Contenu du sommaire : Prescription et recommandation : agir et faire agir ?

In this article we consider the notion of “prescribed use” in light of the development of online audience-building platforms. Prescribed use was initially conceptualized with respect to specific practices recommended to users by industrial designers or by service or content providers. The development of recommendation platforms has both amplified and transformed the notion of prescribed use, since these platforms encourage both user action and user reflection, which are in turn shared through different types of recommendations. We thus identify – and call into question – a shift from prescribed use to generalized prescription, a shift which has been enabled by participatory culture, by algorithms and by computation systems.

Music Recommendation Between Textual Inscriptions, Social Practices and Listening Devices ‪This article presents partial results of a research project whose aim is to produce an ‪ ‪ontology‪ ‪ of music and a navigational tool based on this ontology. In the context of this project, we conducted a study of digital music listening and sharing practices, and a semiotic analysis of streaming site interfaces. Our analysis highlights the underlying mechanisms, as well as the contradictions, which characterize music recommendation in the digital era. In light of our results, we argue that the question of music recommendation should be examined from a wide ranging perspective, encompassing the study of social sharing practices, documentation technologies such as indexing, and enunciative framing‪

‪In today's organizations, employee initiative and autonomy seem to have replaced Taylorian prescription. Using the framework of commitment theory developed within social psychology, we can advance the assumption that managerial rationality has undergone a renewal. This renewal is characterized by modes of prescribing which entail specific communicational forms. Our analysis allows us to relativize the often cited liberating and humanist dimensions of this renewal‪‪.‪

‪Think tanks are hybrid organizational forms defined mainly through activities such as the writing and editing of strategic documents including reports and position papers. These documents are intended to weigh upon law making processes and thus to influence laws which are by essence, prescriptive. The ultimate goal of think tanks is in effect to influence decision-making processes. This article presents the results of an ethnographic study of the Montaigne Institute, a leading French think tank. We analyse three key lobbying reports in favor of French mutual companies and cooperatives, produced by a working group of the Institute. The prescriptive dimension of these documents is expressed euphemistically, by means of a collective authorial stance and unexpected figures of the implied reader/recipient‪‪.‪

A History of Consumer Recommendation Machines: From the Internet of Documents to the Internet of Data ‪With the success of ‪ ‪Amazon‪ ‪ and the development of the ‪ ‪big data‪ ‪ movement, automated recommendation agents have been increasingly adopted by online merchants. From a socio-economic perspective, these agents are interesting in that they constitute a relatively new form of commercial recommendation. In order to better understand the role that such artificial intelligence systems play, as mediators between supply and demand, we explore the prescriptive logic of digital recommendation agents as well as their evolution over time‪ ‪.‪

In this article we explore current digital education policies in France and the measures taken to encourage pupils and teachers to use digital technologies in the classroom. We present a case study conducted from 2013 to 2015 of the experimental use of tablet computers in secondary schools in the French Saône-et-Loire department. We attempt to determine if such experimental projects can be of effective use in encouraging adoption of digital technologies, within the framework of national policy promoting innovation and new pedagogical practices.

Social media use is caught up in a tension between two competing logics: a logic of prescription/recommendation and a logic of exploration. In this article we explore the ways in which a “temporalist” approach allows us to better understand this tension. We identify four temporal regimes (“everyday”, “current”, “continuous” and “updating”) which correspond to the types of social interactions prescribed on social media. Using this analytical typology of temporal regimes, we discuss different modes of user engagement on social media.

‪How do audiences of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) get their information? What do these information practices reveal about NGO audiences and how they view information, in particular information which is produced by volunteer organizations? We present the results of a qualitative analysis of the information practices of audiences of a Belgian NGO. We distinguish between amateur and professional audiences in order to take into account diverse information consumption experiences. At the same time, we consider the porosity between certain types of information practices. Given the diverse practices and expectations we were able to identify, we conclude that the organization under study has difficulties informing its target audiences.‪