This week, we began to focus on the concept of identity and the identity we have as users/consumers online. We initially looked at our own identity and representation when it came to the websites and social media sites we visited. If you turn on personalised ads on Google Chrome, you can see what categories Google places in with regards to your age, gender, relationship status, education, job and more. It does this by analysing your usage of its platform, what websites you visit and engage with etc. We did the same with Instagram, looking at what categories the app placed us in and what sponsored ads it showed us based on what it believed our interests to be.
After reading about the matrix David Sumpter created in his book Outnumbered (2018) , we tried to recreate it. Sumpter did this because he wanted to understand how algorithms were sorting people and content and how the platforms we use create our algorthmic identity. We picked a range of frriends we had on a social media platform (Instagram) and categorised the last 15 posts into different topics with the idea of then creating a similar Matrix.
This was harder than I anticipated as a lot of the friends I follow post similar content so didn't really fill out a strong range of categories. Also, the design of Instagram made this more difficult than Sumpter's use of Facebook, as the story feature and the ability to post up to 20 images in one post meant that choosing how to categorise someone's content was not as simple as looking at one image.