Reproducing hegemony, returning to critical pedagogy. The relationships of youth with digital platforms

This thesis investigates how young individuals perceive, relate with, and make sense of digital platforms in their everyday life, and how these everyday engagements with digital platforms contribute to the shaping of their identities and the reproduction of power asymmetries and hegemonic relationships. To do so, it draws on 40 autoethnographic diaries, written by undergraduate students and prepared according to Annette Markham’s framework of critical pedagogy, thus considering individuals not only as subjects from whom data can be collected, but as participants whose algorithmic awareness and critical data literacy can be enhanced. Theoretically, this research follows a relational approach to technology and identity and considers algorithmic media as socio-cultural artifacts, i.e., heterogenous, human-made and, therefore, culturally situated systems, which embed specific goals and values, and as social agents, i.e., nonhuman elements which participate in the social world and are participated in by it. Findings further support that critical pedagogical techniques can be useful in enhancing critical awareness regarding hegemonic datafication structures, but also show how criticality is diminished or the initial spark of critical consciousness promoted by critical pedagogy is undermined when users blame themselves for their heavy consumption patterns, dismiss critical explanations of platform control, invoke grand narratives of dependency and inevitability, and remove responsibility from tech corporations, thereby naturalizing asymmetrical power relationships and reifying structural hegemonic arrangements and paradigms. Given this scenario, I draw on the Gramscian framework of hegemony to discuss the results and develop a theoretical contribution that can connect reflections both at the micro and macro level. Specifically, by explaining the captivating role of data infrastructures and affordances, the proceduralization and routinization of specific practices of usage that become tacit, and the implications of these dynamics for the process of social echolocation, I attempt to shed light on how hegemonic structural arrangements are reproduced in the relationships with digital platforms. Then, following the tenets of critical pedagogy, I elaborate on a pedagogical contribution to help people go beyond subalternity as it occurs in platform environments. Specifically, it is proposed a two-step process combining autoethnographic tools, aimed at increasing critical algorithmic awareness, with the development of critical data science skills that can help individuals acquiring more precise knowledge schemes and scaling down the power of giant corporations, thereby building individual and collective capacities to use data for developing counter-narratives about possible futures. This dissertation is situated within the field of critical algorithm studies, and findings aim to add to the growing body of literature interested in algorithmic identities and in how digital platforms shape and intervene in everyday life. Furthermore, it should make an important contribution to all those research areas focused on the social impact of algorithmic systems and on how platform power plays out in the micro-level situations of everyday life.