Everyday Scrolling: Algorithmic Awareness and Audience Tactics

In the contemporary digital ecosystem, algorithms play a central role in the selection, ranking, and circulation of news and entertainment. Using Michel de Certeau’s theory of everyday tactics alongside Roger Silverstone’s domestication framework, this article builds on recent scholarship that views algorithmic awareness as differentiated, processual, or scalar. Specifically, we conceptualize algorithmic awareness as a continuum of situated understandings through which users recognize, interpret, and respond to algorithmic curation. Drawing from 56 in-depth interviews conducted in Argentina, we propose that analyzing awareness as a continuum helps explain why users deploy varied repertoires of tactics when engaging with these systems. Findings show that higher levels of awareness do not inherently cultivate user empowerment. Instead, heightened recognition frequently yields deeply ambivalent experiences characterized by cognitive saturation, forced personalization, and strategic platform withdrawal, thereby providing an empirically grounded communication research perspective from the Global South.