my mother suspects i have a partner bc i have been “glowing” for the past few months and last time i heard, my brother has had to tell her that it’s obviously academia giving me the kind of joy and fulfillment that no romantic relationship ever can… that’s how grad school is going 😭

but yes! one of them came out of the short story “my haunting idol,” which follows a japanese career woman named aiko as she’s given a hologram replica of her favourite j-idol and tasked to “solve” the mystery of his murder. as the investigation goes along, we start seeing the depth of aiko’s parasocial attachment to her idol, but also how much this replica of her dead idol, effectively a ghost, knows about her through the data she’s provided. it’s not the most well-written story, prose-wise, but it offers very interesting tidbits and has a little twist in the end that makes the idol characters far more interesting than if the overarching theme was just about the parasocial-ness from the fan perspective.

anyway. we weren’t actually meant to write about the story so much as pursue it to a topic of our choice, so i took the pieces i liked from the story and wrote about digital companionship apps, how the illusion of intimacy is sustained through strategic use of language, and data as the transactional price of belonging. the title was like. “Algorithmic Intimacy: AI Companionship, Dataism, and the Comfort of Surveillance.” very straightforward. here’s a little excerpt you didn’t ask for:

Voluntary surveillance here is arguably not a failure of privacy literacy but the success of dataism’s affective appeal. Users internalize the ideology that their feelings, once quantified, become more authentic, that intimacy can be optimized through feedback, and that love, in digital form, is safest when measured. As van Dijck (2014) notes, this belief in the benevolence of data “relocates faith from human institutions to computational systems” (p. 202) leading metadata to be gradually “turned into treasured resources” (p. 199). Nowhere is this more literal than in AI companionship markets, where each message or sentiment enhances predictive precision. What was once confession becomes variables for better computation, and what was once private becomes a matter of voluntary participation because the comfort of algorithmic attention naturalizes exposure to the point that love and privacy appear mutually exclusive. Platforms like Replika transform the ideology of dataism into infrastructure, embedding the belief that affective transparency is both desirable and safe. Their users’ confessions, interactions, and vulnerabilities are not only processed as data but presented as care, and as such, emotional visibility becomes an in-demand currency of belonging.

another one i liked, despite how messy the process of writing it was, was on the use of social media in electing BBM in the most recent election in the philippines, “Consuming the Past: Algorithmic Nostalgia and Political Identity in the Philippines” (hehe… consuming… bc consumerism and digital consumption but also literally devouring the past so that even people who were alive at the time misremember it… get it…) this one was a more massive paper, so i won’t bore you with all the details, but let’s point and laugh together at the conclusion paragraph that i definitely did not write an hour before the deadline:

When historical consciousness is shaped less by shared deliberation than by algorithmic reinforcement, the issue is not that people remember the past incorrectly, but that they encounter it through a narrowed emotional register. Digital platforms do not determine what is remembered so much as how it feels to remember: which histories arrive as comforting, which as abrasive, which as reassuring, and which as discordant. When these affective cues are reinforced through ordinary acts of engagement—watching, liking, sharing—that register not belief, but mood, they render political identity increasingly legible to systems designed to track, predict, and stabilize behavior. Particularly in a postcolonial society where national identity remains unresolved, the circulation of nostalgic memory through digital platforms then binds consumption and governance together. Remembering still feels personal, but it is no longer neutral, and it is through these ordinary acts of engagement that particular moods of the past become durable. Thus, political identity is quietly shaped in their image, not through persuasion or repression, but through the continuous production of data about what feels familiar, plausible, and worth attending to.

my professor was very involved with this one, and he gave some amazing points about how the “rewriting” of recent history in this context is not quite the same as misinformation. that it’s a matter of affect and memory reframing, to oversimplify it. i learned a lot in my research for this one about the philippines’ social media consumption, and also about how this campaign had an effective prototype during the previous administration. but. again. that is a lot to discuss within a character limit.

anyway !!! thank u for asking !! i’m having a blast in uni !! it’s also very scary !! finding my interests aligned with affect and digital information environments in this particular period of time is both fascinating and sickening !!