Encountering Algorithms
Consider the following scene: Michael presses the post buton and waits. Normally, it should not take longer than five minutes before the “likes” and “comments” start ticking in. Nothing happens. As an independent musician, Michael has to find his own ways to spread the word about his music and make sure he reaches an audience. Facebook seems like the perfect platform for self-promotion. Michael thinks he has goten beter at playing “Facebook’s game,” as he calls it. For example: “Statuses do beter based on what night you post it, the words you choose to use, and how much buzz it initially builds.” He knows from previous experience that, “if the status doesn’t build buzz (likes, comments, shares) within the first ten minutes or so, it immediately starts moving down the news feed and eventually gets lost.” Michael has just released a new album and needs to get the word out. He picks what seems to him the perfect day of the week, carefully crafts the words of the update, deliberately uses phrases such as “wow!” and “this is amazing!” to make the post more visible. Or so he thinks. But nothing happens, and the post eventually disappears, no downloads, just some scatered “likes.”6
One more: Rachel is an avid Facebook user, but lately she thinks “the Facebook algorithm is destroying friendships.”7 She’s been a Facebook member almost since the very beginning and has over 700 friends. She considers herself a fairly sociable and outgoing person, who likes to post regular status updates and frequently comments on other people’s posts. Then, a few weeks back, she saw a post by an old friend from high school. Rachel had totally forgoten they were even Facebook friends. She had not seen this old friend in ages, and, all of a sudden, she “pops up in her news feed.” Rachel is curious—how much has she been missing out on? What’s been going on in her friend’s life that Facebook decided not to broadcast on her own feed? “I’m constantly taken aback by all the info and people Facebook hides from my feed on a daily basis,” Rachel says. “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 out there.”8
Affective Landscapes
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