Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with this form of data-driven media production. After all, it seems, many people enjoy watching the show. The interesting and potentially troubling question is how reliance on data and predictive analytics might funnel cultural production in particular directions, how individual social media platforms code and brand specific niches of everyday life (van Dijck, 2013: 22). Starting from the basic question of how software is shaping the conditions of everyday life, this book sets out to explore the contours and implications of the question itself. In what ways can we say that software, and more specifically algorithms, shape everyday life and networked communication? What indeed, are algorithms and why should we care about their possible shaping efects to begin with?
Let us quickly return to my rainy November day. While chating with friends on Facebook about the pre-Christmas dinner, two rather specific ads appeared on the right-hand side of my Facebook news feed. One was for a hotel in Lisbon, where I was going to travel for the conference, and the other was for a party dress. How did Facebook know about my upcoming trip, or that I had just bought my mother a Christmas gift from that shop? My musings were only briefly interrupted by one of my friends asking me about a concert I had recently been to. She had seen a picture I posted on Facebook from the concert a few days earlier. My other friend wondered, why hadn’t she seen the picture? After all, as she remarked, she checks her Facebook feed all the time. While these connections might be coincidental, their efects are not incidental. They mater because they afect our encounters with the world and how we relate to each other. While seeing ads for party dresses in a festive season might not appear strange, nor missing a picture posted from a concert for that mater, such programmed forms of sociality are not inconsequential. These moments are mediated, augmented, produced, and governed by networked systems powered by software and algorithms. Understood as the coded instructions that a computer needs to follow to perform a given task, algorithms are deployed to make decisions, to sort and make meaningfully visible the vast amount of data produced and available on the Web. Viewed together, these moments tell the story of how our lives are networked and connected. They hint at the fundamental question of who or what has power to set the conditions for what can be seen and known with whatever possible efects. To address this important question, this book proposes to consider the power and politics of software and algorithms that condense and construct the conditions for the intelligible and sensible in our current media environment.
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