The Metric Mindset: Social Life in Datafied Media Landscapes 101 1. Audience measurement, mindset, and social agency Although metrics, and technologies of measurement, have been around since the invention of writing (HACKING, 1990), the rise of statistics in the mid-19th century meant a new phase in the development of measurement (PORTER, 1986), impacting on how the world is perceived and predicted, producing a mindset against which humans orient and act in social space. Digitization has arguably fuelled this development, introducing real-time algorithmic measurement in online spaces, building on continuously larger datasets, and new ways of calculating data, which have allowed for synchronisation of sets of data on unprecedented scales. Digitization has thus provided an increased penetration of metrics in all spheres of life (BEER, 2016), and understanding the wider social and cultural consequences of this should be of sociological relevance. Metrics, as used in this paper, refer to a ‘standard of measurement’ (Oxford English Dictionary). This standard is produced through measurement, and one can say that metrics are the result of the practice of measurement. Measurement has an epistemological dimension as it fixates and preserves events in space and time. However, some aspects of reality do not lend themselves to the simplification and reduction measurement requires, and thus they remain invisible. Metrics express some dimensions of events, rather than others. They constitute an im- age of reality, mediated, that media users see and are invited to react to. Within the culture and media industries metrics have mainly concerned audience measurement. Within the commer- cial media, the interest in ‘knowing one’s audience’ has been a central part of the business models developed from the traditional mass media (BJUR, 2014), but with digitization, new busi- ness models developed building on algorithmically processed audience statistics (BERMEJO, 2009; BUZZARD, 2012). Traditional mass media has had to adjust to this new situation, while new-born digital media already from their start adopted their workings to the metrically steered production environments
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