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Algorithmic Personalization As A Mode of Individuation
Algorithmic Personalization As A Mode of Individuation
Katherine Hayles
Theory, Culture & Society
0(0) 1–21
Algorithmic ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276418818888
Celia Lury
Warwick University
Sophie Day
Goldsmiths, University of London
Abstract
Recognizing that many of the modern categories with which we think about people
and their activities were put in place through the use of numbers, we ask how
numbering practices compose contemporary sociality. Focusing on particular
forms of algorithmic personalization, we describe a pathway of a-typical individuation
in which repeated and recursive tracking is used to create partial orders in which
individuals are always more and less than one. Algorithmic personalization describes
a mode of numbering that involves forms of de- and re- aggregating, in which a variety
of contexts are continually included and excluded. This pathway of a-typical individu-
ation is important, we suggest, to a variety of domains and, more broadly, to an
understanding of contemporary economies of sharing where the politics of collectiv-
ities, ownership and use are being reconfigured as a default social.
Keywords
algorithm, individuation, numbering, optimization, pathway, personalization
The less the determinism, the more the possibilities for constraint.
(Hacking, 1991: 194)
with personalized prices and so on.1 To give some more concrete exam-
ples: in 2007 the UK government published Putting People First: A
Shared Vision and Commitment to Finding New Ways to Improve Social
Care in England.2 The pamphlet outlined the government’s intention to
transform adult social care so ‘that every person who receives support,
whether provided by statutory services or funded by themselves, will have
choice and control over the shape of that support in all care settings’.
This ‘vision’ describes itself as a totally different approach to an historic
‘one size fits all’ system. With an initial focus on transforming social care
and support services, the pamphlet proposes that principles of personal-
ization be embedded in a range of other service areas such as health and
education. An example from the field of health and well-being is
PatientsLikeMe,3 a website that combines features of traditional quali-
tative online patient communities with quantitative data-collection; the
(trade-marked) strap-line is ‘Live better, together!’ This website has
300,000 members, who ‘share’ over 23,000 diseases, and have contributed
over 25 million data points about their diseases, resulting in over 50 pub-
lished research studies. The website says:
The platform is also described as a tool that helps patients find a ‘just-in-
time’, ‘someone-like-me’ peer who can be relied upon to compare options
and aid decision-making. A final example of personalization is the rec-
ommendation service Stitch Fix,4 a website that describes itself as ‘Your
partner in style’ and which seeks to recommend clothing for women on a
personal basis. The business proposition is that the recommendation
service – a composite of algorithmic and human reasoning – knows
better than the customer herself what clothes she will like: selected
items of clothing are sent directly to her, without a preview, as otherwise
her prejudices might prevent her from choosing items that she, unknow-
ingly, will really like.
The question this article seeks to address is: what kind of individuation
(Foucault, 2001; Simondon, 1992) is personalization? We ask this ques-
tion in order to explore the implications of personalization for how we
live together, that is, for forms of sociality. We start from the assumption
that personalization is not only personal: it is never about only one
person, just me or just you, but always involves generalization. Indeed,
our argument will be that it is a mode of individuation in which entities
are precisely specified by way of recursive inclusion in types or classes as
part of the making of what we describe as an a-typical pathway. To make
this argument, we explore the use of recommendation algorithms to sort
Lury and Day 3
Gerlitz and Helmond conclude their analysis of the emergence of the like
economy by suggesting that Facebook is being developed as an ‘infra-
structure of decentralised data production and recentralised data pro-
cessing’ (2013: 1357). While they do not discuss the role of
recommendation systems within this infrastructure, these have become
increasingly important operators of the de- and re-centralizing practices
of the economy Gerlitz and Helmond describe. Structured by the
‘participatory’ practices of inclusive exclusion and exclusive inclusion,
recommendation algorithms penetrate all corners of the internet,
making personalized recommendations – directly and indirectly – to indi-
viduals with interests in a variety of fields, including movies, music, news,
books, research publications, restaurants, jokes, financial services, prod-
ucts of all sorts and persons (for example, in online dating). It is to these
algorithms that we now turn.
Recommendation Algorithms
While very many different kinds of algorithms are used in recommenda-
tion systems, two main kinds are distinguished: collaborative filtering
algorithms and content sharing algorithms. Sometimes, as in Netflix,
they are combined. The former group of algorithms is based on large
amounts of digital data on users’ behaviour, activities or preferences and
leads to predictions of what users will like based on their similarity to
others (see further below). An example is Last.fm,6 a music ‘station’ or
streaming service that personalizes the music it transmits by observing
the music an individual has listened to on a regular basis and comparing
those tracks with the listening behaviour of other individuals. The cal-
culative process involved in this group of algorithms is sometimes
described as ‘leveraging’ the behaviour of users7 since it requires the
participation of many users to produce personalized recommendations
for one person.8 Content-based filtering methods, in contrast, are based
on a description of an item in terms of discrete characteristics; the algo-
rithm is then designed to produce recommendations for individual users
of items that have similar properties to those that the individual liked in
the past (or is examining in the present). Pandora Internet Radio
(currently restricted to listeners in the USA, Australia and New
Zealand because of licensing restrictions) is an example: it makes use
of an algorithm that uses properties of a song or artists (a subset of
the 450 attributes provided by the Music Genome Project) in order to
seed a station to transmit personalized music (Prey, 2017).
We focus on collaborative filtering algorithms, partly because their
ability to make successful predictions across fields is held to be stronger
than that of content-based algorithms, but also because they require and
exploit ‘participatory’ methods to develop novel classificatory tech-
niques. As such, they allow us to identify distinctive aspects of
Lury and Day 7
This matrix is mostly empty (or ‘sparse’), since most users will have
not rated most items. The work of the collaborative filtering algo-
rithm . . . is to predict what values will show up in the empty spaces
of the matrix. These predictions are then provided in some form to
the user as recommendations. (Seaver, 2012)
Seaver continues:
In the next stage described by Seaver, the numbers from the matrix are
statistically analysed and their variance is mapped to a number of dimen-
sions or axes. Users who are ‘near’ each other on this multi-dimensional
coordinate system are held to be similar (like each other), and a user will
be recommended items from the neighbourhood around them. It is this
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
It is not just that there is more than one relevant context for recommen-
dation algorithms. Different contexts are deliberately made to appear or
disappear in different practices of context-ing. Indeed, this emphasis on
context – what is sometimes called context-awareness – provides another
compelling reason to describe personalization as a pathway of a-typical
individuation. A trajectory is not established in advance – as when we
travel with the aim of moving from A to B, already knowing where B is –
but in response to contexts that emerge in the making of a path.
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
a cancer, drug target, resistance and side effects through repeated moni-
toring and the operationalization of the feedback loop between evalu-
ation and intervention.19 In some cases, the methods of operational
research are applied in conjunction with computational biology with
the aim of identifying a pathway that has a ‘biologically meaningful
objective’: a network is ‘designed (or revised) optimally’ to find ‘the nat-
ural circumstances that trigger one particular pathway but not others’.20
An example of findings based upon pathways defined in molecular terms
rather than by anatomy or traditional disease classification is the recently
reported study (Mateo et al., 2015) of the efficacy of the drug Olaparib,
approved for treating ovarian cancers with BRCA1/2 mutations. This
study built upon the finding that cancers are significantly heterogeneous
at the molecular level and discovered that the variation within one, such
as ovarian cancer, can be more marked than between cancers, such as
ovarian and prostate, when tracked in terms of their differential sensitiv-
ity to particular treatments.
More broadly, we can see the operation of principles of optimization
modelling in the now ubiquitous ordinal tropes of ranking, which ensure
that what counts as best is not given in advance, but rather emerges in a
participative fashion with the (continually changing) requirement to do
and be better (Esposito, 2013; Gerlitz and Lury, 2014; Guyer, 2010). In
these practices the you that is addressed is both specific and a you ‘that is
like everyone else’ (Chun, 2011), only more or less so. The exhortation to
‘Believe in Better’21 pervades contemporary culture and might be seen as
an appropriation of ‘optimism of the will’, recursively calibrating rela-
tions between individuals and populations to establish new forms of
stratification (Fourcade and Healey, 2013; Ruppert, 2011). In the
requirement to be like but better than each other established in relation
to such optimizing practices, you and I are not just different to each other
but different-er: our differences are such that we are always both more
and less different to each other. As the Optimizely commercial platform
informs us, ‘Being personal is no longer optional’,22 or, as the name of a
British financial services comparison website says, GoCompare.23
Indeed, it is not just persons that are invited – or obliged – to participate
in bettering themselves in the compositional practices of personalization:
universities, hospitals, museums, police forces, hotels, holidays, restaur-
ants, brands and schools are also now frequently placed in dynamic
relations of competitive comparison with each other by often mandatory
or non-voluntary inclusion in the recursive partial orderings of ranking
systems. While normalization techniques sometimes provide a statistical
snapshot, a one-off cross-section of a population fixed in relation to a
single environment (the nation, for example), personalization is note-
worthy for the way that it establishes (constantly shifting) grounds for
dynamic stratification in relation to multiple norms in multiple
environments.
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
Signature Pathways
We consider one further aspect of the making of a pathway of a-typical
individuation by exploring the use of ‘you’ as a shifter. In linguistic
terms, shifters such as ‘this’ and ‘that’ as well as ‘I’ and ‘you’ can only
be understood by reference to the context in which they are uttered. In
other words, a shifter, sometimes also called a place-holder, is an index-
ical term whose meaning cannot be determined without referring to the
message that is being communicated. The ‘you’ in a pathway of person-
alization designates both the person to whom a message is directed and
the ‘you’ that is contained in the message that is sent. In relation to our
description of algorithmic personalization, it is the suturing of this dou-
bling in the shifter that makes a personalized address to the individual
possible and also organizes the activity of shifting as adjoining, creating
constraints that can manipulate constraints in the making of a pathway.
For Jakobson (1971 [1957]), enunciation is encoded in a shifter in the
statement itself. While Jakobson defines the shifter as an indexical
symbol, Lacan defines it as an indexical signifier in order to problematize
the distinction between enunciation and statement. As a signifier, the
shifter ‘I’ is normally part of a statement. As an index, it is also normally
part of the enunciation. For Lacan (1977), this division or distribution of
the ‘I’ or ‘you’ does not merely illustrate the splitting of a subject; it is
that split. Drawing on these understandings of shifters, it seems that the
indexical signifier is not stopped or ‘arrested’ by (representatives of) the
symbolic order (Fenves, 2002) in the anticipatory flux of personalizing
practices.24 In the context of (algorithmic) personalization, it seems that
the shifter is rather paused. Temporary halting incites participation or the
folding of a context into the pathway. Indeed, it is this pausing, the
marking of an interval, a stopping and starting that repetitively gathers
a collectivity. In assembling observers and observed, pausing allows for
both observation and the observation of the observing (Kaldrack and
Röhle, 2014).
Given that a pathway is a process of stopping and starting that repeti-
tively gathers a collectivity, it is not surprising that the ability to identify
some pathways but not others – the signature action Seaver describes – is
currently the source of considerable interest. Frow’s discussion of signa-
ture and brand (2002) is illuminating in this respect. He describes the
signature as a shifter that sets up ‘a tension between representation and
the represented’ and observes that the signature is not only an index of
the act of framing (of adjoining or bordering), but also designates a
naming right. Specifically, Frow argues that the power of the signature
stems from the elision of the difference between the signature as an index
and the taxonomic function of the proper name. This elision is effected in
a particular way by the brand, he asserts, since ‘the ‘‘Name’’, when one
abstracts it from the signature it indicates, loses its ‘‘index’’ character and
Lury and Day 15
Conclusion
We have argued that personalization is a mode of a-typical individuation
that is produced in techniques of recursive divisibility (the drawing of
lines of inclusive exclusion and exclusive inclusion). As such, it provides
an entry point into the constitution of what, following Mark Zuckerburg,
we have called the ‘default social’. Crucially, as a numbering practice,
personalization does not involve zooming (Day et al., 2014), a performa-
tive gesture that operates the dynamism of moving from big to small, that
is, a slide from one to many and back again, as if the only difference to be
registered was that of an increase in a uniform quantity (as in what
Badiou calls the count of one). Instead, this is a mode of numbering
that constitutes a default social through forms of de- and re-aggregating,
in which a variety of contexts are included and excluded, such that one is
always more and less than one. In a recursive process that involves
tracking bordering, folding and pausing, the individual is precisely and
momentarily specified as ‘a you’ (Chun, 2016), that is, as a dividual
(Raunig, 2015; Strathern, 1998). At the same time, pausing allows for
the composition of heterogeneous (numerical-cultural) quantities, in
which qualitative differences of mass are recognized at different levels
of observation as matters of dimension and scale. Put somewhat differ-
ently, the person who is addressed as a you is refracted in multiple partial
orderings that allow for specific forms of comparison and competition
(of better-ing) while the folding of contexts into the pathway creates new
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
Notes
1. Celia Lury would like to acknowledge the support of Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC), ES/K010689/1, and Sophie Day would like to
acknowledge the support of the National Institute for Health Research
(NIHR) Imperial BioMedical Research Centre.
2. See: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130104175839/http://
www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/Publications
PolicyAndGuidance/DH_081118
3. See: http://www.patientslikeme.com
4. See: https://www.stitchfix.com
5. These are practices that Agamben (1998, 2011) associates with sovereignty:
bare life, he argues, has always been the object and the aim of state action,
and it has always been subjected to elaborate mechanisms of both inclusion
and exclusion.
6. See: http://www.last.fm
7. Arvidsson (2016) argues that it is through personalization that platforms
such as Facebook will – on their own and in conjunction with third parties –
benefit from the financialization of everyday life.
8. One of the most famous examples of this group is item-to-item collaborative
filtering, an algorithm developed by Amazon.
9. Seaver goes on:
19. In precision medicine (or its synonyms), reference is commonly made to the
4Ps, which are predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory.
Some of the advocates of this approach describe current developments as
a revolution:
26. In marketing and many policy fields, for example, the design of optimal
pathways is informed by behavioural economics, in which doing is deployed
as a measure of being. In the terms of our analysis, ‘nudging’ is the identi-
fication and operation of constraints that can manipulate constraints, and
the current investment by business and government in a ‘context-aware’
computational infrastructure seems designed to support the rise of person-
alization as a mode of individuation that will afford the possibility of
dynamic stratification.
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This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on
‘Thinking with Algorithms: Cognition and Computation in the Work of
N. Katherine Hayles’, edited by Louise Amoore.