This brings me to a third diference between November two years ago and today. Socially and culturally speaking, algorithms have emerged as a social and cultural imaginary of sorts. Algorithms are seemingly “everywhere.” They have become sites for cultural and social production. As objects of news stories, academic papers, and conferences, as well as the focal point of public controversies, popular discourse, cultural production, and afective encounters, algorithms are producing calculative results. And while algorithms are oriented toward us, we, too, are increasingly becoming oriented toward the algorithm. In chapter 5, I showed how the algorithmic output of social media becomes culturally meaningful, as seen in the ways that people form opinions about specific systems and act strategically around them.2 Algorithms are not just making their mark on culture and society; to a certain extent they have become culture. As Roberge and Melançon suggest “algorithms do cultural things, and they are increasingly active in producing meaning and interpreting culture” (2017: 318).
However, algorithms are not simply means of interpreting culture, they are also productive of culture, understood in terms of the practices they engender. Hallinan and Striphas claim “engineers now speak with unprecedented authority on the subject, suffusing culture with assumptions, agendas, and understandings consistent with their disciplines” (2016: 119). Although engineers and computer scientists are perceived to be in a privileged position to hold opinions about the term “algorithm,” we are at the same time seeing an emerging trend where “ordinary” people and institutions are speaking and thinking about algorithms. They do so by permeating algorithms with assumptions, agendas, and understandings that are consistent with their specific backgrounds and life worlds. For someone who encounters the Facebook algorithm as a suppressor and regulator of content, the algorithm gets sufused with agendas and assumptions that may not be shared by someone else who encounters similar types of posts but in a diferent situation.
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