By now, I hope to have instilled enough curiosity in the reader to keep you exploring the power and politics of algorithms in the contemporary media landscape with me throughout the next chapters. The goal of the book is for readers to not simply be the subjects of algorithmic judgment but, rather, to be in a position to critically judge the workings of the algorithmic apparatus for themselves.
Outline of the Book
The overall aim of this book is to sketch the contours of an algorithmic media landscape as it is currently unfolding. While algorithms and software are starting to catch the interest of social scientists and humanities scholars, having become somewhat of a buzzword in media and communication studies during the past years, we are only at the beginning of understanding how algorithms and computation more broadly are afecting social life and the production and dissemination of knowledge as we know it. This book seeks to contribute to these discussions by ofering conceptual, theoretical, and empirical analyses of the ways in which algorithms produce the conditions for the sensible and intelligible.
In the chapters 2 and 3, which comprise the conceptual framework of the book, I focus on the ontological, epistemological, and methodological dimensions of algorithms. Chapter 2 provides an outline for understanding what algorithms are and how they are conceptualized in diferent manners. While the chapter functions as a conceptual introduction to the interdisciplinary field of critical algorithms studies, merging perspectives from computer science, social sciences and the humanities, it mainly does so for analytical reasons. I argue that these are not simply diferent perspectives on a static object called an algorithm, but rather, following insights from STS (Law, 2002; Mol 2002), provide diferent versions of what an algorithm is. Even if we assume that we are talking about the same algorithm (say, the “Facebook algorithm” or “K-nearest neighbor”), the algorithm is always “many diferent things. It is not one, but many” (Law, 2002: 15).
Programmed Sociality
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