Jamie Sherman

Algorithms as fetish: Faith and possibility in algorithmic work:

Algorithms are powerful because we invest in them the power to do things. With such promise, they can transform the ordinary, say snapshots along a robotic vacuum cleaner’s route, into something much more, such as a clean home. Echoing David Graeber’s revision of fetishism, we argue that this easy slip from technical capabilities to broader claims betrays not the “magic” of algorithms but rather the dynamics of their exchange. Fetishes are not indicators of false thinking, but social contracts in material form. They mediate emerging distributions of power often too nascent, too slippery or too disconcerting to directly acknowledge. Drawing primarily on 2016 ethnographic research with computer vision professionals, we show how faith in what algorithms can do shapes the social encounters and exchanges of their production. By analyzing algorithms through the lens of fetishism, we can see the social and economic investment in some people’s labor over others. We also see everyday opportunities for social creativity and change. We conclude that what is problematic about algorithms is not their fetishization but instead their stabilization into full-fledged gods and demons – the more deserving objects of critique.

Creating a Creators’ Market: How Ethnography Gave Intel a New Perspective On Digital Content Creators

This case demonstrates how ongoing ethnographic research from within a corporation led to the resegmentation of a market. The first part of the case focuses on how a team of social science researchers at a major technology company, Intel, drew on past research studies to develop a point-of-view on the increasing importance of content creation across a range of populations that challenged the findings of a quantitative market sizing study. Drawing on earlier qualitative work, the team was able to successfully argue for the value of ethnographic research to augment these findings and to show how research participants’ orientations toward technology constituted a more significant, and more actionable way of segmenting this new market than professional status, the differentiator used in the quantitative study. The second half of the case highlights the process of driving business change from within a large corporation. By turning an ethnographic eye on their own organization, drawing on past research, and by sharing unfinished results in workshops to grow the project in phases, the team was able to build stakeholder buy-in, and prime the organization for more ready adoption of ethnographic insights. As a result, the team’s findings led to a substantive change in Intel’s perspective on digital content creators, and to new products and marketing strategies. The team won a divisional award for defining a strategy that led to a profitable growth area for the corporation.