{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","title":"If...Then Algorithmic Power and Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2017054909","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","id":"1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","uuid":"1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","title":"If...Then Algorithmic Power and Politics","normalized_title":"ifthenalgorithmicpowerandpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2017054909","isbns":["2017054909","9780190493042","9780190493059"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":211,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/If...Then%20Algorithmic%20Power%20and%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1d3bd28e-c1ba-4af2-8580-60b32ef26053/search"},"page":{"printed_page":113,"pdf_page":123,"physical_index":123,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c6e13354b68da3a3cbe42238d2f0a83a542914215b4b266d7593157ecde8cf11"},"chapter":"IF...THEN","content":"THE ALGORITHMIC IMAGINARY\n\nAlgorithms seize the social imaginary through the various afective encounters of which they are part. As the many diferent personal algorithm stories analyzed in this chapter atest, algorithms are generative of diferent experiences, moods, and sensations. The diferent scenes and situations can be understood as forming part of what might be called an algorithmic imaginary—ways of thinking about what algorithms are, what they should be, how they function, and what these imaginations, in turn, make possible. While there is no way of knowing for sure how algorithms work, the personal algorithm stories illuminate how knowing algorithms might involve other kinds of registers than code. Indeed, “stories help to make sense of events, set forth truth claims, define problems, and, establish solutions and strategies” (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2012: 1696). Stories account for events and experiences in ways that help actors make sense of what is going on in specific, situated encounters. Personal algorithm stories illuminate what Charles Taylor (2004) has termed “the social imaginary,” understood as the way in which people imagine their social reality. The imaginary, then, is to be understood in a generative and productive sense as something that enables the identification and engagement with one’s lived presence and socio-material surroundings.\n\nHowever, my use of the imaginary is not about the social imaginary per se. The algorithmic imaginary is not necessarily a form of “common understanding that makes possible common practices” (Taylor, 2004: 23), nor is it necessarily about the ways in which algorithms, for instance, can be generative of an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) or a “calculated public” (Gillespie, 2014). While these notions could certainly be part of an “algorithmic imaginary,” I want to use the term here to suggest something slightly diferent but no less related. I have no reason or desire to claim, for example, that people’s personal algorithm stories are part of a more commonly held cultural belief about algorithms in general. While they might be shared or overlap in important ways and be part of larger debates and discourses about algorithms in society, they are also imaginaries that emerge out of individual and habitual practices of being in algorithmically mediated spaces. In other parts of the book, I have discussed the notion of programmed sociality as the ways in which software and algorithms support and shape sociality and lived experience that are specific to the architecture and material substrate of the platforms in question. In this sense, algorithms may, indeed, have the power to generate forms of being together that are reminiscent of Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities. As Anderson famously declared, a nation “is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson, 1983: 15). Importantly, as Strauss points out, Anderson emphasized the role of media, particularly newspapers and books, in “creating a reader’s sense of being part of a larger community of other assumed readers” (Strauss, 2006: 329). The algorithmic imaginary that I want to address in this chapter, however, is not a public assembled by the algorithm but the algorithm assembled, in part, by the public. In other words, the algorithmic imaginary emerges in the public’s beliefs, experiences, and expectations of what an algorithm is and should be.54\n\nAffective Landscapes\n\n113","previous_page":112,"next_page":114}