i am having vague thoughts about a lot of digital interaction processes and their relation to data harvesting and data harvesting's relationship to classical structuralism
So there's a common (and correct) critique of data science, especially when it directly engages with quantifying people's lives and cultures, that it's a reheating of classical structuralism. Structuralism being this wide-ranging idea in the late 19th and early 20th century of examining the pieces of something and comparing it to other pieces to find the underlying universal structures that gave rise to the pieces. For instance in structuralist anthropology there's the idea of comparing aspects of cultures to reveal inherent universals that underly all human culture. This is a very seductive idea for a lot of people because of the way it proposes that we can find some kind of objective solid Truth by analyzing the bits of something. Structuralist practices have been rightfully criticized from many directions, such as it tending to be highly ethnocentric, and the field of poststructuralism is a direct response. The reason all the poststructuralist theories are so obsessed with context and baselessnes is exactly this. They import similar strategies of looking at signs and culture but instead of trying to find some universal grounding to it all, they consider the arbitrary links between cultural elements as where meaning arises. Everything is defined by the context it sits in, instead of that context rising out of some secret universal origin.
Anyway, that was a long preamble but the point is lately I've been thinking a lot about data science and how data-driven the modern internet is and also about online spaces in general. Like we all know and are (hopefully) uncomfortable with the fact that our presence online is constantly being harvested as data by advertisers. And yes advertisers and corporate analysts may not be performing formal academic structuralism in a general sense, but what is stuff like demographic analysis but structuralism except the goal is figuring out how to better market things? This kind of corporate analysis has always existed obviously, but it's never been more Everywhere and it's never been more built into our everyday life. Guys aren't listening in on my conversation with my friends in person to figure out how to sell me things but boy they sure are on twitter!
This led to me having some vague somewhat disconnected thoughts about structuralism and internet spaces. To be clear I don't think there's a literal deterministic link between advertisers and some of this other stuff - partly because that feels like it takes responsibility off people entirely and solely blames structures for people being weird and partly because everything is always more complex - but I do think it's interesting to think about how the identity data-driven internet feeds into a lot of this stuff.
The other day my partner @bigstuffedcat posted something about how a lot of people tend to view all the horrible conservative pundits as rhetorically and philosophically the same on some fundamental level when it's fairly plain that these people shovel all kinds of different shit from each other. That got me thinking about the odd tension in the way a lot of folks, especially online, have this almost parasocial obsession with the personality quirks and characteristics of the most awful people, while also frequently flattening their actual rhetoric and ideologies. We obsessively collect and categorize every foible and event in the life of these people to draw them into a network where each thing forms a data point that proves a Universal Theory of The Conservative Mind. Hey sounds familiar!
I think This Specific Thing is also very in evidence in what I can only describe as the "puriteens at it again" phenomenon. You know, that thing where someone shares some stupid post and uses it as larger evidence of the moral rot inherent in [kids these days|"TME" people|whatever]. Again we collect data points from a series of interactions (often passive, i.e. seeing a post) and use it to prove how each of these points arises from the underlying Truth that the kids are reviving tradcath moralism or trans women are the most oppressed or whatever. Incidentally, another common critique of classical structuralism was the way it tended to involve researchers at best bending data to conform to their theory and at worst entirely disregarding whatever doesn't fit.
My third thought here is about the discomfort I have with the way people sometimes talk about how kids navigate identity online. The "kids are always having carrds that lay out every little bit of their identity and neurodivergence and so on" thing. And idk I have complicated feelings about that! Like yes from a pure safety pov you probably shouldn't publicly list every trigger you have and your full name and address or whatever, but philosophically why does ths feel different to me? Well, it's because the intent is communicative instead of analytic. It's about saying who you personally are to reach out to others like you on a web that is increasingly fractured, despite being more unified, at a time when we're all shoved into one room and we have to desperately try to figure out who we can actually bond with. It's kinda the classic advice about gender labels and such - they're great when you use them to communicate about yourself and a problem when you get mad at other people for not fitting into them.
None of these specific points are particularly new: "teens communicate about their identity!" "people prove their pet Social Theory with random bad posts!" "people treat terrible people like weird influencers!" but thinking about it specifically in terms of structuralism is useful to me because it gives us a much broader lens. That is, we can see all of this stuff (and much more) as part of a very broad social tendency, this fundamental seductive idea of collecting all these disparate clues that together reveal some unified truth (that conveniently often seems to reinforce your already-present world view). It also lets us consider the complex groundings of this phenomenon, the general seduction of the structural perspective, the way identity data-driven information harvesting interfaces with this, the way it is not exclusively due to the medium (sorry cohost), the way social media interaction in general presents us with a constant stream of textual information we can only make relatively superficial evaluations of, etc.
It also, importantly, gives us good angles to think about critiquing and working through this stuff. Like I said up top, if this is structuralism than we would be well-served to take a poststructural approach to thinking about online interaction. This post is too long to give really specific methodological examples here, but the point is more that if we start to think of this stuff as self-reinforcing structuralist culture (but also understand this is a theory and perspective, not a single fundamental Truth) then we can start thinking about ways to critically address it on a deeper level than "people are weird and mean sometimes". And it's not about poststructuralism as cure, it's not even necessarily about poststructuralism as a "coherent" idea. I've been reading I and Thou recently and I think the way Buber talks about reduced ways of seeing others vs seeing others in their fullness is very relevant to This. And certainly this is a place where anarchist theory can and should be applied.
So that's what I've been thinking about lately, alongside various related thoughts about my relationship with internet social communities in general and whatnot. I don't really have a good conclusion to this thing, which is really more of a stream-of-consciousness thought dump than a structured essay. Stream I and Thou by Martin Buber.
