Algorithmic Subjectivity: The Construction of Online Gamblers’ Selves through Digital Calculation
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Abstract
This study examines online gambling as a field of subjectivity production within the conditions of digital society. The primary objective is to explain how players’ subjectivities are constructed through the interrelations among humans, algorithms, data, and platform infrastructures. The research employed a qualitative methodology, drawing on in-depth interviews with online gamblers, industry practitioners, and regulatory officials, alongside document analysis and examination of online gambling platforms. The findings reveal that online gambling is not merely an individual decision-making activity but a network of actants in which algorithms play a central role in tracking, analysing, and steering players’ behaviours in real time. Players’ actions were continuously transformed into data that can be predicted and managed. At the same time, affect operates as a crucial mechanism shaping decision-making at a pre-conscious level, resulting in a redistribution and reconfiguration of human agency within the system. The study argues that algorithmic subjectivity emerges as a product of co-constitutive processes between human actors and computational systems. Subjectivity is not simply derived from lived experience but is actively produced through processes of sorting, classification, and prediction. Within the context of platform capitalism, subjectivity also functions as a data resource from which value is continuously extracted. This research proposes that humans in the digital age are not merely users of technology but are, at a deeper level, products of algorithmic systems that structure perception, decision-making, and the conditions of possibility for action in everyday life.
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บทความที่ได้รับการตีพิมพ์เป็นลิขสิทธิ์ของวารสารมนุษยศาสตร์และสังคมศาสตร์ มหาวิทยาลัยอุบลราชธานี
ข้อความที่ปรากฏในบทความแต่ละเรื่องในวารสารวิชาการเล่มนี้เป็นความคิดเห็นส่วนตัวของผู้เขียนแต่ละท่านไม่เกี่ยวข้องกับมหาวิทยาลัยอุบลราชธานี และคณาจารย์ท่านอื่นๆในมหาวิทยาลัยฯ แต่อย่างใด ความรับผิดชอบองค์ประกอบทั้งหมดของบทความแต่ละเรื่องเป็นของผู้เขียนแต่ละท่าน หากมีความผิดพลาดใดๆ ผู้เขียนแต่ละท่านจะรับผิดชอบบทความของตนเองแต่ผู้เดียว
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