Self-evaluative tools not only draw on data and activities specific to social media platforms, they also allow for new modes of organising these activities, data and temporalities. The role of numbers is understood in relation to dynamics of mediation and medium-specificity (Rogers 2009).
The framing dynamics are explored by focusing on the production of numbers as enumerated entities (Verran 2010), drawing attention to how numbers are never simply abstractions, but construct relations and temporalities, most particularly through algorithmic rankings and dynamics of ordinality. The primary focus lies on the performative capacities of such tools, as suggested in the work of Power, Strathern and Espeland, showing that the measurements they create are not designed to capture a separate reality, but function as framing devices, inviting some types of awareness, and action while ruling out others. This lack has lead to the emergence of numerous self-evaluation tools, offering a re-organisation of data, activities and temporalities. While platforms focus on creating climates of immediacy and now-ness, they offer little access the past, to retrospectively search and make sense of one’s data. This paper focuses on the increasing prevalence of devices for self-evaluation in the context of social media, that is tools that allow users to make sense of the activities and data they produce in social media platforms. The conclusion discusses power-effects implied in the practice of comparing. In the second part of the paper, we reconsider the practices of cross-cultural comparison in the context of the research project, attempting to produce comparability across the three localities. Juxtaposing the two comparative practices (everyday and academic/ ethnographic), we ask how vernacular styles of comparative reasoning are embedded ‘locally’ in cultural cosmologies and how this allows respondents to reflect on socio-cultural differences. Concentrating on three different research locations, Lund/ Sweden, Berlin/Germany, and Nicosia/Cyprus, the paper analyses how the first-order comparative practices of our respondents challenged anthropological (second-order) comparative practices that were employed in the context of the research project. Respondents used comparative modes of arguing to situate themselves socially and culturally. Empirical material comprises interviews with respondents in a EU-funded research project as well as observations of methodological and theoretical debates among research collaborators. The article analyses comparison as a vernacular and academic epistemic practice. Its goal is to begin a move away from the critique of comparison and towards a better comparative practice, guided not by abstract principles, but a deeper understanding of the challenges of practising comparison. This book introduces these questions through a varied range of reports, auto-ethnographies, and theoretical interventions that compare and analyse these different and often intersecting comparisons.
As it plays out in the present, this history encounters a range of other agents also involved in doing comparison who may challenge the comparisons of social scientists themselves. How, then, do social scientists compare? What role do funders, their tools, and databases play in social scientific comparisons? Which sorts of objects do they choose to compare and how do they decide which comparisons are meaningful? Doing comparison in the social sciences, it emerges, is a practice weighed down by a history in which comparison was seen as problematic. But in the social sciences, comparing often becomes more burdensome, more complex, and more questions are asked of it. Comparing like this is an everyday practice.
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Agents of various kinds compare by placing things next to one another, by using software programs and other tools, and by simply looking in certain ways. Comparison is not something that exists in the world, but a particular kind of activity. It is also about the practical acts of doing comparison. This book compares things, objects, concepts, and ideas.
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