This article explains how social networks can be objects of aesthetic appreciation. Drawing on the aesthetics of games, I claim that their aesthetic value lies in how they ‘sculpt’ online communicative agency. Such agency involves two layers: first-order speech acts (posts that display texts, images, or videos) and second-order speech acts (responses that express uptake, such as likes, comments, and shares). Through their aggregation, these speech acts give rise to two speech act artefacts: the …
Read moreThis article explains how social networks can be objects of aesthetic appreciation. Drawing on the aesthetics of games, I claim that their aesthetic value lies in how they ‘sculpt’ online communicative agency. Such agency involves two layers: first-order speech acts (posts that display texts, images, or videos) and second-order speech acts (responses that express uptake, such as likes, comments, and shares). Through their aggregation, these speech acts give rise to two speech act artefacts: the personal profile and the personal feed. These artefacts are experienced through the act of scrolling, which enables their spatial and temporal unfolding. This framework supports an aesthetic account of social networks that foregrounds their agentive dimension and helps enrich our understanding of them.
