Here, the notion of the black box is tackled by claiming that what there is to know about algorithms may not even be inside the box. As we have seen, for Ashby and the early cyberneticians, the black box was not an obstacle but a means for play and exploratory experimentation (Kaerlein, 2013: 659). The cybernetic notion of the black box as a basic human condition bears strong resemblance to the ways in which the psychologist Jean Piaget (originally, a zoologist) theorized the cognitive development of children. According to Piaget’s notion of playful learning, “children build up a picture of the world through making their own sense of inputs to the black box of the mind, converting experience to personal understanding of concrete objects” (Murray, 2012: 902). Instead of talking about knowledge in a definite sense, the emphasis is put on knowing as a continued and playful process. As biologists Maturana and Varela (1987) later put it, knowledge does not reflect a true world but should, rather, be judged by the construction of meaning from experience.
The focus is on how life takes shape and gains expression through encounters with algorithms. A phenomenological approach also considers the ways in which algorithms are “already embedded in particular circumstances” (Berry, 2011: 121). For Alfred Schütz, a pioneer in bringing phenomenology into sociological analysis, experience and the knowledge people derive from it is situated and contextual. It depends as much on various realms of relevance as it does on various social roles. Not everybody needs to know what algorithms are or how they work, but the “fact that we do not understand the Why and the How of their working and that we do not know anything of their origin does not hinder us from dealing undisturbed with situations, things, and persons” (Schütz, 1946: 463). Using “the most complicated gadgets prepared by a very advanced technology without knowing how the contrivances work” (Schütz, 1946: 463) is just a natural part of human life, but there are distinctions as to how relevant it is for people to know or atempt to know. A phenomenological analysis seeks out those slight transformations of relevance for an understanding of how phenomena change from being taken for granted to becoming a field of further inquiry. For example, Nick Couldry and his colleagues (2016) recently proposed the notion of “social analytics” as the phenomenological study of how social actors use “analytics” to reflect upon and adjust their online presence. As they see it, a “social analytics approach makes a distinctively qualitative contribution to the expansion of sociological methods in a digital age” (Couldry et al., 2016: 120). In a world in which large-scale data analysis takes on a greater hold, it is important to investigate the ways in which actors themselves engage with increased quantification. In Schütz’s (1946) terms, we might think of such actors as “well-informed citizens” who seek to “arrive at reasonably founded opinions” about their whereabouts in a fundamentally uncertain world.
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