The programmed sociality apparent in Facebook is about more than making people remember friends from their past with the help of friend-finding algorithms. From the very beginning, a friendship is formed and the friendship is “put to test.” From a political economic standpoint, this is very important, as not every friendship is equally valuable. Some relations are more “promising” and “worthwhile” than others. With more friends than the news feed feature allows for, friendships are continuously monitored for afinity and activity, which are important measures for rendering relations visible. Friendships in social media are programmed forms of sociality precisely because they are continuously measured, valued, and examined according to some underlying criteria or logic. As this book will show in more detail, the news feed algorithm plays a powerful role in producing the conditions for the intelligible and sensible, operating to make certain users more visible at the expense of others. The Facebook news feed displays an edited view of what one’s friends are up to, in an order of calculated importance with the most important updates at top of the feed. Every action and interaction connected to Facebook, be it a status update, comment on someone’s photo, or “like buton” clicked, may become a story on someone’s news feed. Not every action, however, is of equal importance, nor is every friend for that mater. Friendships are put to test, because friendships need to be nurtured and maintained to stand the “test of time.” Algorithms decide which stories should show up on users’ news feeds, but also, crucially, which friends. Rachel, a 24-year-old journalist from New York City, whom I interviewed for this book about her perceptions of algorithms, exclaimed that “Facebook ruins friendships.” With more than seven hundred friends, Rachel says that she is constantly taken aback by all the information and people Facebook seems to be hiding from her feed:
So, in that sense, it does feel as if there is only a select group of friends I interact with on the social network, while I’ve practically forgoten about the hundreds of others I have on there. An example of this is a friend from high school, who liked one of my posts a few weeks back. I’d totally forgoten she was even on Facebook until she liked it and we started chating.
Rachel’s experience is reminiscent of what I mean by programmed sociality, the notion that social formations and connections are algorithmically conditioned and governed by the sociotechnical and political-economic configurations of specific media platforms. Rachel’s worry about Facebook ruining friendship should also remind us that algorithms need to be understood as powerful gatekeepers, playing an important role in deciding who gets to be seen and heard and whose voices are considered less important. Programmed sociality, then, is political in the sense that it is ordered, governed, and shaped in and though software and algorithms. If we want to consider everyday life in the algorithmic media landscape, we need to pay atention to the ways in which many of the things we think of as societal—including friendship—may be expressed, mediated and shaped in technological designs and how these designs, in turn, shape our social values. As we will see throughout the book, such considerations, however, do not stop with values in design, but exceed the purely technical (whatever that is taken to mean) in important ways.
Programmed Sociality
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