Personalization: a new political arithmetic?
File(s)Personalization a new political arithmetic .pdf (2.32 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Day, Sophie
Lury, Celia
Ward, Helen
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation of probabilities. Our proposal is that the categories, numbers, and norms of this political arithmetic have changed in a ubiquitous culture of personalization. Today’s political arithmetic, we suggest, produces a different kind of society, what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the ‘default social’. We address this new social as a ‘vague whole’ and propose that it is characterized by a continuous present, the contemporary form of simultaneity or way of being together that Benedict Anderson argued is fundamental to any kind of imagined community. Like the society imagined in the earlier arithmetic, this vague whole is an abstraction that obscures forms of stratification and discrimination.
Date Issued
2023-05
Date Acceptance
2023-01-01
Citation
Distinktion, 2023, 24 (2), pp.167-194
ISSN
1600-910X
Publisher
Taylor and Francis Group
Start Page
167
End Page
194
Journal / Book Title
Distinktion
Volume
24
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000907247600001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=a2bf6146997ec60c407a63945d4e92bb
Subjects
continuous present
participation
Personalization
political arithmetic
precision
prediction
Social Sciences
Sociology
vague whole
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2023-01-05