abstract:

The social media world is a competitive world. Friends’ scores, likes’ ratings and comments’ counts are some of the most common features in a social network profile. Numbers matter. Not only because they offer a certain sense of self affirmation to the user but also because they define what to see and what to pay attention to. Numbers reveal how social users are, how popular their sayings are, how interesting their everyday life appears to be. Either one realizes it or not, in the era of attention economy, success is being estimated by countings of friends, uploads, likes and posts. But what does gamification really count? Why did it emerge now? Can it be paused and by whom? The paper will examine the role gamification has come to play in social networking sites, offering new forms of measurement which allow exploitation and control. At the same time, counter-mechanisms opposed to gamification proposed by artists will also be presented, aiming to express the role of creativity as resistance, highlighting the importance of critical awareness and collective action.