AN ALGORITHMIC EVENT: THE CELEBRATION AND CRITIQUE OF 'SPOTIFY WRAPPED'

Resumen

Each year, Spotify encourages its users to share aesthetically pleasing data stories ‘wrapped’ and repackaged from their listening behaviour. We approach ‘Wrapped’ as an ‘algorithmic event’, defined as a moment in time in which there is a collective orientation towards a particular algorithmic system and associated data. To examine how people make sense of ‘Wrapped’ as an algorithmic event, we bring together ordinary Spotify users to explore datafication through a series of prompts and creative activities, including a modified version of the ‘walkthrough’ (Light et al., 2018) and a craft-based exercise. These exercises allow participants to tease out how normative assumptions are baked into ‘Wrapped’ and mobilise particular understandings of individuals, their habits, tastes and identities. Importantly, we position our participants as co-analysts, following the work of Robards and Lincoln (2017) and Markham (2021), and in our analysis highlight themes that arise from their contributions. Emerging findings allude to highly ambivalent feelings towards ‘Wrapped’ as an algorithmic event: Our participants both celebrate and critique how Spotify claims to ‘know’ them as individuals. They also contest the way ‘Wrapped’ is framed as revealing the ‘truth’ about music consumption and taste. As such, we argue that algorithmic events like ‘Wrapped’ are useful ways to think through data capture and algorithmic systems. The phenomenon of ‘wrappification’ – by which we mean the repackaging of behavioural data that captures a particular activity throughout the year and the responses to the belief that we can ‘know’ ourselves in this way – speaks to such impact.