Concluding Remarks
Algorithms are not simply algorithms, as it were. Their ontology is up for grabs. Let’s briefly return to the notion of fake news introduced at the beginning of the chapter. While Facebook should not be blamed for creating a misinformed public, or for determining the outcome of elections, the debate over fake news and post-truth underscores the general point I make in this chapter about the power and politics of the algorithmic media landscape. If we want to understand the ways in which algorithms mater, we need to pay atention to the ways in which they are made to mater, as well as the ways in which they are made to mater diferently in diferent situations and for diferent purposes. Going beyond viewing algorithms as problems solvers, as the standard computer science definition would have it, or creating new problems and concerns, a trope on which the social science perspective on algorithms tends to focus, I have made a case for atending to the eventfulness of algorithms that constitutes them as particular forms of problematization. Investigating the ways in which algorithms become relevant, I discussed how relations of sameness or diference are enacted on given occasions, with given discursive and material consequences.
As I showed, the “truth” of algorithms is “played” out in material-discursive practices. Constitutive of what Foucault called “games of truth,” the narratives of news media professionals show how the matering of algorithms is predicted on establishing certain norms and values of what is desirable/problematic, good/bad, true/false. Similar to how truth games were set up in the organization of medical knowledge and the designation of madness in Foucault’s writings (1988; 1997), the truth games surrounding algorithms have to be connected to a whole series of socioeconomic processes and professional practice. As Foucault makes sure to highlight, a game “is not a game in the sense of an amusement,” but rather, “a set of rules by which truth is produced” so that something can be “considered valid or invalid, winning or losing” (Foucault & Rabinow, 1997: 297). These rules, however, are never static. While implicit and explicit “rules,” such as journalistic objectivity and professional ethics endure, the meaning of these “rules” change. In an algorithmic age, news media are not merely adapting to the presence of algorithms or simply using algorithmic systems as part of journalistic practices. What it means to be a journalist and publisher changes, as do definitions of what news and newsworthiness is and should be. News selection only moderately falls to a “gut feeling.” The “hard facts” of metrics, trafic data and new media logics help transform feeling from gut to byte. The way news professionals talk about developing “a feeling for the algorithm,” or “gaming the
Programming the News
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