Examining algorithmic media and the ways in which life is increasingly afected by algorithmic processing, means acknowledging how algorithms are not static things but, rather, evolving, dynamic, and relational processes hinging on a complex set of actors, both humans and nonhumans. Programmed sociality implies that social relations such as friendships are not merely transposed onto a platform like Facebook but are more fundamentally transduced. The concept of transduction names the process whereby a particular domain is constantly undergoing change, or individuation, as a consequence of being in touch or touched by something else (Mackenzie, 2002; Simondon, 1992). Rather than maintaining an interest in what friendship is, transduction and the related term “technicity” help to account for how domains such as friendship come into being because of sociomaterial entanglements. Using Facebook to access a social network transduces or modulates how a person connects with friends. When using Facebook, the technicity of friendship unfolds as conjunctions between users and algorithms (e.g., the PYMK feature), coded objects (e.g., shared video), and infrastructure (e.g., protocols and networks). As Kitchin and Dodge point out: “This power to afect change is not deterministic but is contingent and relational, the product of the conjunction between code and people” (2005: 178). Transduction and technicity become useful analytical devices in exemplifying the concept of programmed sociality as they point toward the ways in which software has the capacity to produce and instantiate modalities of friendship, specific to the environment in which it operates. The productive power of technology, as signified by the concept of technicity, does not operate in isolation or as a unidirectional force. Algorithms and software, in this view, do not determine what friendships are in any absolute or fixed sense. Rather, technicity usefully emphasizes the ways in which algorithms are entities that fundamentally hinge on people’s practices and interaction, in order to be realized and developed in the first place. Taking such a perspective allows us to see friendship and other instances of programmed sociality as emerging sociomaterial accomplishments.
Back to the rainy November day introduced at the beginning of the chapter: The question of what categories were used to determine the specific ads or the content of my and my friends’ news feeds persists. Was it my clicking behavior, my age and gender, pages that I have liked, the cookies set by the online design store where I bought the gift for my mom, my friends’ clicking behavior, the friends of my friend, everything or nothing of the above? Whatever the exact reason might be, online spaces are always computed according to underlying assumptions, norms, and values. Although we simply do not know and have no way of knowing how exactly our data and the algorithmic processing are shaping our experiences online, a critical perspective on sociotechnical systems, along with personal encounters and experiences with algorithmic forms of connectivity and sociality, might help to illuminate the ways in which “categorization is a powerful semantic and political intervention” (Gillespie, 2014:171). Judging solely by the content and ads served up on my news feed, I am perceived as having children, being overweight, and single— none of which is true, at least for the time being. While the case of Facebook and programmed friendship provides a useful entry point to questions of how information is governed and organized online, an understanding of algorithmic power and politics cannot simply be reduced to a single social media platform. As this book will show, how we come to know others, the world, and ourselves as mediated through algorithms is the result of complex sociomaterial practices that exceed the specific coded instructions. Facebook and the notion of programmed sociality are but one way in which algorithmic arrangements bring new possibilities, realities, and interventions into being. And there are many more.
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IF . . . THEN