Paper short abstract

This paper examines how TikTok’s infrastructure is enacted as a commercially-driven, data extraction platform through user–algorithm entanglements. Drawing on STS and digital ethnography, it shows how users’ situated practices complicate their conception as passive “data beings.”

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how everyday engagements with data extraction infrastructures complicate conceptions of users as passive “data beings.” Drawing on STS infrastructure scholarship, the study analyses TikTok as a platformised infrastructure of visibility that becomes concrete through use, emerging from the encounter between standardised scripts of platform arrangements, algorithmic mediation and users’ situated practices.

Based on multi-sited digital ethnography and qualitative interviews with Italian second generation users, the paper conceptualises platform participation as a process of infrastructuring enacted through user–algorithm entanglements. TikTok’s algorithm operates as a key infrastructural element for visibility, public relevance and knowledge production, one that users actively learn and maintain through practices of experimentation, interpretation, adjustments and negotiations. These relations give rise to cyborg configurations understood as sociotechnical processes emerging from the ongoing co-constitution of human practices and algorithmic logics.

Rather than positioning users as either fully captured by datafication or externally resistant to it, the analysis foregrounds ambivalent forms of agency enacted within infrastructural constraints. Users often “play along” with extractive logics because visibility is a rewarded algorithmic outcome, while also mobilising the platform for non-economic, relational, and expressive purposes. Such entanglements are shaped by creative and affective labour, emerging as practices conditioned by users’ situated life circumstances.

By arguing that infrastructures are co-produced in use, the paper suggests that challenging the reduction of humans to data beings and imagining alternative infrastructures depends on recognising and retaining situated agency, related to different resources and goals, which is already enacted in everyday engagements within digital landscapes.