Abstract
The datafication of contemporary family life has become an important topic of scholarly research in recent years. This is hardly surprising. Our digital interactions and practices—from searching for information, reading the news, and navigating social media feeds—are increasingly datafied and mediated by algorithms, thus shaping worldviews, opinions, and practices. While this has implications for all of us, for parents, algorithms—their ubiquity, their opacity, and their commercial underpinnings—shape the very experience of parenting as they interact with online news, social media feeds, and online search. Further, the increased focus on algorithms as a result of the platformization of culture has led to algorithms themselves becoming a source of concern as parents grapple with parenting in a world characterized not only by digital technologies, but also by individualized risk and intensive parenting pressures to maximize their children’s wellbeing and futures.
In Parents Talking Algorithms: Navigating Datafication and Family Life in Digital Societies, Ranjana Das delves into many of these complexities and pressures through interviews with 30 English parents (15 mothers and 15 fathers) of children aged between birth and 18. Her comprehensive exploration documents parents’ experiences and perspectives through their online searches for information (Chapter 1), their knowledge about the curation of content (Chapter 2), their algorithmic understandings and literacies (Chapters 4 and 6), their engagement with online news (Chapter 5), and what they think all this means in terms of their children’s digital futures (Chapter 7).
Parenting has long been acknowledged as a time of uncertainty and sometimes isolation. New parents, for example, use the internet and social media to address these uncertainties through seeking information and advice through online searches and social media, among other things. Das illustrates how parents’ search practices, as well as their navigation of curated information via news feeds and social media timelines, directly shape their experiences of parenthood, including stories that appeal to and fuel anxieties and concerns, which then feed back into parenting practices. One mother of a newborn speaks of being compelled to click on news stories popping up in her feed about a nurse who was found to have murdered babies. Other parents recount seeing online news stories about local crime in the area, tapping into and fueling concern about the safety of their young children out in the world. Parental engagement with such stories, which themselves are algorithmically driven, create more fine-tuned and tailored recommendations, resulting in what Das terms the “recursive loop” whereby “parents’ hopes, aspirations, and anxieties around their own child, potential modifications of their existing practices, and indeed often further scrutiny and research by parents into the areas, in theory, feed back into that recursive loop” (p. 100). Thus, parents’ algorithmic engagements and their positionality as parents are mutually shaped.
As we might expect, parents’ experiences, literacies, and understandings of algorithms are diverse and highly variable. Some parents claim to exercise skill in manipulating and actively “shaping” algorithms, while others, who are nonetheless algorithmically aware, demonstrate far less confidence in exercising acts of resistance. While some parents in Das’s study demonstrated moments of agency in terms of claiming to “manipulate” or “train” algorithms to suit user preferences, many parents remained confused and resigned to the inevitability of algorithmic culture. It is noteworthy that parental understanding of algorithms was largely limited to the actions of individuals, rather than aggregate characteristics. That is to say that parents interpreted algorithmic curation within the context of their own individual actions (i.e., “I’m seeing this story because I clicked on something similar yesterday”) rather than with reference to the aggregate (i.e., “I’m receiving this information because of my age, life-stage, parenting status, location, gender, etc.”).
Despite the differences between parental knowledges and understandings, Das argues that algorithmic literacies—like parenting knowledge and practices more broadly—are contextual, relational and fluid. Parents make sense of algorithms in part through talking to others and by drawing on their own histories and experiences within a broader context of intensive parenting. This fluidity and contextuality is demonstrated by the varying knowledges and practices of parents at different stages of the parenting journey.
The notion of agency is central to discussions of algorithmic cultures. Parents in Das’s study themselves assign agency to algorithms, often personifying them, and accepting them as a necessary trade-off in contemporary digital life. Still, many parents had various tactics to effectively navigate algorithmic systems. These “active shapers” took steps to manipulate algorithmic systems and champion their own and their child’s best interests. Yet, these “ephemeral” acts of agency on the part of parents should not, as Das argues, divert our attention away from institutional power and accountability. Nor should our attempts to cultivate greater algorithmic literacy—which, she notes, goes far beyond the technical toward critical understandings of algorithmic culture and logics—diminish the responsibility of platforms themselves to ensure the safety and well-being of users.
Das’s exploration of parental knowledges and practices regarding algorithmic culture is bottom-up, contextual, and relational. This bottom-up focus is essential. However, as a digital media scholar researching parenting in the digital age (rather than focusing specifically on algorithms), I did find myself wanting to know more about algorithms more generally. I acknowledge that algorithms are notoriously opaque and carefully guarded by platforms. Indeed, the growing momentum for greater regulation of platforms has seen scholars and advocates calling for greater transparency in this area. What do we know, if anything, about different platforms’ algorithmic processes?
I was also interested in whether parents were concerned about some elements of algorithmic culture that have been the subject of recent media attention. What are parents’ experiences of, and concerns about, algorithms in the context of consumption culture? (As the mother of pre-teen and teenage girls, I’m specifically thinking of TikTok algorithms recommending skin care, make-up, and a bunch of other stuff they don’t need.) What of the online manosphere, where young boys are said to get stuck in algorithmically driven echo chambers advocating men’s rights and a return to traditional gender roles? (I am, of course, thinking of Andrew Tate here.) What about broader concerns about online radicalization or extremist online subcultures governed by algorithmic logics? Sure, there may be some degree of media panic to these stories, but nonetheless, we know that algorithms have the capacity to shape young people’s views and purchasing practices, and that media panics shape parental anxieties and practices in powerful ways.
These limitations aside, Das’s account of parents talking about algorithms provides valuable insights into the complexities of parenting in a datafied and algorithmically driven world. These challenges, insights, and knowledges are essential as we (one hopes) move toward greater regulation of big tech and demand more accountability and responsibility from big tech in an algorithmically driven world.