Article

Theory, Culture & Society

30(4) 47–71
Popular Culture, Digital ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413476542

Social Life of Data tcs.sagepub.com

David Beer
University of York, UK

Roger Burrows
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Abstract
Digital data inundation has far-reaching implications for: disciplinary jurisdiction; the
relationship between the academy, commerce and the state; and the very nature of
the sociological imagination. Hitherto much of the discussion about these matters
has tended to focus on ‘transactional’ data held within large and complex commercial
and government databases. This emphasis has been quite understandable – such
transactional data does indeed form a crucial part of the informational infrastruc-
tures that are now emerging. However, in recent years new sources of data have
become available that possess a rather different character. This is data generated in
the cultural sphere, not only as a result of routine transactions with various digital
media but also as a result of what some would want to view as a shift towards
popular cultural forms dominated by processes of what has been termed prosump-
tion. Our analytic focus here is on contemporary prosumption practices, digital
technologies, the public life of data and the playful vitality of many of the ‘glossy
topics’ that constitute contemporary popular culture.

Keywords
archives, digital, methods, play, popular culture, Web 2.0

It has long been obvious that ‘[a]s more and more behaviour is con-
ducted electronically, more and more things can be measured more and
more often’ (Abbott, 2000: 298). According to Abbott (2000: 299) this
requires that we ‘rethink data analysis from the ground up’. However,
this digital data inundation is not just a narrow technical

Corresponding author:
Roger Burrows, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK.
Email: r.burrows@gold.ac.uk
48 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

methodological matter for the social sciences; it has been argued that it
has far broader implications for disciplinary jurisdiction, the relation-
ship between the academy, commerce and the state and, indeed, for the
very nature of the sociological imagination (Savage and Burrows,
2007). Hitherto much of the discussion about these matters has
tended to focus on what has come to be termed ‘transactional’ data
held within large and complex commercial and government databases –
data that is generated as a by-product of routine transactions between
citizens, consumers, business and government. This emphasis has been
quite understandable – such transactional data does indeed form a
crucial part of the informational infrastructures emerging under condi-
tions of Knowing Capitalism (Thrift, 2005). However, in recent years
new sources of data have become available that possess a rather differ-
ent character. This is data generated in the cultural sphere not only as a
result of routine transactions with various digital media – although that
remains important – but also, and crucially, as a result of what some
would want to view as an epochal shift towards popular cultural forms
dominated by processes of what has been termed prosumption (Ritzer
and Jurgenson, 2010). Our analytic focus here is on such data – data
that is, for the most part, actively both produced and consumed via
myriad acts of ‘playbour’ (Kane, 2004). A concrete focus on such data
provides an interesting illustration of a central thesis of Thrift’s
Knowing Capitalism – that the analysis of contemporary sociocultural
transformations should not only foreground the role of often-unseen
informational infrastructures in the co-construction of everyday lives
but also that we should take play seriously. For Thrift, ‘capitalism is
not just hard graft. It is also fun. People get stuff from it – and not just
more commodities. Capitalism has a kind of crazy vitality . . . It gets
involved in all kinds of extravagant symbioses’ (Thrift, 2005: 1). It is
with some of the ‘extravagant symbioses’ that are emerging between
contemporary prosumption practices, digital technologies, the public
life of data and the playful vitality of many of the ‘glossy topics’
(Beer and Penfold-Mounce, 2010) that constitute contemporary popular
culture that concerns us here. Play generates data in the kind of digital
and information-dense context described by Thrift and others (Crang
and Graham, 2007). We are certainly interested in how digital pro-
sumption activities generate new forms of social data, but we also
want to describe the recursive ways in which such data can be re-
appropriated as a part of the organization and relations of contempor-
ary popular culture, or what Mackenzie (2005) has called the ‘perfor-
mativity of circulation’. Popular culture is at the centre of the
transformations that have facilitated the accumulation of digital data;
but it is also at the heart of the issues and debates that face the social
sciences (Beer and Burrows, 2010a). In order to understand new forms
of social data we need to understand the part played by popular culture
Beer and Burrows 49

in its accumulation and flow; that is to say that we need to think about
the way in which popular culture is folded into this ‘performativity of
circulation’.
We use the notion of prosumption here simply as a sensitizing concept
that points towards the perhaps rather banal observation that the ana-
lytic distinction between consumption and production has often been
overdrawn by social scientists (Beer and Burrows, 2010b). It simply
alerts us to the observation that various Web 2.0 applications, or
social media as they are now often referred to – Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs and the rest – have facilitated the increasing
participation of people in the formation of media content. This involve-
ment, according to Turner (2010), is part of a much broader ‘demotic
turn’, in which ‘ordinary’ people have become much more prominent in
media content (for more on the spectacular and moralistic melodrama of
this coverage of ordinary lives see Skeggs, 2005). Although Ritzer and
Jurgenson (2010) perhaps overstate the significance of the concept of
prosumption, they do point to the significant phenomena of the growing
amount of ‘labouring’ people are undertaking as they ‘play’ with these
new technologies: creating profiles; making status updates; distributing
information; sharing files; uploading images; blogging; tweeting; and the
rest. These can be thought of as spaces of cultural engagement that
extend the boundaries of the ‘social factory’ across everyday life (Gill
and Pratt, 2008; Terranova, 2000). This type of media engagement, pre-
mised on participation of various types, is creating new and vast forms of
data about us, some of which is not necessarily transactional in content.
Our primary concern here is with the manner in which these activities are
creating new forms of social data – data generated as a by-product of
new forms of popular cultural engagement. We are concerned with how
this by-product data also comes to constitute and reshape cultural forms
and practices as they occur.
We begin with some reflections upon the component parts of the infra-
structure that affords this new data accumulation. We then draw upon
this framework in order to provide an overview of the types of data
archives that are emerging. The article identifies four different types of
archive that capture different types of by-product data in different ways;
we loosely organize this overview in terms of differences in the levels of
‘prosumer’ activity involved in the co-construction and maintenance of
the archive. We then shift our attention to the recursivity of data in
popular culture; here we draw upon a range of examples to illustrate
the ‘performativity of circulation’ of contemporary culture and show
the different ways in which by-product data affects the form and
‘doing’ (Savage et al., 2010) of popular culture. We briefly conclude
with some reflections on the relations between popular culture and
by-product data and by returning to the challenges and potentials for
50 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

social and cultural research in such a changing technological and cultural

landscape.

Popular Culture and Digital Archives

There are some conceptual points of reference that are needed in order to
begin to appreciate the generation of digital by-product data as well as
the form this data takes and the way it is organized. We begin with some
reflections on how popular culture accumulates by-product data through
and within different types of archives. In order to do this it is useful first
to identify four component features of popular cultural archives that
enable us to differentiate their form, use and content: profiles; linkages
and data intersectionality; metadata; and play.
The profile is the site or node of data accumulation and is central to
contemporary culture. Much of contemporary culture requires us to
build up an individual profile that accumulates information about a par-
ticular person. This profile might be constructed by the user to allow
them into a social networking site, or it could be the product of the
music consumed through a music streaming service or when purchasing
books and the like, or it might be the types of profiles generated on games
consoles, such as the Mii profile on the popular Nintendo Wii games
console. We should perhaps expect this tendency, for as Featherstone
(2006: 592) notes, the modern nation-state has been ‘based not on the
ideology of individualism, but the actuality of individuation’. The profile
is the aspect of contemporary culture that enables ‘people’s lives . . . [to
be] seen as singularities’ (Featherstone, 2006: 592). Profiles are the case-
based instances in which data is accumulated.
Second, we can point to the significance of linkages and what might be
thought of as data intersectionality. These linkages and intersections are
the connections that form between people and things as a consequence of
data harvesting and mining, or through the connections made between
people and things as they search and browse pre- and self-organized
content. Some linkages are automated and occur through algorithmic
processes of recommendation and selection, others are more agentic
and occur through routine practices and shared tastes and preferences.
Thinking in terms of linkages and data intersectionality allows us to
consider broader data assemblages, or as Kitchin and Dodge (2011: 7)
have put it: ‘coded assemblages’ which occur where ‘several different
coded infrastructures converge’. We can begin to see how data generated
moves between archives and how archives feed into one another – we can
also begin to think about how these ‘agencements’ – the manner in which
‘agency and action are contingent upon and constituted by the socio-
technical arrangements that make them up’ (Ruppert, 2011: 225) – enact
subjectivity and produce populations.
Beer and Burrows 51

The third component feature is metadata. Metadata enables the organ-

ization and self-organization of archives; it classifies content and makes it
searchable and accessible. Metadata is transcendent and overarching.
It is data itself, of course, but it plays the part of filtering, making content
readily searchable, it classifies and groups, it is created through processes
of data tagging and can be thought of as a type of classification system
that works from the ground up (as it is created in everyday cultural
engagements rather than being imposed upon cultural forms). Popular
culture increasingly generates both data and metadata as a by-product.
Finally, play is crucial in understanding the new social data and the
social life of this data and of the methods that work through it. As we
have already intimated, through referring to the work of Thrift, this is
about how people generate and create data both actively and passively
through their engagements with popular culture, as they have fun and as
they find and consume stuff. As we will discuss, various forms of data are
lending themselves to play in various forms of vernacular social research,
particularly in the sphere of visualization. Among other things, we begin
to open up here a culture of visualization built upon types of play,
formed in a vast cultural ludodrome (Atkinson and Willis, 2007) and
its attendant expectations of playfulness.
With this basic framework in place for differentiating forms of content
and the practices involved in their creation we can turn our attention to
the archives themselves. Archives are often the product of accumulated
constituent profiles organized through metadata, but they might also be
archives of content created by a variety of means (e.g. through wikis and
the like). This creates questions about the way in which we might under-
stand what an archive is or how we might think of different types of
archive. Should we treat websites as individual archives? This would most
likely be quite narrow. Should we think of one big digital archive with
component strands? Perhaps this would be too broad. Instead we choose
here to use the framework we have outlined to work with a differentiated
vision of contemporary cultural archives based upon the type of content
that they hold and the practices that underpin that content. As things
stand these new archives have been given little attention beyond
Featherstone’s (2000: 170) crucial observation that, as a result of devel-
opments in contemporary media, we should no longer just ‘see the arch-
ive as a specific place’ in which documents are deposited. Instead he asks,
‘should the walls of the archive be extended and placed around everyday
life?’ As we show below, the answer to this is clearly in the affirmative.
This statement is some dozen years old now and we have been a little
slow to follow up on using the archive as a conceptual device for under-
standing the formation of cultural content. In fact, there is a good deal to
suggest strong support for Featherstone’s (2006: 595) assertion that ‘the
will to archive is a powerful impulse in contemporary culture’. Archives
are central to the operation of much of contemporary popular culture
52 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

and are organized and searchable in a variety of ways with ‘non-linear’

points of entry (Lash, 2002). Archives provide a useful focal point for
understanding the interplay of component parts of the framework and
enable us to see the concrete ‘instantiation’ (Hayles, 1999) of information
(see also Moore et al., 2010). We might usefully think of this new data as
being generative of four interrelated types of archive that can be placed
on a loose continuum based upon the level of prosumer activity present
in their operation; that is to say simply that using the framework above
we can crudely arrange the different types of archives we have located
based upon the level of participation of those engaging with various types
of cultural resource: transactional archives; archives of the everyday; view-
point or opinion archives; and crowdsourcing archives. We will very briefly
sketch each of these out before showing how they fit into the framework
we have outlined, and in order to provide an infrastructural and context-
ual backdrop for the flows of culture that we go on to describe in more
detail. We begin with the types of archives that are more consumer-
oriented and transactional and work towards those that are defined
more in terms of the ‘playbour’ of their users.1 From the outset we
would like to be clear that this should not be seen as a rigid typology;
rather these types of archive should be thought of as overlapping and
fluid – they are intended as a device for thinking about the formation of
contemporary culture. It might, for example, even be the case that par-
ticular web applications can be thought of as containing multiple types of
archive content. The value of the framework used here is that it might
help us to unpick such instances, to see how they operate and to under-
stand how this flows back into cultural constellations.

Transactional archives
Transactional archives capture the cultural forms that are consumed by
‘transactional actors’ (Savage et al., 2010: 11). Taken in its narrowest
sense, the content of these archives tends to be largely defined by com-
mercial organizations rather than those that use the archives (although
users might be engaged in rating and reviewing or perhaps commenting
on the content). These transactional archives contain materials that can
be searched and purchased, viewed or streamed from the source. Typical
examples would be iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and now even something
like the BBC iPlayer. An engagement with these archives is usually rela-
tively easily defined as an act of consumption, of locating and consuming
a cultural product. These archives, though, are perhaps a little more
complex than this would at first suggest. Just to partly begin to elaborate
upon this complexity, these transactional archives are responsible for
generating a kind of back-end archive about users as data is generated
through acts of consumption and is captured for harvesting by commer-
cial organizations. These archives contain the cultural forms themselves
Beer and Burrows 53

as well as data about the transactions that occur; these sit as visible and
invisible dimensions of transactional archives – the high-profile theft of
data from the Sony Playstation network in April 2011 is one illustrative
moment where these back-end archives suddenly become publicly visible.
Profiles are built up about individuals and populations of consumers,
both directly from their engagement with the archive or by ‘scrobbling’
information about cultural consumption patterns from various mobile
logjects (Dodge and Kitchin, 2009), about which more below.
It is perhaps obvious that our engagement with contemporary cultural
forms often requires some form of interface – or in fact an interplay of
interfaces and materiality in the form of hardware devices and software
(Kittler, 1995). As Poster (1996: 20) explains, ‘the interface stands
between the human and machinic, a kind of membrane’. These various
interfaces have of course become ubiquitous, with iPods, iPhones, iPads
and the like contributing to the formation of a kind of ‘interface culture’
(Johnson, 1997) in which, as Kittler (1996) puts it, the ‘city is a medium’
and space and place become part of the ‘content’ of media (Adams,
2010). Or, as Featherstone (2006) has argued with reference to
Benjamin, the city is an ‘archive’. A good example of the type of detailed
data that might accumulate around the consumption of popular culture
is in the area of music and mobile music. Mobile music devices are now a
common staple of everyday life; massive sales figures for such devices
indicate just how integrated they have become in the practices of popular
cultural consumption. The use of such devices creates a detailed log of
the music that is consumed, which songs, how many times, for how long
and so on. These are then recorded when the device is docked with a
computer and the software records the data about these listening prac-
tices, which can then be harvested by commercial organizations. We
might also imagine that these data may contain locational and time
data that allow the consumption of popular culture to be placed within
a temporal geography. These devices act as what Dodge and Kitchin
(2009) refer to as ‘logjects’, objects that record their own history and
usage. The result is that popular cultural consumption is eminently
more ‘trackable’, to the extent that massive accumulations of data are
occurring that record exactly what it is that people are consuming. We
can only imagine the scale and density of such a body of information
about people’s cultural consumption practices and what it might reveal.
If we then begin to add in the range of sources that individuals are using
for such cultural consumption we begin to see that there are many var-
iegated places in which such data might end up: the different software
used for supporting mobile music devices; the range of retailers from
which music downloads may be purchased; the illegal cultural consump-
tion we hear so much about (David, 2010); and the rise of cultural
streaming sites that allow any music to be consumed for free at the
cost of listening to advertising. These are all generating and capturing
54 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

data about the consumption of popular culture, some clearly on a greater

scale than others.

Archives of the everyday

The next type of archive speaks directly to Bauman’s (2007) much dis-
cussed observations concerning what he calls the ‘confessional society’
(Beer, 2008); this we might think of as being a set of observations about
the emergence, to return to Featherstone, of archives of the everyday.
Developments in social networking sites in particular have rendered
undoubtedly true Featherstone’s observations about the shifting bound-
aries of the walls of the archive (Featherstone, 2000: 161; see also
Featherstone, 2006), with applications like Facebook representing an
archive of (selected aspects of) the everyday lives of some (currently)
over 500 million people. Similarly we find archives of videos of everyday
lives or photos on applications like YouTube and Flickr. One can spend
hours or even months on YouTube watching people brush their teeth and
perform innumerable other mundane routines. These then might be
thought of as ‘ordinary’ archives (Osborne, 1999): spaces in which we
find rich data about people categorized through tags and linked together
by, as we used to call it, hypertext. In short, the accumulation of data
afforded by prosumption practices with an elective affinity to Bauman’s
‘confessional society’ have facilitated the accumulation of these vast
archives containing information about people’s lives. But what do
these archives capture and what can analysts do with this data? To
give some indication of these everyday archives and what it is that they
can possibly capture and reveal, consider the visualization created by
David McCandless and Lee Byron in 20082 that shows the aggregate
pattern of relationship ‘break-ups’ during an annual cycle based upon
changes in ‘status updates’ on Facebook. This reveals both the level of
detail about something as private as relationship breakdowns, the public
visibility of this and also the possibilities that arise for using such data in
creative and insightful ways. We get a real sense here of the ebbs and
flows of relationship change, something that is not straightforward to
study using traditional social science methods but which in a confessional
society is made publicly available and visible.

Viewpoint or opinion archives

The next type of archive generated and developed by movements in
popular culture is the opinion or viewpoint archive. These types of arch-
ives can be thought of as being created through the practices of blogging,
micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter) and the contributions made to a broad
range of Web 2.0 type websites. We might also include here the rating
and reviewing practices that popular commercial sites routinely incorp-
orate in order to provide people with the opportunity to express their
Beer and Burrows 55

views about certain products and services such as those dedicated to

giving people a voice about holidays, restaurants, and the smoothness
of transactions and exchanges of goods, books and so on. These sites
provide numerous opportunities to postulate on any range of matters for
public dissemination. They enable individuals to respond to the day’s
events, to react to articles or other opinions, to comment on football
transfers or sporting incidents and so on. Prime examples of such arch-
ives are those relating to celebrity gossip (Beer and Penfold-Mounce,
2009). Contemporary popular culture is densely populated with images
and narratives about celebrities and their lives. Beyond the traditional
print media and TV, in recent years there has emerged an additional layer
of commentary on celebrity life provided by, to turn again to Turner’s
(2010) phrase, ‘ordinary people’. The stories and images of celebrities and
their lifestyles are now available through blogs and other user-generated
sources through which views can be communicated; the ‘new melodra-
matic imagination’ is exercised in content about the physical attributes of
celebrities, their lifestyle choices, the morality of their behaviour, their
intimate relationships, how inspirational or aspirational they might be
and so on (Beer and Penfold-Mounce, 2009). There are in fact now innu-
merable sites dedicated to celebrity gossip which contain vast and reveal-
ing insights into the sentiments and opinions of those consuming these
stories and images. To take one example, the celebrity gossip blog of
Perez Hilton provides detailed daily updates on what is happening in
celebrity culture. Each entry, organized by date and by the individual
under scrutiny, is accompanied by dozens of views and comments from
the readers upon each individual story. This is just one instance of the
widespread practices of commenting and providing opinion that are a
motif of participatory cultures. Indeed, many platforms now invite com-
ment as a part of their infrastructure.

Crowdsourcing archives
A final related type of archive might be thought of as the crowdsourcing
archive. These are products of often huge communal prosumptive effort
on the part of participants. There are thousands of examples, but the
most well known is Wikipedia. These archives do not just accumulate
data in the form of text, but within each of the wiki entries there is
metadata that people tag the entries with, allowing users to track inter-
actions, edits, additions and disagreements that underpin the entries – the
data has also been extracted to create maps and other visualizations of
the content. In line with this development, Appadurai has noted the
‘capability of interactive users to more easily enter and edit the archive’,
and, following this, a tendency ‘for the archive itself to be expanded by
the nature and distribution of its users’ (Appadurai, 2003: 17). The per-
formance of producing these archives as well as consuming their content
56 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

is creating new forms of data about social interactions, memory and the
nature and tensions of contested knowledge. The media theorist Mark
Hansen (2010: 180) suggests that developments in participatory media
such as wikis demonstrate the social and collective dimensions of what he
refers to as ‘transcendental technicity’, as the technical capacity of these
platforms transcend the limits of social networks.
To summarize our initial discussion of data accumulation and digital
archiving in popular culture we have created a table that attempts to
show what we take to be the patterns of association between them (see
Table 1). Here we use the initial framework of component features –
profiles, linkages, metadata and play – in order to show how these
different types of archives – transactional, everyday, viewpoint and
crowdsourcing – might be differentiated. This table provides a schematic
overview of these archives and gives a general sense of how we might go
about drawing lines between their form and content. The above cursory
discussion, which of course imposes some illusory order upon a quite
chaotic cultural constellation, might lead us to wonder what happens to
the data as it accumulates through routine engagements with popular
culture. Is this accumulation the end of the road? What happens to the
data after it has been produced? The data harvesting practices of the
commercial world are crucial and are still generally hidden from
the gaze of the social researcher, placed as they are within Thrift’s
(2005) ‘technological unconscious’. We wonder, though, what else hap-
pens to the data other than it being used to extract value out of personal
details. It is by asking such questions that we can begin to decipher some
of the ways in which data feeds back into popular culture and thus begins
to have a constitutive shaping effect; it is here that we might see in a more
concrete way the enactment of the social through data in the context of
everyday life and thus an elaboration of the emergent ‘cultures of circu-
lation’ (Mackenzie, 2005). The point then might be to push this agenda
by focusing upon the recursivity of this new data in popular culture. The
recombinant relations between popular culture and the new social data
are now becoming central to mundane cultural engagements, and as yet
we have not really engaged with understanding these crucial shifts in
culture.

Recursive Data in Contemporary Culture

Some prominent social theory, such as the work of Scott Lash (2007), has
suggested that information and data do not just capture but now actually
constitute everyday life. As Hansen (2010: 181) puts it, ‘media today
mediates the conditions of mediation’. The notion here is that data is
recombinant and recursive (Uprichard et al., 2009), it shapes as well as
merely captures culture. We have seen this idea being elaborated upon by
human geographers, perhaps most notably in the accounts of prediction
Table 1. A schematic overview depicting the relations between by-product data accumulation and archiving in contemporary popular culture

Type of digital popular culture archive culture

Component features:
Data accumulation Viewpoint/opinion
Beer and Burrows

framework Transactional archives Everyday archives archives Crowdsourcing archives

Profiles Integral component. Integral component. Not integral but often Integral to editing and
Consumer profile. Personal information. present. contribution processes.
Cultural artefacts Communicative, inter- Visible where comments Individual and topic-based
encountered. actions. are communicated. profiles.
Tastes and preferences. Self-generated. Often fantasy profiles with Record of involvement in
Automated. Mundane everyday activ- invented names. knowledge creation and
ities. A record of views and maintenance (symbol
Presentation of self. opinions. communal engagement).
Responsive to various Track of activity and
cultural stimuli and circu- means of control of
lations of information. content.
Linkages and data Cultural engagement Platforms and applica- ReTweeting (RT) and Combined sources of
intersections linked to data harvesting. tions. other practices of linking knowledge on subject
Recommendations and Individuals and groups. to cultural resources. areas, events and people.
predictive analytics. Individuals with cultural Viral flows of information. Referencing, citations and
Commercial archives and resources and prefer- Responsive to other paraphrasing.
classification systems. ences. media including print Combinations of linked
Scrobbling and other data media and television. resources. Networked
exchange. Topic-based connections. ideas and subjects.
Mobile devices, everyday Networks of blogs con- Data informing the
spaces. nected through shared descriptions and
topics and links. explanations.
57

(continued)

Table 1. Continued
Type of digital popular culture archive culture
Component features:
Data accumulation
framework Transactional archives
Metadata Controlled and managed.
Linked products through
buying habits/consumer
tastes.
Generative metadata sys-
tems (finding linkages).
Classified content con-
trolled by commercial
gatekeepers (usually).
Play Finding culture, discovery,
reinvention.
Consuming artefacts and
narratives.
Seeing trends and charts.
Overviews available
through aggregators.
Everyday archives
Linked tastes, preferences,
views, beliefs favourites,
etc.
Combined automated
metadata and self-gener-
ated metadata (e.g. tagged
people on photos).
Linkages to strangers (and
friends).
Complex array of orga-
nizing information and
classifications.
Creating profiles.
Searching, finding out
about people, making
connections.
Making friends or fans.
Visualizing personal social
networks.
Fraping, flaming and prac-
tical joking of various
forms.
Viewpoint/opinion
archives
Chaotic and largely self-
generated metadata.
Tags, tagging and tag
clouds.
Hypertext links between
posts and topics.
Hard to navigate, messy.
Often temporally linear
content and topic-based
organization.
Finding out about things
and people. Discovery.
Responding to events and
stories, being a part of the
story (Melodramatic
imagination).
Commenting, being heard,
sharing views. Keeping up-
to-date. Overviews avail-
able through aggregators.
58
Crowdsourcing archives
Self-organized content by
users.
Variable between exam-
ples, but classification
central to the site.
Classificatory imagination.
Tags, tagging, tag clouds.
Search facilities, non-linear
engagement.
Prosumer creation.
Searching and finding out.
Information about edits
and re-edits.
Sabotage, false edits,
changing contents.
Visualizing knowledge and
information.
Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)
Beer and Burrows 59

in service provision, monitoring, and management of cities and borders

in the illuminating work of Amoore (2009) and more generally by
Graham (2005; see also Crang and Graham, 2007). We have seen so
far how popular culture contributes toward data accumulation, but
what happens to this data and how does it come to constitute everyday
life? Some of these feedback loops will be hidden in what Thrift (2005)
describes as the ‘technological unconscious’. It might not be possible, for
example, to understand exactly how one’s listening practices feed into the
production of large-scale national geodemographic systems that in turn
provide a postcode-level analysis of people’s tastes and preferences
(Burrows and Gane, 2006; Uprichard et al., 2009). We can, though,
open up some of the more visible and direct feedback loops within
which such data have come to co-construct popular culture and a
range of everyday practices.
Perhaps the most visible feedback of data accumulated through
engagements with popular culture comes in the form of comments
upon comments or even comments upon pictures, posts, videos, music
and other content – these we have shown are definitive properties of
viewpoint and crowdsourcing archives in particular. This is a kind of
direct feedback and layering of data upon data made possible by indi-
vidual participation. This is a quite obvious form of data generating data,
and even data generating metadata as individuals reflect upon or tag and
organize existing content. Indeed, tagging content with organizational
metadata can be understood as play in itself; there is certainly a highly
visible classificatory imagination at work in contemporary popular cul-
ture. We know little about how or why people engage in this – and yet, as
we have already outlined, such practices are at the centre of the emer-
gence of the new forms of archive we have identified. It is also possible
that the now frequent use by journalists and amateur bloggers of celeb-
rities’ and famous persons’ Twitter feeds as the source for stories and
insights into other stories have come to shape older and more established
media content. The use of social media content to inform the official news
media’s reporting of the recent (summer 2011) social unrest in London is
one such example. There are of course wide-scale changes in journalism
that are related to the issues discussed here, not least where live data
about the favourite news stories of the moment might shape cultural
production and what it is that gets reported on from day to day. The
image of the live feed of most read stories present in the newsroom is
pertinent here (for a discussion of the technological transformation of
journalism see Weiss and Domingo, 2010).
A little less direct but equally visible is one of the most commented
upon ways in which data about popular culture feeds back into popular
culture, the now increasingly common process of automated recommen-
dations – or, as it is sometimes referred to in the popular press, ‘behav-
ioural advertising’. We have already spoken about the transactional data
60 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

accumulated through the purchases made, a process central to transac-

tional archives, as we have described them. This clearly feeds directly in
to the predictive analytics of contemporary capitalism in the form of the
personalized recommendations that we frequently receive that point us
toward possible future purchases. To use the most obvious example,
Amazon clearly uses information about our purchases, our transactional
profile, to then predict other cultural products we might also wish to
purchase. This is the archetypal vision of Thrift’s (2005) ‘knowing cap-
italism’ and shows how data flows back into transactional archives. The
predictive capacities come to shape the purchasing options we encounter
and thus are likely to become embodied in transactional decisions, which
in turn are then recorded again as the by-product data is stored in the
archive and harvested repeatedly to inform further predictive
recommendations.
This type of predictive process is more deeply embedded, though, in
music consumption, particularly where music is consumed in a virtual
format. In these instances profiles are built up about listening practices,
and in some instances by the songs that we select that we ‘like’. A good
example here is the online music source Last.fm, a widely used web
resource for legal music consumption. It operates a little like a persona-
lized radio station in that it identifies music based upon the things you
have previously listened to and the songs that you have a preference for.
This is a predictive music service that uses the aggregate-level data gath-
ered to make inferences on a case-level basis. Transactions, as we might
call them, are not then a linear process, rather they are a product of
recursive data flows shaping encounters and consumer choices (even
where the recommendations are ignored or overlooked). The transac-
tional archive is a site of circulation of cultural information instantiated
in performative consumer activity. The result is that the information
about listening practices feeds back into this resource and shapes the
type of music that listeners then encounter. The recursive feedback of
data in popular culture then has a constitutive affect on people’s life-
worlds in the form of recommendations and also in the form of music
that these automated systems play back to the user. Last.fm is one exam-
ple, and, because of its market presence, we can also point toward
Apple’s iTunes to give some indication of how embedded these consti-
tutive powers might be. The software package iTunes has a built-in
optional facility, known as Genius; this operates in a similar way to
Last.fm, using actual listening practices to intuit music tastes and to
use this to make linkages to music that fit this profile. In this instance
we can imagine that the level of data harvested through iTunes is of a
scale that such analytic practices are highly refined, if not always accur-
ate. This, then, is before we even start to contemplate the predictive
capacities of the rapidly expanding free and legal music streaming sites
like Spotify, through which profiles are again built about individual
Beer and Burrows 61

practices creating both aggregate-level and case-based data that may feed
back into popular culture (as well as metadata-level tags and tag clouds
revealing clusterings of tastes and preferences). In addition to this we
have yet to fully appreciate the biggest archive of people, Facebook, and
how targeted advertising informed by ‘prosumer’ content is being devel-
oped and utilized (there have been ongoing stories of targeted advertising
emerging over the last two or three years as Facebook content is being
used to associate people with products).
What we have in the case of recommendations and predictions of taste
and the linkages that this creates is a very grounded example of what
Lash (2007) has referred to as ‘power through the algorithm’. Lash has
attempted to conceptualize this context within which data ‘find us’, where
algorithms have a constitutive power and act to shape everyday experi-
ences, cultural encounters and other aspects of our life-worlds (see also
Amoore, 2009; the importance of ‘feedback’ in information systems has
been highlighted elsewhere by Clarke, 2010: 168). Lash’s argument is that
we now need to expand our concept of power to grasp ‘algorithmic’ or
‘generative’ rules which are:

virtuals that generate a whole variety of actuals. They are com-

pressed and hidden and we do not encounter them in the way
that we encounter constitutive and regulative rules. Yet this third
type of generative rule is more and more pervasive in our social and
cultural life of the post-hegemonic order. They do not merely open
up opportunity for invention, however. They are also pathways
through which capitalist power works. (Lash, 2007: 71)

We might be a little cautious about Lash’s terminology, but in this

instance it becomes clear that popular culture is constituted by data
about popular culture, whatever the potentials for resistance and
apathy. In short, there is some suggestion in the examples discussed
here that algorithms are taking on some constitutive power as they
begin to shape listening and other consumption practices within popular
culture – as they enable raw data to be converted into predictive linkages.
The use of data, though, is not just about making direct linkages
between individuals and forms of popular culture. We also find that
data becomes a form of entertainment – ‘infotainment’ – as it becomes
a resource used for play. This takes at least four forms. The first is where
individuals draw upon existing sources of data and create visualizations
of this data, such as ‘mashups’ of crime data with Google Maps to pro-
duce crime maps. Here this social data is appropriated into popular cul-
ture to inform and stimulate creative practices and playful visualizations
for people to consume. To give an illustrative example we can look to a
visualization produced by Wired magazine and Pitch Interactive.3 It is a
visualization of the type of complaint and time of day that complaint
62 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

calls were made to the 311 phone service in New York during a week in
September 2010 – here data from a type of transactional archive is
extracted and appropriated to create a visual image that then circulates
through other forms of cultural archives as it is shared, tweeted and
re-tweeted, posted to blogs and so on. The horizontal axis is time of
day and the vertical width of the segments indicates the volume of
that type of complaint, such as graffiti, streetlights, illegal parking and
the like.
This gives a clear indication of the types of social problems and nuis-
ances that are occurring in a particular place; it is interesting that the
data is gathered in a way that makes it readily available for temporal and
geographical analysis. Notable, in this instance, is the continual and
dominant presence of noise as a social agitator. This presence of noise,
the large portion in the centre, continues throughout the day but ‘bal-
loons’ through the evening into the early hours of the morning. This is an
unequivocal illustration of the importance of developing understandings
of noise as a social nuisance (Atkinson, 2007) that comes from a single
and simple visualization that is circulating on blogs and the like as a form
of entertainment. We will not explore this kind of ‘vernacular sociology’
in detail here as it has been described in detail elsewhere (Hardey and
Burrows, 2008; Ruppert and Savage, 2012); it also distracts us a little
from the central focus of the article – but this example is useful in
showing how data is being used in culture and how data can have a
social life across different types of archive as it is injected with vitality
from the playfulness of those appropriating it. What is clear, however, is
that there is at work both a ‘visualization of culture’ and a ‘culture of
visualization’; this can be seen from even a cursory search of any cultural
sphere – there are not many things that have yet to be visualized and
archived.4
A second form of data play in popular culture, which is more directly
about the by-product of popular culture feeding back into popular cul-
ture itself, is where the data generated by popular cultural engagements
are used to generate social insights of various types. Here the routine
contributions and accumulated archived data of popular culture are used
to see (and even create) ‘social facts’. In this instance social research can
be thought of as becoming a form of popular cultural entertainment that
draws upon the data accumulated in popular culture. A wonderful exam-
ple from outside of the academy is provided by wefeelfine.org, a ‘fun’
web resource created by the computer scientists Jonathan Harris and Sep
Kamvar that scours the internet every 10 minutes and captures where the
phrases ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’ are being used. It captures details about
the person who posted the comment and the other words in the sentence
attached to ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’. These then feed into real-time visu-
alizations of this data about emotions linked to a range of social categor-
izations that the visitor can play with to create real-time insights
Beer and Burrows 63

(including gender, age and location). As they put it in their mission

statement:

Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted
blog entries for occurrences of the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling’.
When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the
period, and identifies the ‘feeling’ expressed in that sentence (e.g.
sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely
standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the
author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as
can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was writ-
ten. All of this information is saved. The result is a database of
several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000–20,000 new
feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings
can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices.

This instance is an example of where the various new types of data

generated through routine engagements with popular culture are then
used to create new forms of popular culture in the shape of visualizations
that are created by the individuals who run the site but which can also be
manipulated by visitors to the site. Again, the possibilities of the accu-
mulated archives of data about everyday life become apparent, with the
data accumulating in particular in what we have called everyday archives
being used to produce insights which then are drawn together to form a
new archive of emotions, a subset perhaps of the everyday archive. We
might think of an application like wefeelfine.org as being a kind of portal
onto everyday archives, a device that allows us to see patterns among the
chaos of data flows, that brings the data to life from among the mess and
density so that it can be observed in an intelligible way on a more aggre-
gate level. Most of the mobile visualizations from wefeelfine.org would
not work well on the printed page so we would recommend a visit to the
site to create some up-to-date visuals of the expression of various emo-
tions in real time.
A third way in which data is played with in popular culture is to
generate insights into popular culture itself. Here the mashups are not
created with any particular social insight in mind but instead aim to
visualize popular culture or to make some aspect of it more visible. We
have already discussed the way in which the music application Last.fm
builds an individual-profile-based transactional archive as users consume
music. There are examples of how this data can be used to create visu-
alizations of music taste.5 This visualization shows how transactional
archives can be used to extract information about tastes and preferences.
The data’s social life is extended as the visualization is passed around
again, moving across archive types, as the method and tool are used by
64 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

people to play with their own data and as cultural capital goes metric
within and through cultural evaluations and positionings.
This visualization indicates the type of music that these categories of
people are listening to and have a preference for. Other similar visual-
izations take advantage of the ground-up classificatory systems of tag-
ging popular in these participatory archives in order to make visible the
classificatory imagination operating as the users actually classify and self-
organize the materials in the archive. It also records the type of genre
metadata that users actually attach to music. This then could be viewed
as a rather nuanced way of carrying out Bourdieusian musical field ana-
lyses (Bennett et al., 2009: 75–93); here we have data that reveals what
people actually listen to and the categories they actually attach to the
music. The words in the visualization are the names of bands and artists,
the larger the names the more frequently they have been consumed. This
is a clear example of how information generated as a by-product of
popular culture has fed back into popular culture and popular cultural
analysis for entertainment. In this instance the visualization was created
by blogger and Last.fm intern Joachim Van Herwegen. This is illustrative
of how these applications encourage people to use the data they create;
Last.fm actually has a facility for such visualizations to be created and
shown. In fact many of these popular cultural web resources contain
some form of blog containing vernacular analysis of the data which we
can think of as being viewpoint archives based upon the data extracted
from popular culture itself. Similarly, there are often applications that
allow users to visualize their own data; Last.fm’s ‘playground’ is a good
example of this.
A fourth way in which data can constitute popular culture – sitting
between the types of recommendations generated by data harvesting and
the insights created by mashups – is via popular culture data aggregators.
These provide people with a real-time indication of what is ‘hot’ in popu-
lar culture based upon the discussion or the consumption of popular
cultural forms. Often data aggregators – some of which are free, others
of which are more commercially oriented – are used to follow responses
to brands and the like. They draw together data from across the different
types of archives outlined earlier in this article and are able to pull dif-
ferent forms of materials together to provide overviews of buzz and
trends as they emerge – a technology of ‘pattern recognition’ for those
familiar with the more recent novels of William Gibson. In this context it
is not necessary to wait for the NME (New Musical Express) to be pub-
lished on a Tuesday or for Top of the Pops to air on Thursday, or for
radio DJs to get word. These aggregators provide instantaneous insights
into trends in tastes and preferences in popular culture. This is the ultim-
ate trackability and speed-up of popular cultural movements. To choose
one example to explain these popular culture data aggregators we can
focus for a moment upon Hype Machine; this is a data aggregator that
Beer and Burrows 65

follows music blog discussions. The site explains: ‘Song listings that
appear on this website are automatically gathered from music blogs all
over the internet. We do this to let people discover new artists, fall in
love, buy their CDs and go to their shows.’ This then is undoubtedly an
attempt to use data to shape culture and cultural practice. The explan-
ation of the benefits of this service is that it enables the visitor to Hype
Machine to see the songs that ‘people are falling in love with right now’
through a live feed of blog entries about music, or alternatively, if this is
too rapid and you need a more cumulative and considered account on
which to base your judgments, you can see the music that bloggers talked
about last year. Illustrating the intersectionality and connections of the
data assemblage in popular culture, Hype Machine can also be linked to
individual Twitter and Last.fm accounts in order to make it follow the
profile of the music one listens to. The importance again of profiles about
individuals is illustrative here in these case-based analytics.
Elsewhere the data aggregator klout.com provides individual scores
that indicate the impact that people or entities have across Twitter and
Facebook; essentially archives of the everyday and viewpoint archives
become data sources for the measurement and reporting of cultural influ-
ence. Any name can be searched to locate a Klout score from 1 to 100.
Klout, we are told, uses 35 variables to measure influence based upon
audience size, responses to actions and how influential one’s audience is.
All of which can be used to get a sense of the broader cultural trends and
movements around individuals or topics – these Klout scores are taken in
real time or can be used historically; we can see for instance that Barack
Obama and Justin Bieber (the teen ‘popstar’) were the most influential
people of 2010 and that social media and Iran were the top two topics.
What these aggregators allow is for trends and shifts in popular culture
consumption to be made visible and trackable. The data generated about
popular culture can be harvested from the different types of archive to be
visualized, so that it can again feed directly back into informing inter-
ested parties about popular culture – and we might also add things like
the iTunes charts and similar real-time indicators of cultural consump-
tion. This is a much accelerated and in some ways entirely new set of
organizations and relations in popular culture about which we so far
have little understanding. Nor, we could add, do we have a clear sense
of the socio-technological infrastructures and archives that organize and
underpin it, the way the data is played with or algorithmically sorted, and
how this shapes culture; we know little of the cultural version of the
‘agencements’ to which Ruppert (2011) refers.
In a slightly slower form of circulation, by-product data is also used to
reflect on patterns of popularity over longer periods of time. The highly
influential media organizations Google, Twitter and Facebook now all
draw upon their archived data to inform annual ‘Zeitgeist’ reviews.
Google uses the data about the things people search for to capture the
66 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

‘spirit’ of the year (locationally and through time, using various static
and mobile visual tools). Facebook produces an annual ‘Memology’
report using data from profile-based status updates. Twitter uses the
content of posted Tweets to accumulate details of the top trends of the
year (using 25 billion Tweets). These separately and together draw upon
the accumulated and archived data produced through routine engage-
ments with culture, and provide the type of insight that has hitherto been
out of the reach of social scientists.
It should be said that many of the trends for 2010 are fairly obvious,
with many revealing an interest in Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, the iPad
and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but there are also some hidden
dimensions that the use of these data reveals. We could list a number of
insights provided by this recirculation of data generated in popular cul-
ture. Let us, though, just give the example of the phrase ‘hit me up’ as
emblematic of the relatively concealed aspects of popular culture that we
find here. This phrase and its abbreviation as ‘HMU’ emerged from
nowhere as the top status trend on Facebook. This emergence can be
followed through the data.6 The report reveals that the HMU acronym
grew from just 20 posts a day in early 2009 to 1600 posts a day by the end
of the year, then in 2010 it grew ‘aggressively’ by 75 per cent a month and
reached 80,000 mentions per day by the end of 2010. The report also uses
the data to reveal the varying temporal frequency of these mentions of
HMU, with school holidays and weekends being the time when HMU
was used to invite friends to ‘hang out’. This type of visibility enables the
growth of such trends and allows their wider appropriation; it creates a
scaled-up version of what used to be called ‘word-of-mouth’, and this
snowballs phenomena into trends by revealing the patterns within arch-
ives of the everyday, which then get fed back as people follow the trend
(or abandon it if it becomes ‘uncool’). Thus we are presented with a
highly complex set of variegated cultural circulations. Indeed, we begin
to see that popular culture is realized and performed through the social
life of data and the infrastructural properties of various but closely
aligned digital archives.

Concluding Comments
We wanted to illustrate the centrality of popular culture within the cru-
cial and pressing issues that face the social sciences. Here we have illu-
strated the part that popular culture plays in data accumulation, the
recursivity of data in constituting everyday life, and we have begun to
elaborate upon the possibilities of this for social research (for a parallel
discussion of this in the area of political engagement see Ruppert and
Savage, 2011). However, the article only touches the surface of what is
possible, as our examples and discussion suggest we are only beginning to
open up the neglected ‘migrations, translocations and twists in the
Beer and Burrows 67

technoscape’ (Mackenzie, 2005: 72). As we have described, data is

archived in various ways, some more visible than others, and in a
number of instances circulates back recursively into popular culture
and into culture more generally. The outcome of this recombinant set
of processes is that popular culture, and therefore the everyday experi-
ences of myriad individuals, are being shaped and constituted by the
social life of data. That is to say that this ‘performativity of circulation’,
as Mackenzie helpfully puts it, is largely overlooked in work on culture
but is actually coming to radically transform large sections of the cultural
landscape. We need to look beyond a notion of transactional data, in its
narrowest sense at least, to understand this new social data in its broadest
forms; its form, content and organization. Not all of this by-product data
can be thought of as being transactional, at least not in a narrow sense.
We need to hone a much more nuanced understanding of these new
forms of social data that includes the form of the data and how it
folds back into everyday life. A more differentiated vision of the pro-
cesses that underpin culture is required. We have opened up a typology
here based upon what we have identified as the component features of
these contemporary archives; this typology helps us to see the flow and
circulation of data more clearly, but – in a context of variegated and
mobile infrastructures creating a fixed set of socio-technical boundary
conditions – inevitably creates problems.
We might reasonably conclude that routine everyday engagements
with popular culture, facilitated by technological and cultural transform-
ations, are responsible for affording the accumulation of vast by-product
datasets that can be conceptualized through a notion of archives and
archiving. Similarly, we might also reasonably conclude that this data
has a life after its harvesting, it has a social life as it finds a new vitality
through the play of individuals and through the excitement of participa-
tion, and that in some instances it feeds directly and indirectly back into
the organization and relations of popular culture. These feedback loops
can be knowing and active or unknowing and algorithmic. We might say
that to a minimal degree this recursivity has always been there in the
form of market research, reported sales figures, in music charts, in popu-
lar cultural journalism and in a number of other ways. We would
respond by arguing that this has accelerated greatly and has been
appended by new ways of seeing and engaging with popular culture
that simply could not have existed before the conditions enabled this
new type of social data to emerge and circulate. We might say that
there has always been a performativity of circulation of data in popular
culture but that this circulation has accelerated, the data has hyper-
multiplied and the connections and linkages forged have been beyond
any previous comprehension. There is also the added dimension that
recombinant data forms mean that popular culture incorporates the
data it creates while also then generating another set of by-product
68 Theory, Culture & Society 30(4)

data: for example, visualizations, charts and so on which can shape

understandings, actions and the like. Culture is now ‘code/space’ in
that it, like many dimensions of the social world, relies on code to func-
tion; it ‘occurs when software and the spatiality of everyday life become
mutually constituted, that is, produced through one another’ (Kitchin
and Dodge, 2011: 16).
The use of this new social data in social research needs us first to
understand and account for the manner in which that data is accumu-
lated and the way in which the data itself is integrated back into everyday
practices. We know little about how the performativity of data circula-
tion, the social life of data, feeds into the performance of subjectivity and
the constitution of everyday experiences. We know little of the affect of
the social life of data. Popular culture provides one area in which we
might develop just such an understanding, where we might elaborate the
conceptual ideas of algorithmic power and the like, and by doing so
further our prospects of both providing a valuable critical commentary
on the role and use of by-product data, and the bigger and more difficult
problem of how we might access and use such data. Popular culture
would be a productive sphere for developing a more rounded under-
standing of the closely allied conceptual ideas that are circulating
around the constitutive power of software, affect and enactment.
Overall though, and in much broader terms, it has recently been
argued that social researchers no longer engage with debates about the
premises that ground our epistemological formations (Hart and
McKinnon, 2010). We agree that this is required, but, as we have
shown here, we also need to consider that we might have to seriously
reflect upon and rethink our ontological assumptions about our everyday
engagements with culture. The relations between popular culture and the
new social life of data provide us with an important focal point for
developing the dual projects of critique and social analysis.

Notes
1. We should reiterate that this is not a typology of all of the new forms of
digital archives. Our focus here is on archives generated and used in everyday
engagements with popular culture. For a parallel analysis of the impact of
archives focused more on the political rather than the cultural sphere see
Ruppert and Savage (2011).
2. Taken from the blog www.informationisbeautiful.net, posted 3 November
2010.
3. See: http://flowingdata.com/2010/11/08/what-new-yorkers-complain-about/
4. See, for example, manyeyes at http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/
cognos/manyeyes
5. See, for example, this visualization of music taste by age and gender: http://
flowingdata.com/2010/09/28/music-listening-preferences-by-gender/
6. See: http://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post¼466369142130
Beer and Burrows 69

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Author Biographies
David Beer is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York,
UK. He works in the areas of culture, media and social theory. His new
book, Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation, will be
published in the summer of 2013.

Roger Burrows is a Professor in the Department of Sociology,

Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently working on a project
examining the sociology of ‘super-rich’ neighbourhoods in London and
has also recently published articles on the cultural role of metrics in the
contemporary academy.