Paper Short Abstract:

Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok shape beauty standards through the collaboration between users and algorithmic systems. This research examines how algorithms mediate body representations and embodiment, utilizing media diaries and interviews to explore how AI-driven systems co-curate feeds and shape perceptions of beauty.

Paper Abstract:

Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are algorithmically curated spaces where users’ interactions with their feeds shape and reshape representations of beauty and the body. My dissertation, part of the interdisciplinary research project Curating the Feed, explores how idealized beauty standards are constructed through the collaboration between users and algorithmic systems. This collaboration remediates ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1972) and relating to representations of bodies and one’s own body, as platforms mediate both the visual and embodied practices of beauty.

Algorithmic systems, as active constituents of the digital field, significantly shape how bodies—particularly faces—are represented, how beauty is enacted through technology, and how these ideals are practiced in real life. These invisible forces highlight the more-than-human agentic capacities of AI, raising critical questions about the nature of digital ethnographic engagement: How do algorithmic systems rewrite perceptions of embodiment, both online and offline?

This research utilizes long-term media diaries, in-depth and chat interviews, offering a nuanced ethnographic approach that accounts for the interplay between human and more-than-human actors. By examining how these systems co-curate image flows, the study investigates how algorithmic systems actively shape perceptions of embodiment, complicating established ethnographic methods of writing and unwriting narratives.

By focusing on the recursive entanglements between socially informed bodies, algorithms, and visual regimes, this study contributes to broader anthropological discussions on technology, embodiment, and the evolving challenges of conducting ethnographic research in algorithmically governed digital spaces.