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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how people engage with algorithms through relational and moral reasoning rather than technical understanding. Drawing on ethnographic research on Douyin and WeChat, it argues that algorithmic engagements are relational practices that manage visibility and social consequences.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on Douyin and WeChat in a small Chinese city, this paper examines how ordinary social media users engage with algorithmic systems through everyday moral and relational reasoning rather than treating them as purely technical tools. Through cases such as refusing to provide “not interested” feedback, avoiding or accepting acquaintance recommendations, and strategically managing algorithmic visibility, the paper shows that algorithmic engagement is directed toward specific relationships and toward the negotiation of moral concerns, cultural norms, and social risks. Artificial intelligence algorithms operate through relations and become consequential mediators. Without taking relationality into consideration, specific algorithmic practices cannot be adequately understood.

This article challenges the long-standing tendency toward methodological individualisation in the social scientific study of algorithms. It contends that algorithm research should move beyond examining interactions between individual users and technical systems, and instead treat relationality as a constitutive condition of algorithmic action rather than merely an external influencing factor. Intelligence here is not understood as a measurable property of either humans or machines, but as an emergent and contested quality enacted through social relations. By foregrounding how algorithms constitute moral and relational actors in everyday life, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on intelligence, agency, and personhood in an age of distributed and more-than-human cognition.