ABSTRACT

Despite the increasing prevalence of curation algorithms on everyday social network sites (SNSs), they often are imperceptible and difficult to become knowledgeable about since little insight in the actual working of these algorithms is given. To address this, we developed an online interface as a visual feedback tool to decrease the ignorance about the Instagram curation algorithm, named ‘Instawareness’ (https://instawareness.ugent.be/). As such, the goal of this article is to validate the actual effectiveness of Instawareness and to demonstrate how people can be made aware of the Instagram curation algorithm using a quasi-experiment. Validating the actual effectiveness of Instawareness allowed us to connect additional findings about the influence of awareness and understanding of Instagram’s curation algorithm to our primary validated findings about achieving such awareness. These show that it is not cognitive understanding about Instagram’s algorithms but solely awareness about them that appears to be sufficient for people to indicate increased critical concerns towards SNSs. Furthermore, Instawareness proved to be efficient in increasing cognitive media literacy (CML) and in indirectly stimulating critical concerns towards SNSs.

摘要

尽管策展算法在日常社交网站 (SNS) 上越来越流行，但它们通常是难以察觉的，并且难以了解，因为对这些算法的实际工作知之甚少。为了解决这个问题，我们开发了一个在线界面作为视觉反馈工具，以减少对 Instagram 策展算法的无知，名为“Instawareness”（https://instawareness.ugent.be/）。因此，本文的目的是验证 Instawareness 的实际有效性，并展示如何使用准实验让人们了解 Instagram 策展算法。验证 Instawareness 的实际有效性使我们能够将关于意识的影响和对 Instagram 策展算法的理解的其他发现与我们关于实现这种意识的主要验证发现联系起来。这些表明，并不是对 Instagram 算法的认知理解，而仅仅是对它们的认识，似乎足以让人们表明对 SNS 越来越严重的担忧。此外，Instawareness 被证明在提高认知媒体素养 (CML) 和间接激发对 SNS 的关键关注方面是有效的。