and newness—is reflected in its technical affordances.
According to them, as part of the now widespread strategy of engaging users for
extended periods of time, Facebook’s flow emphasizes newness—even if, in
practice, the order of the stream is also heavily influenced by factors other
than mere currency. In summary, Facebook’s immediacy relies on the fact that the
flow is characterized by rapid change and that, therefore, each post or
interaction is made visible for a short period of time (Kaun and Stiernstedt,
2014).
Coleman (2018a, 2018b, 2020a, 2020b) also engages with the apparent dominance of
immediacy in digital media. By examining how platforms use the rhetoric of
real-time in their promotional materials, Coleman (2018a: 601) reiterates the
manifoldness of this temporality—digital media’s time, although marked by the
now and the immediate, “is also on-going and open-ended.” The present, then, is
active, flexible, multiple, and changing (Coleman, 2018a, 2020a). Her extensive
work on temporality also raises the question of “whether ‘the now’ is (or is
becoming) a dominant way in which temporality is constituted and organized in
today’s digital societies” (Coleman, 2020a: 1696)—a query that is central to the
present article.
The contributions offered by these authors are all highly valuable for expanding
our understanding of digital media’s temporality, and for the detailed scrutiny
of how each platform constructs its own time, which often (but not always)
privileges realtimeness. One of the remaining gaps in our theorization, however,
is that while a “device” perspective is extremely useful for specifying the
particular temporalization of certain sites and apps, the reality is that
platforms are not often experienced in isolation, and their content frequently
flows beyond and across specific interfaces. In practice, the use of social
media platforms in the context of everyday life is much messier, more recursive,
and fluid than documented by most of the literature on real-time.
If we go beyond platform-oriented approaches to focus on lived experience, more
than simply a matter of information organization (Weltevrede et al., 2014)
real-time refers to a broader expectation of social coordination—a
synchronization with the events of the world and the experiences of others
(Jordheim and Ytreberg, 2021). It is this referential, social nature of
realtimeness, rather than a strictly technical capacity, that particularly
interests me. Under this conception, real-time matters because it encompasses
negotiations over social organization, “reality,” authentic connection, and
control. Those disputes, which have a long legacy in the history of digital
mediation (Chun, 2011; Gehl, 2011; Van Es, 2016), acquire further layers of
complexity in a context of increasing algorithmic intervention, marked by opaque
formulas and their concealed operation (Carmi, 2020; Kant, 2020).


IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: FLUID TEMPORALITIES IN THE ALGORITHMIC MEDIA MANIFOLD

Recently, one feature of social media has attracted unprecedented academic
interest, while at the same time finding enormous traction in popular discourse:
platforms’ algorithmic systems—or, simply put, “the algorithm.” In this context,
the term designates the (often obscured) formulas that guide the content
organization of social media. Algorithmic platforms claim to offer what is
relevant to us individually while veiling their very operation behind a
discourse of impartiality and objectivity (Beer, 2017; Bucher, 2017, 2018;
Carmi, 2020; Kant, 2020).
While it is beyond the scope of this article to offer an in-depth discussion of
algorithmic infrastructures, one specific aspect of their (perceived)
performativity is of central interest to my purposes: the fact that they are
said to disrupt social media’s previous “chronological” ordering. As indicated
by Bucher (2018), the algorithmic logic means that platforms’ content
presentation is no longer ruled by real-time: “Algorithmic media such as
Facebook are more about ‘right-time’ than they are about real-time (p. 80).” She
describes a shift from focus on “nowness” or “recency” to one that privileges
reaching the right user in the time in which this content will be more relevant,
engaging, or interesting. While the real-time web is governed by chronology, the
algorithmic one is focused on the most opportune timing for a given encounter
(Bucher, 2020). Still, according to her, the logic of right-time does not
completely displace the real-time, but rather incorporates it “as a function of
relevance” (Bucher, 2020: 1712).
Moreover, social media are characterized by a permanent state of becoming—they
are “(a)live” technologies, as their constant movement is key to their logic of
the update (Berry, 2011; Chun, 2017) and their overall framing as gateways to an
endlessly pulsating life (Beer, 2019). And yet, algorithmic media are said to
focus not on a steady temporality guided by universal events but rather on “a
series of individuals that (cor)respond in their own time to singular, yet
connected events” (Chun, 2017: 27). Crucial here is the understanding that
algorithms are not stable objects, as they are entities enacted by
socio-technical practices which also affect human practices and experiences
(Seaver, 2017).
In short, algorithmic ordering makes it difficult for users to understand the
actual operation of the platforms, and to know when and where to find the
content that is technically “new” or happening “now.” This alleged shift from
chronological linearity to a messier, computational organization has profound
consequences for our experiences of the social world—for how, ultimately, the
world “appears” to us through social media—which in turn has significant
implications for a phenomenological investigation.


YOU ARE UP TO DATE: FROM THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME TO A RHYTHMIC POLITICS OF
TEMPORALITY

From a phenomenological perspective, temporality, as a situated account of past,
present, and future, is considered to always be relational (Heidegger, 2008),
and therefore “how long the present lasts will depend on the goal and the origin
of the interpretive practice” (Hoy, 2012: 91). This means that temporality is
seen as dependent on other aspects, including affective states—how we find
ourselves in a given situation, and how we feel, condition what and how we can
perceive (Heidegger, 2008; Highmore, 2011; Hoy, 2012). I posit that a productive
strategy for a phenomenological inspection of social media’s temporality is to
use rhythm as an analytical device. Rhythms are patterns of movement resultant
from “sensorial orchestration” (Highmore, 2011), systematic arrangements of
notes that produce a flow, and which are composed by the cyclical intercalation
of rapidity and slowness, repetition and difference (Lefebvre, 2004).
In this regard, Miyazaki (2012) coined the term algorhythm to characterize the
interplay of the computational logic of mathematical formulas (algorithms) with
the rhythmic movement of cultural phenomena. Crucially, Miyazaki’s reflections
are centered on the measurable temporal effects of technical processing. His use
of algorhythmics, then, is based on a software studies approach to computational
working. I am, in turn, interested in the experienced, phenomenal rhythms
produced in ordinary encounters with algorithmic media.
More recently, Carmi (2020) called rhythmedia the practice by which “media
companies render people, objects and their relations as rhythms and (re)order
them for economic purposes (p. 119).” Carmi’s work illuminates the arranged
character of relations that are concealed by the platforms under a foggy
rhetoric of “organic” ordering. Rhythmedia refers to the intervention of
platforms in ranking people and their relations, thus defining the very forms of
“sociality” that can emerge from these technologies (Carmi, 2020). Importantly,
rhythms are not natural or organic, as they result from ordering mechanisms and
calculated strategies (Carmi, 2020).
Rhythm is, in short, about both perception and its arrangement—it is, in
phenomenological words, the “organization of time in parts accessible to the
senses” (Sachs, 1952: 387). In this regard, I posit that, instead of
aprioristically subscribing to conceptions of social media as inherently
chronological, “kairological” (Bucher, 2020), or even timeless, observing the
experiential rhythms produced in everyday encounters with these technologies
seems more generative for examining the manifold and contingent character of
temporality. In examining the rhythms, I aim to identify different modalities of
mediated synchronization—of temporal alignments between people and technologies
(Jordheim and Ytreberg, 2021). Key here is the understanding that temporality is
subjected to ordering and yet also susceptible to contestation (Jordheim and
Ytreberg, 2021), which seems fruitful for an empirical analysis centered on
lived experiences.


METHODS

Empirically, rather than focusing on allegedly impartial depictions of a given
phenomenon, phenomenology focuses precisely on individual, subjective
descriptions, from which it “asks ‘What is this experience like?’ as it attempts
to unfold meanings as they are lived in everyday existence” (Laverty, 2003: 22).
The methodological stages for the project from which this article originated
consisted of eliciting accounts of concrete lived experience, deploying a
phenomenological sensibility to organize these accounts into themes that
elucidate the questions of interest, and then presenting these themes in a
detailed, evocative narrative, from which I draw conclusions.
In practical terms, I conducted a thematic analysis (Clarke and Braun, 2017) of
qualitative data gathered through the diary-interview method (Zimmerman and
Wieder, 1977), while embracing a phenomenological disposition. The 20
participants were adults who live in London (United Kingdom) and make use of
social media. In 2019, they completed a 5-day-long qualitative diary describing
their experiences with and of social media technologies, which was preceded and
followed by semi-structured interviews; the analyzed dataset comprised 40
transcribed interviews (i.e. a pre-diary and a post-diary interview with each
participant) and 100 diary entries. I tried to recruit individuals that could
offer a greater heterogeneity of experiences—the rationale being that any
evidence found would not be specific to a particular group, population, or
context, but instead more likely to consist of a phenomenon that is observable
across diverse cases (Robinson, 2014). Acknowledging that there is no such thing
as a standard or archetypical user of social media, the aim of my analysis is to
provide granular, illustrative descriptions and reflections that allow for the
examination of the common structures of lived experience.
It is worth pointing out that the emphasis on “everyday life” is always at risk
of underplaying significant social inequalities. In this regard, there is an
increasing body of scholarship examining how experiences of and with technology
are contingent on one’s gender, race, sexuality, class, and (dis)abilities,
among other social categories. While I recognize and appreciate the role of
these distinctions and their intersectional manifestations, one of the
limitations of this article is that it only considers their role in shaping
experience when they are explicitly mentioned by the interviewee. Despite the
nuances intrinsic to each of these categories, a phenomenological take on
mediation is premised on the idea that there is an experiential situation that
is available to us all (Scannell, 2014). The analytical aim is, then, to
identify patterns across the individual experiences, perceptions, and
verbalizations provided by a small group of people, which then are used to
inform and review wider theorizations.
To recruit participants, I used a multi-sited selection across London,
complemented by online adverts. I tried to ensure the inclusion of participants
from different age groups and genders, who live in diverse neighborhoods, and
have different types of occupation, to increase the likelihood of obtaining a
multiplicity of experiences of, and with, social media. Recruitment
advertisements were distributed in coffee shops, co-working spaces,
universities, pubs, and libraries in a range of locations across the city and
its suburbs—Bethnal Green, Brixton, Croydon, Hammersmith, Kentish Town, Mile
End, Peckham, Shoreditch, Stoke Newington, Tooting, Wood Green, and adjacent
areas—supported by the sharing of a digital version of these ads on Facebook
groups related to some of these neighborhoods. The recruitment process was more
laborious than initially anticipated, and I attribute the difficulty in
retaining participants to the diary requirement. I then started asking the
participants themselves to nominate other people who they thought would be keen
to take part. The profile of the 20 participants who completed the study can be
found in the supplementary file.
Before the conduct of any interviews, and after research ethics review,2 the
prospective participants were told the general aims of the project, received a
sheet containing all the relevant information, and signed an informed consent
form. Whereas the data collected through the diaries and interviews were not
made confidential in this project—after all, verbatim quotations are made public
in the following sections—I committed to anonymize the identities of those
involved. I therefore chose pseudonyms for each of the participants, and
deliberately omitted certain details about their occupation or location to
prevent their identification.
Although qualitative coding is often framed as “organic,” it is important to
acknowledge the active role of the researcher in the identification of themes
(Clarke and Braun, 2017). Themes do not “emerge” from the data but are actually
constructed according to specific interests and theoretical frameworks (Braun
and Clarke, 2006). The accounts of lived experience obtained through the
interviews and diaries, therefore, are never examined outside of the theoretical
framework described in previous sections—even though I remained open to insights
that would challenge, contradict, or complexify this framework. To flesh out the
questions of interest, the final list of themes and codes was elaborated, at
times to emphasize similarities between participants, and at others to highlight
divergences and heterogeneities in the dataset. Rather than offering an
exhaustive analysis of social media use, I focused instead on those moments in
which the real-time synchronization through technology (even if only as a
partially achieved or frustrated potential) seemed particularly prominent.
The platforms most frequently mentioned by the interviewees were Instagram,
WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Messenger. Participants also cited
Discord, FaceTime, Hinge, iMessage, LinkedIn, Periscope, Pinterest, Reddit,
Skype, Slack, Telegram, TikTok, Tinder, Tumblr, Twitch, WeChat, and YouTube.
Within these platforms, there is a vast array of formats, content, and uses. I
embraced this multiplicity to explore the experienced rhythms of the social
media manifold. Following the theoretical conception of temporality as both
subjected to orchestration and at the same time capable of instability and
contestation, the first empirical section focuses specifically on the
negotiation between these in light of the perceived agency of algorithms, paving
the way for the unpacking of the instances in which rhythms are experienced as
marked by realtimeness.


PHENOMENAL ALGORHYTHMS: SOCIAL MEDIA AS SENSORIALLY ORCHESTRATED

While some platforms are more transparent about the way they rank and sort
content, for the most part social media now promise to tailor their stream to
each individual user. The first dimension of algorithmic systems that the
interviewees seem to acknowledge, therefore, is the platforms’ curational
character. The interviewees’ verbalizations suggest that any chronological,
“pre-algorithmic” platform was assumed to be unfiltered and exhaustive,
delivering everything that was posted and shared, in real-time. In this regard,
participants described noticing, based both on their own personal experiences
with the platforms and from hearing or reading about it elsewhere, a transition
toward an organization based on either “popularity” (dependent on the
quantifiable engagement a given post gets) or “relevance”—understood as the
presumed significance of a given content to the individual. Monica (26 F,3
illustrator) elaborated on this shift, which she observed on Instagram:
> They have an algorithm, so it is about how people interact with your account.
> The people who interact more with your account are going to see your posts
> more often, and people who interact the least, even if they still follow you,
> are going to see it least. Which basically means your post is not going to be
> seen by everybody.

In short, “the algorithm” (often designated by the interviewees as a singular
noun) is perceived by the participants as a sentient entity that was
incorporated by platforms (notably, Facebook and Instagram), and that has
specific roles: identifying individual preferences, “picking up” posts according
to popularity, affinity, and engagement, thus selecting what is and what is not
seen by specific users, and organizing the stream of content according to an
internal logic. In terms of temporality, what this means is that one’s access to
real-time happenings is seen as highly contingent on following the “right
people”—as explained by Anna (25 F, footwear developer):
> you see what your people, you see what they are interested in. [. . .] If
> something is happening and people don’t have interest in or don’t have a
> strong opinion about, you might miss it and not know that it’s happening.

As a result of this “new” regime, the expectation of real-time chronology is
replaced by a more opaque logic.
By foregrounding algorithms in the analysis, I do not mean to suggest that they
deterministically create specific temporal experiences. My point is that “the
algorithm” is used in the participants’ verbalizations as a key device to make
sense of social media’s temporalities, particularly when it comes to the now
widespread structure of the infinite stream. My interest, then, is not
necessarily in the speculative character of algorithmic performativity—the
folklore or “gossip” on the operation of algorithmic visibility, as theorized by
Bishop (2019)—but rather in how this speculation reflects negotiations over
social coordination, temporal control, and agency. After all, as Monica
wondered,
> The thing of social media being about immediacy, is that I want to see what
> you post immediately. So it is strange that I am not seeing that post now. Why
> do I have to go to the profile and find out there were five things that I
> missed?

The participants’ speculation on the operation of algorithmic systems reflects
the realization of a perceived loss of temporal autonomy—which might produce
different reactions, being at times criticized for their alienating and
reductive nature, and at others praised for bringing serendipity and
spontaneity. That is, social media’s algorithms (both as imagined entities and
as perceived through direct sensorial engagement) produce specific kinds of
experienced temporal patterns, or rhythms.
My analysis suggests that one dominant characteristic of the phenomenal rhythms
of algorithmic media is their perceived homophilic harmony—that is, the content
and the people shown to you first are those attuned to your individual
preferences and past engagement: “You will see stuff that you like seeing, and
it’s easy to keep looking,” summarized Anna. Such an assessment is echoed by
Simone (33 F, marketing officer): “it shows me what I wanna see, because that’s
the kind of things I follow, that’s the kind of things I like, that’s the kind
of people I associate with.” Here, then, algorithmic media are understood to be
deeply contingent on one’s actions within and across platforms—rather than
independent of human agency, they are assumed to be both driven by and affecting
it. As further synthesized by Alyssa (24 F, customer service), if a given type
of content “keeps you looking at the platform, then they’ll keep showing it to
you.” Overall, the participants seemed pleased—comforted even—when their
individual preferences are met by the recommendation systems; when the platforms
manage to, as theorized by Bucher (2020), deliver the right thing at the
right-time. The perceived harmony of social media, therefore, is not only
homophilic, but preferably anticipatory—as illustrated by Joe’s (25M, mental
health social worker) positive appraisal of YouTube: “YouTube has the best
algorithm, you’ve got to give them that. Every single time I think about a song
they’re like ‘hey, are you thinking this?.’” The justification given by the
platforms—and, apparently, accepted by the users—is always centered on improving
and enhancing “the experience.”
Yet, sometimes, this automated harmony is seen as unfit for the messier,
disharmonic reality of people’s tastes and preferences. In these cases,
interviewees describe an estrangement between their “real” selves and the
reductive individual predilections assumed by social media. When the algorithmic
right-time does not feel like the right-time for the user (Bucher, 2020),
platforms are faced with suspicion, as manifested by Alyssa when describing her
attitude toward Instagram: “I don’t trust just how the platform is built to show
you certain content. I trust that it probably knows me very well, but I don’t
trust that it shows me everything I want to see.” That is, despite promises of
enhanced experience, social media are frequently perceived by the users as
providing a rather diminishing, monophonic, synthesized version of reality.
So rhythms are not always harmonious, precisely because they are flows composed
by different paces, sequences, frequencies, and intensities. Therefore, another
prominent quality perceived in everyday engagements with algorithmic media is
their repetition: “Many times, I find stuff that I have already read, or I see
that it’s not a new story,” described Simone. In certain occasions, this
repetition is understood as a cyclical standardized pattern: as put by Anna,
> you can refresh, and you go on the feed, and the same sort of people come up
> first. I guess that must be the people they know that the photos you’ll like,
> they must just know who you wanna see.

In other settings, the repetition is annoying, entrapping even, as illustrated
by Arthur (41 M, education consultant):
> the same stuff seems to keep coming round, so I quite often now don’t look at
> Facebook for a few days, and when I get back after a few days I see the same
> things again that I had seen before.

What this means for our analysis is that people’s emotional reaction to
platforms’ harmony can range quite significantly. Repetition, as illustrated by
Arthur’s comment above, might make the rhythms of social media be perceived as
slowing down. Ratifying the role of moods and affective states in sustaining
temporality, “boredom” appeared with great prominence in the analyzed
verbalizations related to this perceived deceleration, especially when
associated with the platforms’ apparent endlessness (a point that I have
discussed elsewhere, Lupinacci, 2021a). Yet, although social media are generally
perceived as “endless,” there is the acknowledgment that, due to algorithmic
filtering, their rhythmic experience is also invariably finite: “There are
things that you always gonna miss. [. . .] Social media is not going to give you
all of the posts,” said Monica. If we conceive temporality as a fluvial process
(Hoy, 2012), then the participants seem to be relatively accepting of the fact
that this stream is unpredictable, and that they should “not expect to step into
the same river twice” (Bucher, 2018: 81).
This also indicates that phenomenal algorhythms—the experienced patterns of
movement of algorithmic media—are not purely effects of (imagined or actual)
technical operation; they are also organized by the human actors involved in the
process. Therefore, aspects such as frequency and intensity of use of a given
platform—how often and how deep you step into the river, to appropriate the
metaphor above—also impact on its rhythmical experience, as rhythms are produced
in the assemblage between bodies and technologies. This point can be illustrated
by Sophie (24 F, au pair):
> When I wake up, I’m very excited to open Instagram and see . . . it always has
> the people you view the stories the most first [. . .] and I’ll get to a point
> where I’m watching stories of people I don’t really care for anymore, so I’ll
> get off that and I’ll go through the posts. And then I’ll do that for a little
> bit, and then I’ll refresh it and watch more stories. And I find that’s the
> repetition I get myself into. The stories, the posts.

Harmony, then, emerges when the rhythm of social media—the pace and composition
of the content surfaced by these platforms—is perceived to be coordinated or
synchronized with the right-time (Bucher, 2020) of the user’s expectations.
Repetition, in turn, usually means that these automated reverberations have
either gone too far (the content shown is all too similar) or are too slow, and
that the lived rhythms of the user have surpassed those of the platform. Despite
the prevalence of harmony and repetition, the agency of algorithmic media is
also understood as eventually unsettling—when you expect repetition and
encounter difference, you are faced with dissonance, noise:
> If you refresh it, there’s these new ones straight away. But if you look at
> the dates, especially if you haven’t been online so much, you see photos that
> were posted one, or two days ago, but that it hadn’t shown on my feed. (Anna
> complained)

Although ordering in social media is never really conceived by the participants
as “organic”—as they seem relatively aware of the operation and motivation
behind this regime of content organization—it is in moments of breakdown (for
instance, when you expect updates and get recurrence, or when you cannot find
the tweet that you just read) that the perceived agency of algorithms becomes an
issue.
In this regard, while “algorithms” have already been established as a productive
vehicle for unveiling the ways in which the agency of social media (and
processes such as mediation and personalization) is perceived by ordinary users
in the context of everyday life (Bishop, 2019; Bucher, 2017, 2018, 2020; Kant,
2020; Seaver, 2017), I suggest that understanding social media’s time through
the lens of phenomenal algorhythms offers a potentially fruitful vantage point
to study the odd temporalities created when what matters at the individual and
societal levels, the chronologic and the algorithmic, the popular and the
relevant, seem to clash.


REAL TALK ON REAL-TIME: INSTANTANEITY, FRESHNESS, SIMULTANEITY, AND EPHEMERALITY

Having clarified what I mean by phenomenal algorhythms—and how context- and
mood-contingent these can be—I will now focus on experiences that are understood
as evoking a sense of realtimeness (Weltevrede et al., 2014). This section
starts from the understanding that any experience of real-time is always made
and managed, and that the present is, itself, composed of different
temporalities (Coleman, 2020a). Drawing on these ideas, my argument is that
realtimeness is also rhythmic, and can therefore be scrutinized as a sensorial
orchestration.
As described by Maeve (27 F, administrative officer), one of the most exciting
features of platforms such as Twitter is the fact that they “deliver messages to
you without you having to look out for it. [. . .] You’re really like ‘oh that’s
interesting!’—things you haven’t really thought of. You didn’t even know you
wanted that information!” This presumed “spontaneity” is, of course, striking if
we consider that the business model that underlies social media is marked
precisely by predictability—or, the capacity to anticipate users’ preferences
and behavior for targeted advertising purposes (Carmi, 2020; Chun, 2017). People
feel like they are thrown into a continuous flow in which “all sorts of
different things might come up [. . .] that’s kind of the beauty of it,”
described Arthur. What this fleeting, aimless navigation means for our
possibilities for identifying empirically and theorizing the experience of
real-time is that there is a messy, often chaotic combination between intended
and “accidental” encounters with content (or, as respondents described, “coming
across things”), and the very intentionality behind each instance impacts on
their perceived realtimeness. That is, real-time access to current happenings
and posts might not necessarily be the main driver for the use of platforms such
as Instagram, but it is perceived as something that is unintentionally
encountered during this ordinary activity.
Perhaps in its most obvious conception in media and communications scholarship,
real-time is the experience of accessing, through technical mediation, an event
or situation as it happens, and while it unfolds. This implies a matter of
speed, but also of duration. In observing if, how and when real-time is
rhythmically manifested in the experiences described by my interviewees, I posit
that realtimeness can be more productively examined by foregrounding four
specific, although interconnected, mechanisms—which I have labeled
instantaneity, freshness, simultaneity, and ephemerality. In doing so, I tried
to avoid reproducing supposedly objective measures (“new,” “now”) in favor of
subjective, relational accounts. In this regard, “instantaneity” designates a
lack of perceptible technical delays; “freshness” refers to perceived
novelty—something that looks original or unprecedented, regardless of its actual
recency; “simultaneity” designates coordination, or the perceived access to an
event while it occurs—or at the same time as it is experienced by others; by
“ephemerality” I mean the understanding that the duration of a given experience
is limited, and that therefore it must be attended to before it vanishes.


INSTANTANEITY

Participants’ definition of social media was elastic, with different people
emphasizing varied dimensions. Yet, the possibility for instantaneity was often
positioned as the crucial characteristic, as summarized by Marjorie (25 F,
unemployed): “I think it’s the immediacy [. . .] It’s just about seeing
something, or wanting to share something that happens to me, and being able to
share immediately with others.” If we take instantaneity to mean a potential
connection to the social world devoid of perceptible technical delays and,
consequently, the opportunity to know what is happening at that precise instant,
“right now,” then perhaps the push notification is the most common trigger for
its manifestation. Still, as explained by Rosie (47 F, administrator), not all
notifications feel the same, and the sense of urgency—which prompts real-time
connectivity—might change significantly depending on, for instance, the platform
used:
> I mean, with Twitter and Instagram I don’t bother if the notifications stay in
> there. [. . .] On WhatsApp, I need to see it immediately who’s messaged me.
> [. . .] in my head I know it’s not gonna be an emergency, but I need to know
> what it is and what they’re saying.

Certain notifications are considered more momentous, and therefore worthier of
instantaneous attention. Whenever one of these alerts pops up, users make an
assessment based on personal relevance. These decisions, although, seem deeply
intertwined with habits and reflexes.
Also, the same platform might be experienced differently by diverse users and in
varied circumstances. For example, although many of the participants mentioned
Twitter as the primary source for knowing what is happening in the moment (as
proclaimed by the platform itself in its promotional materials), Roger (43 M,
administrative officer) thinks Facebook is much better for that—not necessarily
because of the speed in which content is circulated, but due to the easier, more
convenient experience of use afforded by the platform’s interface:
> I got fed up with Twitter, it was just . . . just about having to click on
> tiny URLs to get more information [. . .] It’s too much effort. With Facebook,
> I just scroll it down, see “this is the one I’m interested in,” and that’s it,
> with pictures and everything.

That is, instantaneity is not only about the potential delivery of content at
the precise moment it happens, but also about how swiftly one manages to
navigate these always-updating flows in order to find the bits of information
that are considered interesting. As illustrated by Roger’s point above, if it
requires one additional click, then the experience’s instantaneity is
compromised.
Moreover, the rhythmics of social media are also affected by the interplay of
varied platforms—not only because the same person might use a range of
applications but also because, often, the content itself overflows and
fluctuates across them. Abbie (19 F, student), for instance, said, “I don’t have
Twitter, but I see things that had been posted on Twitter on Instagram. Like
reposts.” What this means is that although platform-centric analyses are indeed
valuable for the understanding of the pace produced by each device separately,
they inevitably fall short when it comes to providing a framework for the
messier, complex ways in which these technologies are brought to life in
ordinary settings.


FRESHNESS

Overall, my analysis confirms the prominence of “currency” as a key aspect of
everyday expectations of, and experiences with, social media. While there is
some awareness of the different temporalizations employed by the platforms (as
unpacked in the previous section), there seems to be concomitantly the
taken-for-granted expectation that whatever one is seeing on social media has
happened fairly recently: “I guess it’s a bit weird, because you assume that
everything is happening there and then, because you are looking at it there and
then,” said Anna. As explained by Joe, the very fact that most platforms show
when a given post was shared emphasizes their time-sensitiveness:
> For instance, I read about the students being caught in Hong Kong on Reddit,
> and the post was from six hours ago. So I was like “Oh, news being made in
> less than 24h! Holy shit, this is ‘hours’ recent!” [. . .] Like “this is
> really happening!”

In this regard, being the first to know about a given topic, regardless of its
apparent frivolity, emerged as another of the main drivers of the use of social
media.
However, and reflecting the multifaced character of realtimeness, the findings
seem to point less to a reliance on a universal “new” and more to perceived
freshness—that is, the excitement is situated in accessing something that,
ultimately, feels new to you, regardless of its actual novelty. This means that
the reference point for the “new” is not an assumed shared and external time but
rather the unprecedentedness of the experience to the individual—in this case,
“its newness is its strangeness” (Scannell, 2014: 52).
Interestingly, time-sensitiveness can also be evident even in the absence of
explicit “temporal” prompts such as the exact time of the publication. In this
case, social media’s quantifiable engagement is also used as proxy for perceived
freshness. That is, the fewer people have reacted to a given content, the
fresher it feels: “It was, like, less than a thousand hits on this trailer on
YouTube when I shared it. And I was like, oh my god, only one thousand likes,
this is incredible! We’re breaking, we’re on the cusp of history,” celebrated
Joe. In other words, the number of “likes” a post gets can also be used as a
chronological marker in the otherwise temporally ambiguous setting of the
aforementioned phenomenal algorhythms.


SIMULTANEITY

Still, in moments of particularly remarkable events or crises, individual
freshness does not suffice, and users find solutions to reach accounts of what
is unfolding from the perspective of those who are there and then, as
illustrated by Simone:
> when Notre Dame was burning, I saw it and really felt I was one of the first
> ones in my network to read about it, because it had been just posted. [. . .]
> then I went on Twitter, and Twitter in general you won’t really look for the
> reliability, you just look at what people are saying.

Synchronization, as theorized by Jordheim and Ytreberg (2021), “happens both as
individuals are synchronized by some kind of external force and as they
synchronize with each other (p. 11).” I use “simultaneity,” here, to designate
precisely the experiences resultant from the temporal coordination that operates
across these two dimensions—the perception that events are occurring as you, and
others, are following them.
As I have been discussing, my analysis suggests that the participants’
experiences of instantaneity and freshness change significantly depending on the
interactional situation or context—as well as on their mood. Similarly, people’s
perception and expectation of simultaneity is highly contingent on the platform
used—which supports the findings of available theorizations that emphasize a
device-perspective on social media pace (Weltevrede et al., 2014). Arthur, for
instance, manifested frustration when people misinterpret his posts on Instagram
by assuming they were being shared and consumed as they happened,
simultaneously,
I’ll post some photos and they’ll be like, “Oh, are you still there?” or, “Have
a good time!” I always think, “Hm, I’m not there, I was there two weeks ago.”
[. . .] I don’t really want to say, “These are some photos that I took, just so
you’re aware, I took them about two weeks ago.”
In addition, if social media’s phenomenal rhythms—and, presumably, their
opportunities for a sense of simultaneity—depend on the frequency and intensity
of their use, then it seems important to highlight that these are also heavily
impacted by emotional circumstances. Remarkably, although some of the
respondents admitted that they are constantly accessing specific platforms to
keep track of whatever is happening (“I probably check it every hour, once an
hour,” said Joe), others adopt strategies such as temporary disconnection
(Jorge, 2019) and platform curation to circumvent the emergence of certain
moods. Consequently, simultaneity is something that users sometimes actively try
to avoid, as explained by Anna: “For example, Brexit, at the moment, I just
can’t deal with it. I’m not up to date, because it’s too time-consuming, too
life-consuming.”
It is also clear from the analyzed dataset that the expectations for
simultaneity vary dramatically depending on the feature of social media that is
being employed—and the perceived difference between “the feed” and “stories” on
Instagram is perhaps the most striking example: “If it’s like a post, you can
obviously take a picture, and it’s on your phone, and you can post it later.
Stories are, like, as it’s happening,” described Abbie. A crucial follow-up
question, then, is whether it matters at all if whatever one is seeing through
these platforms is indeed unfolding “simultaneously.” The answer is, according
to Abbie, “it depends,”
> I mean, if it’s just your friend posting a selfie or something, it’s not
> really important if it’s from now or from two weeks ago. But with stuff like
> news, if you’re trying to keep up-to-date with something, then it would be
> important to know when things actually happened. [. . .] So to be informed, to
> fully understand a situation, it would be important to know if it’s actually
> happening right now.

In other words, the extent to which these experiences are perceived as
instantaneous, fresh, and simultaneous—and whether this synchronization is
indeed considered relevant—depends not only on the affordances and operation of
the platforms themselves, but also on the meaningfulness of the existing topics
and relationships that are sustained through these technologies.


EPHEMERALITY

As I previously suggested, “real-time” encapsulates not only a matter of speed
but also of duration—or, more specifically, an alleged lack thereof. After all,
if the main claim of a given experience is centered on its “nowness,” then we
can infer there is an anticipation of a “thenness”; a time in which this
experience no longer exists, and cannot be enjoyed anymore. Ephemerality is
manifested in my informants’ verbalizations with different levels of subtlety.
More obviously, platforms that have incorporated stories-like features—in which
the content can be consumed for a limited time (or viewed a limited number of
times) before it vanishes—tend to center the ephemeral as a key component of the
experience they provide. As described by Anna, with stories, the content “is
only there for a small amount of time. And that’s, I think, why people enjoy it.
They don’t want to be recorded [laughter] they don’t want a history of
themselves.”
Due to the lack of permanence, stories are understood as requiring less effort
or planning, which in turn provides an overall sense of “spontaneity”: “It’s
just about what you do. It would be in the moment, just stupid stuff that I
think is funny, or silly, or something like that. A bit more anything and
everything,” said Iris (24 F, designer). It is worth noting that, in social
media, the very brevity of so-called ephemeral affordances is usually
transitory: platforms like Snapchat and Instagram use them to encourage
“spontaneous” sharing, so that people can “post anything, anytime”; months
later, they tend to incorporate some sort of archival tool, even if keeping the
aura of casualness and authenticity. Ephemerality prompts real-time quantifiable
engagement, which is convenient for these platforms’ business models (Lupinacci,
2021b).
Beyond stories, it is noticeable that ephemerality permeates more subtly the
activity of sharing links and posts itself—that is, most of the time, the
content circulated to friends is considered frivolous, just “silly,” “funny,”
and not supposed to be paid attention to for long: “If I see something funny,
I’ll send it to like five of my friends. Like a funny picture, or a funny tweet,
or a meme,” described Siena (20 F, student). That is, a big portion of what is
shared and said via social media is simply “chitchat,” and therefore inherently,
and intentionally, short-lived—particularly, when it comes to messaging systems.
Similarly, the constantly updating flows—combined with algorithmic
sorting—produce a sense of ephemerality, as it is not only difficult to keep
track of things as they are presented, but also the task of retrieving a
specific post becomes extremely challenging: “You’d be like scrolling and then
you’ll refresh it or something and whatever you were seeing will just disappear.
And because it’s not chronological, you can’t really find it again, because it
will be just lost in your feed,” complained Abbie. In fact, the volume of
information, and the perceived endlessness of the flow, creates a sense of
imminent disappearance (Berry, 2011)—which prompts the user to attend to the
situation “here and now.”


CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE SENSORIAL ORCHESTRATION OF REAL-TIME

If our sociality is increasingly intertwined with the logics of social media,
then the examination of the temporalities that are immanent in these platforms
contributes to the understanding of our very conditions of existence today. In
“ranking” particular posts in certain ways, social media determine what is
worthy of attention, and affect when and how the world “appears” to us—which, I
have been arguing, is a phenomenological problem.
In this article, I foregrounded some of the ambivalences and complexities in the
temporal experiences emergent from the sensorial orchestration provided by
platforms. To operationalize the idea of social media’s temporality as both
subjectively experienced and always organized in certain ways by the platforms
themselves, I employed the notion of rhythm. That is, I focused my observation
on the description of systematic patterns of movement as experienced by users in
ordinary settings. Rhythms, it is worth mentioning, are as much about space as
they are about time (Lefebvre, 2004)—they depend not only on the frequency of
certain “notes,” but also on the presence (and absence) of specific ones. In
social media, this presence is dictated by algorithmic systems; if temporality
is indeed orchestrated, my analysis suggests that “the algorithm” is perceived
to be the conductor, the maestro. In this regard, the conception of phenomenal
algorhythms aims to shed light on the interplay of historically vague notions
such as “new” and “now” once computational sorting has become widespread, and on
the “perceptual contestation” (Jacobsen, 2021) that characterizes the use of
these platforms in everyday life.
A purely critical stance would suggest that platforms are more focused on
perfecting their real-time prediction of what you want to see and on the
real-time engagement resultant from this targeting than in offering an accurate
reflection of what is currently happening. Yet, following my interest in the
experiential, I have proposed that, phenomenologically, the realtimeness of the
social media manifold can be evoked through particular orchestrations. These
arrangements deploy different sensibilities, which I have named instantaneity,
freshness, simultaneity, and ephemerality. Those, in turn, are heavily
contingent on the user’s active engagement, on the purpose and mood of this
engagement, on following “the right people,” on implicit markers of recency
(such as the number of likes), on the platforms as a whole and their discrete
features, and on the combination and/or overlap of different platforms.
The realtimeness of the social media manifold is not necessarily marked by a
correspondence to a punctual “now”—although the technical potential for this
exists, and is eventually put to work—and is instead more frequently created by
rhythmics that emphasize synchronization and social coordination through these
different, but interconnected, mechanisms. Drawing on contributions from
scholars focusing on the affective dimensions of digital time (Coleman, 2018a,
2018b, 2020a, 2020b) on the politics of pacing and rhythmics in computational
media (Carmi, 2020; Weltevrede et al., 2014), and on the perceived intervention
of content-sorting systems (Bucher, 2020; Kant, 2020) to develop a critical
phenomenology of mediation, this article ultimately argues that, in social
media, any sense of realtimeness emerges not despite algorithms, but precisely
due to their experienced agency. Realtimeness, as a product of sensorial
orchestration, is not necessarily replaced by algorithmic ordering; it is
instead, rearranged by computational systems and users alike.
If, in following Ihde (1990), we take social media technologies to be both means
and objects of experience, then their temporality becomes even more complex.
When they are used as a means to an experience—to access and follow something
that is happening elsewhere, for instance—then a referential real-time that
corresponds to the instantaneous, linear chronology of the event becomes
prominent. When they are treated as objects of experience, then an internal
realtimeness—one that depends more heavily on the flow of content itself—seems
to come to the fore, with freshness and ephemerality being two of its
foundations. In the messy rhythmics of social media, the “clock time” and the
right-time are often confounded and intertwined.
The participants’ verbalizations demonstrate the general awareness that social
media might not provide direct access to everything that is happening outside
the mediation context as it happens, in real-time—and therefore indicate that
any perceived mediated realtimeness is, still, separate from the temporality of
their lives and routines beyond social media. Indeed, as discussed throughout
this article, the comparison between the perceived internal rhythms of social
media and those of broader “real life” (as differentiated by many of the
interviewees) also informs accounts of the former as marked by either slowness,
repetition, and boredom, or by acceleration and frantic attempts to keep track
of non-stop updates.
More than an objective “nowness” or “newness,” social media’s capacity for
experienced realtimeness seems to depend on a perceived unpredictability: the
interviewees seem to believe in, and desire the concretization of, the “happy
accidents” through which platforms produce “an affective feeling of randomness
of discovery” (Karppi, 2018: 57). That is, even if acknowledging the role of
algorithmic personalization—which, ultimately, extracts data and organizes it in
patterns to make individuals “predictable” (Chun, 2017)—the temporality of
social media paradoxically foregrounds the “chanced upon.” In these
algorhythmics, there is a crucial conflict between predictability and
orchestration, on the one hand, and spontaneity and serendipity on the other. My
assessment is that this clash represents a contemporary manifestation of the
historical struggle for agency in relation to communication technologies—and for
maintaining a sense of autonomy even when objectification is needed for the
concretization of media’s promises of enhanced experience.
In addition, although algorithmic personalization is foregrounded as the main
feature of social media, I argue that these platforms also work to make people
aware (and crave the awareness) of others who are (perceived to be) experiencing
the same as them, irrespective of the correspondence of this ongoing event with
a universal, external “present.” In this regard, I understand that these complex
rhythms are always a combination of inner processes and social arrangements,
being both situated and relational. From an internal viewpoint, they are
contingent on our positionality as well as on our affective states; socially,
they are dependent both on wider structural forces and on the coordination with
the rhythms of others—even in environments that emphasize individuality.
Ultimately, in a cultural moment in which social media are often criticized for
providing a hyper-curated portrayal of reality, the potential for real-time
connectivity also speaks to the continuously updating desire for (and increasing
commodification of) authenticity (Banet-Weiser, 2012). The pursuit of
realtimeness through alternative apps,4 for instance, seems permeated by the
wish to escape the structure dictated by powerful, profit-oriented,
“algorithmic” platforms—even if this demand is often acknowledged and
incorporated by the mainstream platforms themselves.5 Within this dynamic
socio-technical environment, the perceived temporalities of algorithmic
media—their phenomenal algorhythms—reflect and enact negotiations over social
coordination, temporal control, and the direct access to “reality.” As a complex
sensorial orchestration, the realtimeness of social media depends not only on
the perceived pace and tempo of the platforms’ content display, but also on how,
in using these platforms, we perceive time within our lives as individuals and
as part of a social world, and how this makes us feel more or less synchronized.


FUNDING

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.


ORCID ID

Ludmila Lupinacci https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4371-6768


FOOTNOTES

1.
Please note that I use both the terms “phenomenal” and “phenomenological,” and
that the former is not used here as a synonymous for “exceptional” or
“remarkable.” I am employing “phenomenal” to designate that which is perceived
(the state observed), and “phenomenological” to designate the perceptual (i.e.
the nature of the observation itself).
Go to Footnote
2.
The descriptive codes that follow the participants’ pseudonyms refer,
respectively, to age and gender. In the case of Monica, for instance, “26 F”
indicates that she is a 26-year-old female.
Go to Footnote
3.
Because the research did not involve vulnerable populations and/or sensitive
topics (being considered of “low risk”), ethics clearance was obtained
internally through the Department’s Research Ethics Review, following the
research ethics policy of my University.
Go to Footnote
4.
For instance, BeReal—a platform launched in 2020—claims to be a “new and unique
way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life.” The app
explicitly uses the rhetoric of real-time connectivity (“everyone is notified
simultaneously to capture and share a photo in 2 minutes”) to promise a more
authentic form of communication than that of algorithmic platforms.
Go to Footnote
5.
In March 2022, Instagram announced the introduction of “Favorites and Following,
two new ways to choose what you see in your feed”—a direct response to the
critiques targeting the continuous and unpredictable tweaks it makes to the
algorithmic systems that sort users’ feeds.
Go to Footnote


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BIOGRAPHIES

Ludmila Lupinacci is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and
Communications, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Some
of her academic interests are: technology and society, digital platforms,
Internet studies, social media, phenomenology, and experience.


SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

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Appendix – Demographic profiles of the participants
Pseudonym
Gender
Age
Nationality
Occupation
Abbie
Female
19
UK
Student
Alyssa
Female
24
USA
Customer service
Anna
Female
25
UK
Footwear developer
Arthur
Male
41
UK
Education consultant
Debora
Female
25
UK/Chile
Engineer
Ian
Male
38
UK/Greece
Self-employed salesman
Iris
Female
24
UK
Designer
Joe
Male
25
Ireland
Mental health social worker
Julia
Female
45
Australia
Post Officer
Lewis
Male
26
UK
Bike mechanic
Luc
Male
34
UK
Designer
Maeve
Female
27
UK
Administrative officer
Marjorie
Female
25
France
Publishing, unemployed
Monica
Female
25
Venezuela
Illustrator
Paul
Male
43
Poland/UK
Administrative officer
Roger
Male
43
Colombia/UK
Administrative officer
Rosie
Female
47
South Africa/UK
Administrator
Siena
Female
20
UK
Student
Simone
Female
33
Tunisia/France
Marketing Officer
Sophie
Female
24
Canada
Au Pair
figshare
ShareDownload
File (sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448221109952.docx)
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 * 15.56 KB



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Article first published online: July 24, 2022


KEYWORDS

 1.  Algorithm
 2.  digital time
 3.  experience
 4.  interviews
 5.  phenomenology
 6.  qualitative research
 7.  real-time
 8.  rhythm
 9.  social media
 10. temporality

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Published online: July 24, 2022


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LUDMILA LUPINACCI

London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4371-6768
L.Lupinacci-Amaral@lse.ac.uk
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NOTES

Ludmila Lupinacci, Department of Media and Communications, London School of
Economics and Political Science, Houghton St., London, WC2A 2AE, UK. Email:
L.Lupinacci-Amaral@lse.ac.uk


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