To examine this, I discuss the case of Facebook’s news feed, focusing on the ways in which the feed is fundamentally governed and organized by an algorithmic logic. If Facebook is the computational platform that facilitates other things to be built on top of it, an architectural model for communication, then the news feed is the actualization of this model as a communication channel, a designed space in which communicative action can take place. Despite its purported discourse of openness, the Facebook news feed difers in fundamental ways from the ideal public sphere envisioned by Jürgen Habermas and other political theorists based in the idea of mutual deliberation and argumentation. While the intention is not to suggest compatibility between the communicative space of the news feed and the public sphere model, it is not without its warrants. The news feed, I want to suggest, is political insofar as it is exercising a position of governance. Here, I am not referring to politics in the conventional notion of parliamentary politics. Rather, politics is understood in a much broader sense as the encounter and conflict between diferent ways of being in the world (see also chapter 1). As the French philosopher Jacques Ranciére (2004) has theorized, politics concerns the reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible. In this sense, politics is productive of “the set of horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made, or done” (Ranciere, 2004: 85). It is a way of informing experience that has no proper place. In this sense, power and politics are not limited to parliamentary governments or ruling bodies. Whereas political theorists such as Habermas considered politics mainly as discursive forms of power produced through arguments in an informal public sphere (Flynn, 2004), I propound a view on politics that is sensitive to its material dimensions as well. In his seminal studies of the Long Island Bridge and the mechanical tomato harvester, Winner (1986) argued that technological arrangements impose a social order prior to their specific use. If taken to the realm of algorithms, we may start to consider them as political devices in the sense that they represent certain design decisions about how the world is to be ordered. After all, as Mackenzie suggests, algorithms “select and reinforce one ordering at the expense of others” (Mackenzie, 2006: 44). It is the work of ordering and distributing the sensible that I am concerned with in this chapter.
Life at the Top
67