If...Then Algorithmic Power and Politics 第166页

As the continuing saga of Facebook’s trending topic shows, the figuration of the humanmachine relationship is only ever temporarily stabilized. Only two days after Facebook announced that it would replace the human writers with robots, the algorithm started to highlight fake news as part of the trending topic. Without human oversight, the robots were not able to detect that a story featuring the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly wasn’t true. This, of course, caused much outcry again, proving to critics that humans were needed after all. I am including this in a note because of its obvious neverending character. At the time of writing, Facebook might have deployed more humans again to counter the robots gone awry, while in two months’ time it might just as well be the other way around.

While many scholars who subscribe to a performative notion of ontology claim that reality emerges not just in interactions but intra-actions, referencing Barad (2007), I am not commited to making what is essentially a very strong ontological claim. Rather than commiting to a view that claims nothing exists outside or external to a relation, which is what Barad’s notion of intra-action implies, my view is more in line with Deleuze’s notion of assemblage, which assumes a certain autonomy to the terms they relate. See Hein (2016) for a discussion of how compatible Barad and Deleuze are.

Technography has previously been described as an “ethnography of technology” (Kien, 2008), a research strategy aimed at uncovering the constructed nature of technoculture (Vannini & Vannini, 2008), a way to explore artefacts in use ( Jansen & Vellema, 2011), or a method “to tease out the congealed social relations embodied in technology” (Woolgar, 1998: 444). Moreover, the notion of technography has been used to describe the “biography of things” (Kahn, 2004) or simply as a synonym for a “technical drawing,” for example, within the field of architecture (Ridgway, 2016). My understanding comes closest to that of Woolgar (1998) and of Vannini and Vannini (2008), who describe technography as a general atitude and research strategy aimed at examining the structural aspects of complex technocultural layers. However, the way in which I use the term difers from the notion of technography in Woolgar and in Vannini and Vannini in that the descriptions of technology do not necessarily involve a description of situated practices of production and implementation in particular setings. The question is, rather, what can we know about the workings of algorithms without necessarily asking humans or studying particular social setings as an ethnographer would do?

Chapter 4

As Leah Lievrouw (2014) has argued, the tendency for STS and communication scholarship is to privilege the social side. In emphasizing the opposite, this chapter is highly indebted to scholarship on materiality in media studies (Kitler, 1999; Meyrowitz, 1994; McLuhan, 1994), cultural theory (Galloway, 2004; Packer and Crofts Wiley, 2013; Parikka, 2012), sociology, and organization studies (Leonardi et al., 2013; Mackenzie, 2008; Marres, 2012), social media research (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013; Langlois, 2014; van Dijck, 2013), and software studies (Berry, 2011; Chun, 2011; Fuller, 2008).

See Andrew Bosworth’s depiction of the Facebook boot camp at Quora (last accessed February 9, 2015): htp://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-Engineerings-Bootcampprogram-work

See FB tech talk “behind the code” in which Facebook engineers discuss the boot camp and the company culture (last accessed February 9, 2015): htp://www.livestream.com/fbtechtalks/ video?clipId=pla\_c1161c6b-dd52-48e7-a8ea-abeb3b198375&utm\_source=lslibrary&utm\_ medium=ui-thumb

166

NOTES TO PAGES 56–70