Contributors: Adela, Lorainne, Maryam

Social media is at the center of everyday life. We scroll through endless streams of content carefully curated to our tastes, shaped by algorithms that “learn” from our behaviour. In this digital landscape, anyone can create and share media about anything, while platforms personalize what we see based on our activity. This constant curation keeps us engaged, presenting an illusion of infinite choice while subtly guiding what gains visibility.

Both creators and consumers play active roles in the system. Creators learn to work with the algorithm: choosing specific sounds, hashtags, and editing styles that fit its rhythm, while consumers customize their feeds to match their interests, following or blocking certain tags, creators, and engaging with select content. Together, these behaviours teach the system what “works,” creating a feedback loop in which both the user and the algorithm continually adapt to one another. It’s through this ongoing exchange that trends emerge.

In this blog, we attempt to extend Tim Ingold’s notion of correspondence to digital contexts, suggesting that users and algorithms are engaged in an ongoing process of co-creation: a form of digital correspondence where each shapes the other through continuous interaction.

We argue that, through the lens of correspondence, social media algorithms can be understood as both a system of control and responsive materials that evolve with user activity, forming a digital environment where trends are “made” collaboratively through attention, resistance, and adaptation.

Making as Correspondence

To set the ground, Ingold defines correspondence as the relationship we form with the world when we think through doing. For him, genuine inquiry is not at all about standing apart from the world and describing it from a distance, as if we were detached observers. Instead, it involves, as he writes, “opening up our perception to what is going on there” (p. 7) and responding to the world’s movements, textures, and changes. Therefore, correspondence is an ongoing, two-way process of mutual responsiveness between ourselves and our surroundings: we attend to what the world is doing, and our actions, in turn, answer back to it.

Ingold compares interaction and correspondence to the act of walking with another person. When two people walk beside each other, they are engaged in a deeply companionable activity, despite not speaking directly to each other and rarely making eye contact. Instead, they coordinate their pace, rhythm, and direction through subtle bodily cues and peripheral vision, and their connection unfolds through movement itself, rather than through communication or representation. This is not a verbal or face-to-face exchange but a lived attunement. It’s rather a way of “growing older together” (p. 106) in shared time, making the nature of the relationship dynamic, ongoing, and co-creative. Walking together, therefore, reveals what Ingold calls correspondence: a mutual responsiveness that arises through motion, and never through detached interaction.

Ingold extends this idea to the act of making, describing it as a dialogue between the maker and the material. The maker does not really impose form but learns from the material’s resistance and possibilities, adjusting gestures in response. Through this ongoing exchange, both the maker and the material are transformed. Therefore, we think to correspond is not at all to represent reality from outside, but to join with it: to move, learn, and evolve alongside it. It’s a way of knowing with the world, rather than knowing about it.

Correspondence in the Digital Sphere

Viewing algorithms through the lens of Ingold makes it clear that the relationship between them and social media users is one of correspondence. The production of and interaction with content on a platform is processed as data that continuously shapes our digital experiences. Every user’s contribution to the algorithm, regardless of whether they post content, is significant but often overlooked. The very act of liking, saving, or even swiping after a certain amount of time signals one’s level of enjoyment of a specific kind of content. Such simple actions give rise to personalized feeds, such as TikTok’s famous “For You Page”, that grow in effectiveness the longer one stays on the app. 

Correspondence is not limited to just being between user and algorithm, but also among users themselves too. Ingold describes the scene of a string quartet: players do not interact nor move position, but create interwoven sounds that blend into one (p. 107). This music room, we think, can be seen as equivalent to the digital spaces of social media platforms, in which users continuously contribute to an ever-changing conversation that describes a song, however discordant, of collective consciousness. Only through the algorithms that push forth voices and encourage user responses can such dynamic conversations take place. TikTok’s “stitch” feature that allows a direct response to videos is one of many that illustrates how users engage in a mutual feedback loop of responsiveness, and hence correspondence – similar to a string quartet’s act of “listening as they play, and playing as they listen” (p. 106). 

This phenomena is largely seen through the prevalence of trends on social media. Thanks to the dynamic, ever-shifting nature of the algorithm, trends disappear just as quickly as they arise. When a post gains traction, the algorithm prioritizes it and pushes it out to users’ feeds, leading to further engagement and more user-generated content on that topic. And through the use of popular hashtags and sounds, and the continuous mutual responsiveness among users, trends proliferate, change and shift – then fall off just as easily. This way, we correspond with other users while also corresponding with the algorithm by answering to what it shows us, collectively contributing to a fluctuating digital landscape that shapes our perceptions of the world.

The ability of algorithms to tailor the content fed to users allows for the positive engagement with personal interest and the development of niche, creative communities. However, we think its detrimental impacts cannot go unmentioned. Algorithms are strong perpetrators of echo chambers, in which the development of “filter bubbles” limits exposure to opposing views and reaffirms users’ confirmation bias (Latimore).

Furthermore, we must realize the content filtered out by algorithms is not only derived from user interactions, but also from the biases ingrained within their very programming – biases that mirror existing hierarchies of visibility and power.

Power and Algorithmic Control

These built-in biases remind us that algorithms are never at all neutral, they are shaped by the same social, political, and economic forces that structure the world around us. What began as a relationship of mutual correspondence between users and platforms starts to reveal a deeper imbalance. The very systems that seem to “listen” and adapt to us are, in reality, governed by unseen mechanisms of power.

Through Ingold’s framework, when we think about how we interact with social media today, we see a similar kind of correspondence, but one that has been distorted by forces we cannot fully perceive. Every post, like, and comment feeds into the algorithm, which in turn “learns” our behaviour and shapes what we see, believe, and desire. It’s still a dialogue but one that has become asymmetrical, where one side listens with human curiosity, and the other responds through invisible forms of data-driven control.

The algorithm, through Ingold’s lens, starts to look like a “material” that has learned to push back. It resists our intentions, reshapes our sense of connection and perception of reality, and even determines what counts as “worthy” of attention. But this correspondence is never innocent, never neutral; it’s shaped by power. The algorithm actually amplifies certain voices while silencing others, rewarding what is profitable, making certain things visible and trending while burying what doesn’t serve power and its agendas – very often the stories and struggles that most urgently demand to be heard.

We see inevitable connections in Critical Terms for Media Studies, and we keep returning to the description of mass media as “the playthings of institutions… under the management of the palace, the market, or the temple” (p. 277). That feels truer than ever. What appears as a participatory and democratic space is, in fact, an infrastructure of control. Algorithms amplify what serves institutional power and suppress what threatens it.

We see this in real time as voices exposing genocide, colonial violence, and injustice are shadow-banned, flagged, and buried beneath layers of distraction and a public that has been numbed into passivity.

Reclaiming Media as Ethical Making

As media students, we have a responsibility to see through this illusion, to think critically, to question, and to resist. Ingold teaches us that making is an ethical act of correspondence, one rooted in care and attention. To “make” within algorithmic systems, then, must mean to intervene consciously and to create media that refuse erasure, that restore presence where silence has been systematically imposed. 

In resisting the algorithm’s pull, we think that our role cannot stop at consumption or critique, it must extend to re-making media itself. Re-making as a tool for truth-telling, for exposing injustice, and for reawakening correspondence as a living, ethical practice.

Contributors: Adela, Lorainne, Maryam

References
Latimore, E. (n.d.). The echo chamber of social media. Retrieved from https://edlatimore.com/echo-chamber-social-media/
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge.
Peters, J. D. (2010). Mass Media. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. Hansen (Eds.), Critical Terms for Media Studies (pp. 261–276). University of Chicago Press.
Photo credit: Which? Trusted Trader, “How to use social media for your business”, June 1 2023. https://for-traders.which.co.uk/advice/how-to-use-social-media-for-your-business