Conclusion
Algorithmic Life
I began this book by asking readers to consider the following scenario: Copenhagen on a rainy November day, where a semester is about to finish. The festive season is around the corner, but it’s otherwise a normal day like any other, filled with the habits of everyday life. Many of these involve media, such as checking Facebook, reading online news, searching Goggle for information, writing emails, tweeting a link, buying a Christmas present from Amazon, watching an episode of “House of Cards” on Netflix. While there is nothing particularly eye-opening about these moments, that was exactly the point. It describes life lived with, in and through the media. Or more precisely, a life fundamentally intertwined and entangled with algorithmic media of all sorts. As I am writing this concluding chapter it so happens to be a remarkably similar day in November, albeit two years later.
Of course, nothing ever stays exactly the same. This time around it is sunny, not raining, and I have much less time to check Facebook or watch Netflix, as I am trying to finish this book. The platforms and algorithms have changed too. While we might not always notice, the calculative devices of contemporary media constantly work to give us more of what we seemingly want. Atuned to users’ clicks, shares, and likes, algorithms are constantly updated, revised, and tweaked to make the flow of information seem more relevant and timely. As Wendy Chun suggests, “New media live and die by the update: the end of the update, the end of the object” (2016: 2).1 This condition of the perpetual update means that I am never guaranteed to see the same content on Facebook or Twiter as my neighbor or friend, due to network logics and algorithmic processes of personalization. Every day, or even several times a day, users are implicitly confronted with the question of “what will I see this time”?
It used to be that one could expect a certain sense of chronological order to the ways in which information was presented online. Today, chronos seems increasingly to have been replaced by kairos, the right or opportune time to say and do something. As evident in news feeds of all kinds, time is no longer about the linear, continuous flow, but rather about the very punctuation of linear time itself. As it was argued in chapter 4, kairos is what constitutes the temporal regime of algorithmic media. After all, as Facebook tellingly suggests, the goal of the news feed “is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them” (Backstrom, 2013). In the past few years, many more media platforms have followed suit. Instagram and Twiter are only some of the more prominent platforms that have started to punctuate the flow of the “realtime” feed by highlighting “right time” content instead. The previous chapter shows how the logic of “the right content, to the right people, at the right time” is increasingly becoming part of traditional news media as well. Faced with economic hardship, news media are reorienting themselves to the new digital realities. One consequence is the way news organizations adapt to the algorithmic media landscape by deploying algorithms to produce, distribute and present news in ways that readers are already familiar with from being in social media spaces. But even more significance is carried by the fact that traditional news media are becoming algorithmically atuned.
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