Formulación de bioproducto

Epigraph

The phrase ‘I really do not know what is going to happen’ heard at the FA headquarter and meetings shows a mix of uncertainty and anxiety. This uneasiness could be attributed to the mid-September polls, which predicted a complicated political scenario for the FA. The party could lose control of the legislative chambers and the presidential election that have been previously considered as secured victories. Expressions of uncertainty and uneasiness were sometimes followed by a call to party’s followers for making extra efforts to participate and support the campaign under the battlefield slogan ‘Let’s redouble’86_.

The campaign team at the National Commission for Propaganda and Communication were constantly receiving requests from people asking for materials (leaflets, flags, stickers) with which they might help support the party. Throughout most of the evening, a team of young volunteers were discussing ideas and developing activities for the digital campaign in the offices and aisles of the building’s first floor. The goal was to win the presidential seat and secure a majority in the legislative chambers on the 26 October national election, and the digital team had spent time and resources on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, where the slogan ‘Let’s redouble’ was also repeatedly mentioned.

The team knew that a new Like on Facebook was not equivalent to a new vote or a valid form of predicting results in the coming elections. But, they saw the clicking of this button as a form of showing support in real- time and were making every possible effort to boost the public’s reaction. The number of Likes on the Facebook’s page had been constantly growing in previous weeks, but the anxiety and uncertainty regarding

86 _{Let’s redouble is a FA battlefield slogan that portrayed a political period of resistance marked by the} Uruguayan dictatorship in the 1970s and the basis of a popular lyric which is still used to call FA

supporters and the people in general for making an extra effort in the political struggle. The song can be accessed online on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhMXybx7jpQ. Last accessed on 28 April 2018.

the future election’s results did not disappear. The ‘Let’s redouble’ motto was a form of coping with the difficulties in the campaign and moving towards the electoral goal.

In one of the corners of the office, a campaign manager was quietly looking at the latest charts displaying the numbers of Likes reached by the different parties competing in the elections. He had been looking at FA Fan Page every day in the past months and had paid to promote the page, so more people could be reached and engage with the campaign. He also knew that 120,000 Likes reached on the page was not a prediction of what the election results would be, and on its own this number had not even provided him with a certainty about the general directions of the campaign. It was only after he received updated information about the number of Likes reached by the other parties that he was able to take a decision and direction on this specific medium. While Looking at the screen, he calmly said: “So far we have more than the double of Likes. If they narrow the gap to less than 70,000 likes, I will start pumping money on Facebook again”.

Introduction

The main aim of this chapter is to understand how Facebook’s indicators, such as the number of Likes described above, became part of valuation processes that have implications in deciding further actions for the campaign. This opening vignette provides a glimpse of some of the multiple activities carried out by the group of professional campaigners introduced in the previous chapter as part of the FA National Commission. Their practices, conducted in association with other actors in a specific electoral situation, are the main focus of this chapter. They shared the interests and anxieties about gaining public support with other party members, but what differentiates them from other groups was a professional logic that required a systematic approach to collect evidence to make valuations of performances of the campaign to achieve results. Campaign managers incorporated Facebook’s affordances to measure the public’s responses to try to understand their position in the electoral race. And, in line with one of aspects of an audit culture (Espeland and Sauder, 2007), the chapter argues that the metrification of participation was a necessary component for the activities of this group of professional campaigners who required constant audits to conduct their work.

The chapter starts by considering the meaning of metrics provided by research participants and explores how they were included in valuation process to understand the interactions on the FA official Fan Page. As was mentioned in chapter two, this thesis found a literature gap in the study of Facebook and political campaign that left the cultural meaning of social buttons mostly unexplored. The chapter’s first section makes a small contribution to filling that gap by providing an ethnographic observation of the users’ perspective on these buttons. The quantification of interactions provided by these metrics is then connected to the notion of progress in a professional and audit cultures (Espeland and Sauder, 2007; Grosser, 2014) and analysed as part of what Gerbaudo (2016) describes as digital enthusiasm andthe capacity of metrics to foster more activity among political groups.

The second section analyses the practices of this group of professionals as part of what is defined as an

audit culture and a logic of action that required a systematic analysis and devices to assess situations and make decisions. Facebook’s indicators were included in evaluations and decisions such as the need for more advertising described in the epigraph. In line with Dewey’s (1939), and Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1999) theories, valuation process can be thought of as the response to a problematic situation that requires an examination and a solution. This section analyses how the quantification of the public’s reaction was used as a reality test (Boltanski and Thévenot’s, 1999) to make evaluations of the campaign performances as part of an audit culture that required ordering and ranking pages for taking decisions. The last part of this section elaborates one of the main arguments of this thesis and analyses how Facebook has contributed to the popularisation of a culture based on constant audits. Here, the thesis suggests that the pervasive use of metrics on this site has provided all types of users with tools to conduct their own forms of valuation in relation to content and accounts’ capacity to generate responses from the public. A specific example is analysed to illustrate how metrics were included and influenced evaluations on the importance of content to foster public support.

The third section analyses how metrics were instrumental for justifying and enabling the activities of the National Commission as part of a professional frame for acting in a culture that required auditing. Not only does the chapter argue that metrics have a performative effect on users and influence evaluations and

decision making, but it also considers valuations as part of open process that may be questioned (Boltanski and Thévenot’s, 2006), reviewed or ignored. The possibility of conducting valuation is considered as part of a process that needed to be negotiated with different intervening actors. The creation of a consensus around the possibility of metrics as valid devices for conducting valuations is analysed as part of the distributed agency of those actors who contributed in different capacities. And, metrics are analysed here as part of a specific frame that fitted the logics of this professional group campaigning for the FA.