Göran Bolin 102 (BOLIN, 2011; KENNEDY, 2016), and we have seen the rise of a ‘data analytics industry’ (Beer, 2018), surrounded by new ter- minologies centred on ‘big data’ (BOYD; CRAWFOORD, 2012, ANDREJEVIC, 2013), ‘bio-metrics’ (GATES, 2011), ‘gamification’ (WHITSON, 2013), ‘social profiling’ (GOULD, 2014), etc. This has privileged new ways for the media to relate to their audiences, with new textual strategies developed, e.g. click-bait journalism (WAHL-JØRGENSEN et al., 2016), ‘like economies’ (GERLITZ; HELMOND, 2013), and new business models (BOLIN, 2011) – all of which are built on metrics. From the media productions perspective, metrics have most often been used for producing economic value (through, for example, the construction of the audience commodity). Following pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1939), it seems more rewarding to theorise value in both its essence (what it is) and how it is arrived at (the practice of valuation) – that is, both as a noun and as a verb. Metrics represent a form of valuation, and to produce metrics is to arrive at the ‘worth’ of something, the measure assumed in the practice of valuation (MAGENDANZ, 2003), according to the philosophical principle the ‘What counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted’ (BA- DIOU, 2008, p. 2). In practices of valuation economic value often has a privileged position, where metrics translates qualitative value forms into numerical (economic) value – the ‘currency’ that media producers speak of when they translate audience ratings into the worth of the audience commodity, or the ‘traf- fic commodity’ that social media platform owners trade in. Met- rics represents a sort of rationality where most things converge into economic thinking in media production (BAYM, 2013), and when sociability becomes metricated along nexus of values de- fined by the social media industries, it motivates research on how media users make sense of these metrics in their everyday media use, which values are produced in this process, and which social actions and relations are privileged. Metrics, however, is not a unified entity and one can, for example, distinguish between two kinds of metrics related to social media: representational and operational metrics. Representational metrics are bits of numerical information that the media user is directly confronted with on the social media in-
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