Over the past fifteen years Instagram has industrialised and platformised the everyday practices of creating and sharing digital images. Our posts and stories are both an archive of our lives and visual practices, but also part of the historical process of assembling image data sets for training machine vision systems. This paper presents the final part of a multi-year project where we use a combination of cultural and computational methods to explore the relationships between our everyday image-making practices and the algorithmic models of Instagram (Authors). We present findings from a study with 25 participants who have used Instagram for five or more years as part of their professional or creative practices. Participants downloaded and donated their complete archive of Instagram posts and stories. We then printed out 500 images from their profile as photographs and clustered their entire archive using our purpose-built machine vision system. In a co-analysis interview participants scrolled back through their Instagram profile, narrating changes in their practices and the platform over time. They then manually sorted the images printed from their archive and explored a visualisation of the algorithmic clustering of their images. Through this process of co-analysis we elicit the algorithmic imaginary of users and develop an intimate platform biography of how their practices are entangled with platform interfaces and algorithmic models.

Over the past few years, digital platforms from different sectors have started tailoring their content to both respond to and create certain moods, vibes, or ‘ambiences’. In so doing, they become ‘atmospheric architectures’ (Bohme 2020), entering the industry of emotional regulation. I posit that a critical-phenomenological framework is a productive epistemological, theoretical, and methodological resource for scrutinising this shift precisely at the intersection of embodied affect and the political economy of platformisation. By critical phenomenology I mean a phenomenological disposition that is not blind to the social, technical, and political environment in which it is situated (Couldry and Kallinikos 2018). This paper also dialogues with recent discussions both in public discourse and the relevant scholarship about a latent change in our digital sociality, in which the values for which we once celebrated digital media are now being replaced by a different mode of consumption, fruition, and attention (John 2022). Using the contemporary case studies to flesh out these new formations in emotional capitalism (Illouz 2007), I propose that we are entering a new stage in programmed sociality (Bucher 2018), focused less on sharing, connecting, or engaging, and more on the platformisation of the merely felt. The examination of this phenomenon demands us to acknowledge the significance of those mixed feelings – which involve an interplay of the affective and the computational – and of their entanglement with a profit-oriented corporate technoscape.

In this paper, I briefly recount the evolution in the use of the word ‘toggle,’ and build off it to theorize it as a concept.Today we know toggling as a verb, and the user interaction (UI) of switching between and moving across apps and activities. Prior to this, toggle was a noun that referred to fasteners on garments and on walls that held things in place. This evolution from a noun to a verb, helps attend to the fact that as people, we have always used our hands, heads, and objects to hold things together, as we switch between doing and being.

To theorize toggling, I will first detail my motivation, methods, and methodology. Then I will illustrate how toggling as a concept, enables reframing two dominant views on (1) how information is imagined to push users to do things and (2) how being a user, especially a consumer, is imagined to move us “out of touch.”

Toggling as a conceptual vessel places UI in this history of how our hands and fingers have interacted with surfaces of objects like buttons and made sense of the world. Placing interaction in our hands makes room for us as scholars to ask: how do people make sense of information and hold everything together as they switch between doing livelihood-care and being workers, consumers, business owners, householders and so on?

This work introduces Jewish entrepreneurialism on TikTok. The platform emerged as a prominent space for Jewish creators to showcase religion and culture, fostering visibility and community engagement. They have skillfully carved out a distinct realm for entrepreneurial labor by dedicating their content creation to cultivating the #JewTok. Entrepreneurial labor prompts creators to mine their own identities for content, blurring the lines between work and self-representation. For #JewTok creators, monetizing culture becomes deeply entwined with their identity as they transform aspects of their religion, ethnicity, heritage, and culture into fodder for engagement. We use ethnographic observations of 27 creators' profiles, supplemented by interviews with 19 creators, revealing entrepreneurial labour as Jewish Ambassadorship in four ways: (1) Jewish creators as cultural brokers, helping fellow Jews navigate non-Jewish dominant spaces, with their profiles serving as cultural hubs; (2) community builders who use TikTok's features to bridge interreligious gaps among marginalized groups; (3) justice advocates who address Jewish stereotypes, and (4) religion explorers who enhance understanding of Judaism's diverse identities. Our findings also reveal entrepreneurial labour as Jewish Hardship in two ways: (1) algorithmic antisemitism, described as baked biases in algorithms leading to the suppression of Jewish creators. This harm leads to the amplification of their content to harmful audiences perpetuating (2) religious voyeurism and surveillance, where creators' content transforms into voyeuristic spectacles, drawing unwanted attention. This dynamic underscores the urgent need for researchers to explore this creator economy, as similar patterns have already emerged in other creator communities across race, disability, gender, and sexuality.