PEOPLE AREN’T A MATH PROBLEM
Meet Jessa. She and her boyfriend, both in their mid-20s, recently moved to New York City for work. The couple has been subleting an apartment for one and a half months, sleeping on an air matress that gradually seems to be deflating ever faster. They regularly talk about how much they look forward to sleeping on a real mattress. While Jessa trawls Craigslist for new apartments, her boyfriend looks at mattresses on Amazon. Then, one morning, while Jessa scrolls through her Facebook news feed, there it is—an ad for air matresses. Jessa is so perplexed that she tweets about it: “How on earth did the Facebook algorithm know she was sleeping on an air matress?”18 Although the connection may have been coincidental, the efects are not incidental. While Jessa understands that clicks and browser behavior are routinely tracked and used to tailor ads online, there is something almost inexplicably creepy about the ways in which algorithms seem to know you.19
Similarly, Kayla, a 23-year-old student from New York, is confounded by the ways in which the Facebook algorithm seems to have her pegged as “pregnant, single, broke and overweight.”20 Sure, she posted a status update a few days ago about being broke and single, she says, so the suggestions for dating sites and loans made sense. But how weird was it when the algorithm for suggested apps showed her dating sites next to apps for expecting mothers? Like Jessa, Kayla had theories about the logic behind the algorithmic profiling of her. As she speculates, “upon further thought, I think the pregnancy ones were because I had been looking at nursery decorations on another website for a baby shower gift.”21 While the inferences that algorithms make on the basis of user behavior might logically make sense to people, there is something socially and culturally “of” about puting dating sites next to advice for expecting mothers. Despite declaring that they do not really know what an algorithm is, many participants, when asked how they would define an algorithm, seem to make a distinction between a technical aspect and its socially perceived outcomes. Take Shannon, a career counselor in her 40s, who happened to blog about Taylor Swift. Now, the Facebook algorithm seems to think she is a “12 year-old with an Amex card.”22 Shannon is not sure “what the Facebook algorithm is—at least, the technical part of it.” She understands that “it picks up clues, perhaps using keywords” from her own activities and information she herself has provided “to try to target relevant content.” Although it makes technical sense, it may not feel right, Shannon explains. Asking her to provide an example of her experience of being algorithmically profiled, Shannon says:
Affective Landscapes
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