CULTURAL ARTIFACT ANALYSIS

This project was conducted as part of CIS 605: Cultural and Critical Theory in Communication at the University of Alabama. On this page, I analyze a cultural artifact related to my area of interest and use course concepts to examine how meaning, ideology, identity, and power operate through communication and representation.

Instagram’s Algorithm as a Cultural Artifact

What does it mean to exist inside a system that decides, second by second, whether you are worth seeing? This is the daily condition of over two billion people who use Instagram. Most of us accept it as just how the internet works. But Instagram’s algorithm, its public display of likes and follower counts, and its experiment with hiding likes are not just there for the sake of popularity, but a cultural artifact that reproduces hegemony and commodifies the self. Instagram launched in 2010 with a chronological feed. In 2016, the platform replaced it with an algorithm ranking system that predicts and maximizes engagement. The stated rationale was that users were “missing 70% of posts.” What went unsaid was that “what matters most” is defined entirely by what maximizes time-on-platform and advertising yield.

This is, in Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) terms, a hegemonic operation. Hegemony rules not by force but by making its own logic feel like common sense. The algorithmic feed presents itself as a service: personalized, helpful, frictionless ; while it reorganizes social visibility around the interests of platform capitalism. Stuart Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding framework highlights this at the level of meaning. Instagram encodes posts through algorithmic amplification, with a preferred meaning: visibility equals value, engagement equals worth. Users decode these signals from a dominant position, internalizing platform metrics as an accurate reflection of social reality. The scroll becomes a consent machine.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944/2002) warned that the culture industry reduces human experience to a commodity, standardizing difference, manufacturing false needs, and integrating audiences “from above.” Their diagnosis, written about mid-century mass media, reads today as a description of Instagram’s metric infrastructure. The public display of like counts and follower numbers is an architecture of quantified selfhood, submitting every post to real-time market evaluation. Shoshana Zuboff (2023) names this surveillance capitalism: the extraction of behavioral data as raw material for prediction products. On Instagram, the behavior monetized is the performance of selfhood, one in which the user generates identities, relationships, and emotions as raw material, while the platform converts these into advertising intelligence. The result, as Taina Bucher (2018) argues, is programmed sociality: social life that does not simply occur on the platform but is actively shaped by it. Algorithms do not reflect who we are, they make certain versions of us legible while rendering others invisible.