This month's Frame: Igor Kopytoff and singularisation
A framework that will help you see the limitations of current recommendation systems and how they could be improved.
We organise our lives around recommendations. From finding the most convenient route to travel to discovering the best TV show to watch, we constantly rely on algorithmic recommendations to provide us with the right answers and the best suggestions.
At times, recommendations can strike gold, like when the perfect song comes up on Spotify’s Discover Weekly to capture the mood. However, at other times, recommendations feel generic—an artificial suggestion generated to drive engagement. And sometimes recommendations—like Google’s AI search recommending users to put glue on their pizza—can feel absurd and even dangerous.
AI hallucinations and generic recommendations might seem worlds apart but they do share commonalities. The cause of both is the lack of grounding in social contexts. Just as the AI-driven algorithm that recommended glue on pizza fails to notice the sarcasm in a glue pizza recipe, generic recommendations often fail to capture the moment or “read the room”. The stakes are high. Too many generic recommendations and a user can lose trust in them, not believing they can take them anywhere new or exciting.
To avoid the pitfall of losing user trust by making irrelevant recommendations, platforms need to seize the opportunity to provide meaningful recommendations.
Igor Kopyroff’s concept of singularisation can help us understand how something becomes meaningful by grounding it in the social.
The framework
Kopytoff argues that physical objects have biographies similar to people, where they move between different states. The key movement in an object’s life is moving between being a “commodity” (something that can be sold and has a clear financial value) and a singularised object (something that is unique and priceless).
Singularisation occurs when objects take on a meaning that is grounded in social and cultural contexts and can occur either through an institution or an individual. For example when a famous painting enters the collection of a museum; it becomes part of the art historical canon and becomes “priceless”. The institution has deemed that this piece of art isn’t seen as a commodity to be exchanged (even if technically it does have monetary value). Similarly, a personal heirloom can feel like a singular unique object by representing a happy memory to an individual or a family. In this case, it's personal relationships that make the object feel priceless even if wider society does not see it as valuable.
Kopytoff’s work lays out a process by which an object can pass from being a commodity to something singular and special by integrating itself into social and cultural contexts.
The ways that objects can do this are through:
Social and personal histories: They become singularised by embodying personal histories, meaningful shared memories with others, or even acting as a reminder of someone important to us like the personal heirloom, which differentiates them from other, more mundane objects.
Social identity: An object can also become singularised when it validates a community’s identity and is valued by a person’s social graph. For example, a football fan’s jersey can feel priceless as it validates their identity as part of the supporter community and signals allegiance to other fans and enmity with rivals.
Social practices: Social rituals and practices are often centred around specific objects, which acquire significance through their roles in these activities. Kopytoff's analysis reveals how objects become singularised through their involvement in rituals such as weddings, funerals, and religious ceremonies. A wedding ring, for instance, is not merely a piece of jewellery but a symbol of marital commitment and social recognition of a partnership.
Using the framework
Similarly to physical objects, recommendations can also go through this singularisation process by being rooted in the user’s social history, social identity, and social practices.
Social and personal histories
Recommendations that can build on the user’s memories become more meaningful by being rooted in their personal history. However, there is a distinction to be made between mundane memories and those that are significant. This holds true for recommendations, where algorithms can over-index on insignificant past interactions that were in the moment, rather than informing future use.
One way to differentiate significant memories is by connecting recommendations to shared histories with other users. Recommendations that build on previously shared interactions, interests, or memories (e.g., places visited together) can become singularised by basing them on the meaningful connection and shared history between the users.
Social Proof and relationality
Recommendations can also become more meaningful through their connection to the user’s relationships and communities, similar to how the team’s jersey validates a fan's attachment to the supporter community.
Recommendations that leverage the influence of friends, family, and influencers within the user’s network make recommendations feel more relevant and provide social proof. For example, showing the user that their recommendation was liked by a friend signals that they’re interacting with content that represents their social identity and that is valued by other people whose opinion matters to them.
Social practices
Recommendations can also take on a more singularised role as they become a vessel for meaningful interactions and social practices between users. Users we have met in the past, have spoken about the practice of “building their algorithm brick by brick” with their friends, sharing memes in order to create similar recommendation systems that encapsulate their humour. This social practice is about refining and aligning tastes with their friends.
Recommendations that connect and build on these shared moments not only feel more relevant but could play an important role in further supporting users' ongoing conversations and relationships.
Kopytoff’s concept of singularisation reveals that there are multiple ways social and cultural contexts can make ordinary objects feel unique and meaningful to people, including the way objects can both embody and support connections to others. Similarly to physical objects, social context also affects how users view recommendations. Not unlike commodities, recommendations can feel generic and artificial, a commodity designed to grab the attention. On the other hand, rooting recommendations in users’ social context can make them feel more personally relevant and meaningful.
Frames is a monthly newsletter that sheds light on the most important issues concerning business and technology.
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