Algorithmic Enclaves

Abstract

This chapter offers an analytical framework that captures the complex dynamics of the relationship between social media algorithms and human users, and contributes to and intervenes in scholarly debates regarding political implications of social media algorithms. Detailing the ways in which social media are central to the contemporary media landscape in which emotional capitalism is pursued, intensified, and amplified, the chapter demonstrates the affective constitution of communication networks. Given that social media algorithms are largely designed to enhance targeted advertisement and built on sorting principles, this biases them towards the superlative, notably contents that generate extreme, binary affective gestures, such as love or hate. The neoliberal social media landscape, affective networks, and social media algorithms, taken together, assemble a habitat that privileges and encourages the emergence of political clusters that resort to binary affective rhetorics in what the author terms “algorithmic enclave.” This enclave is a discursive algorithmic enclave where users voluntarily form an affective political cluster exclusively dedicated to promote the wellbeing, rights, and interests of their own, while negating the rights of “the Others.”