{"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":122,"pdf_page":132,"physical_index":132,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"35bf210b5776b132f20285800350780d3774ffae46bdf8acaec7d2469604a3ec"},"chapter":"IF...THEN","content":"While algorithms in many ways have become an entrenched part of the logic and functioning of today’s news media, their status and purpose are still very much up for debate and contestation. In this chapter I look more closely at the content and circumstance of these debates by considering how key actors in the news media, such as Hansen, make sense of and negotiate algorithms in the institutional context of journalism. To understand the power and politics of algorithms in the contemporary media landscape, the argument is made that it is vital to see algorithms as neither given nor stable objects, but rather made and unmade in material-discursive practices. Sometimes algorithms are rendered important, while at other times deemed insignificant. Knowing more about processes of matering, I suggest, enables us to understand the multiple realities of algorithms, and how these relate and coexist.\n\nAlthough the many recent controversies surrounding algorithms certainly call into question what algorithms do to the current informational landscape, what news is and ought to be, and what it means to have editorial responsibility, algorithms are already an integral part of journalism and journalistic practices. As is evident from much of the current literature on the intersection of technology and journalism (e.g., Anderson,  2013; Coddington,  2015; Diakopoulos,  2015; Dörr,  2016; Lewis, 2015), algorithms, robots, and data analytics are now contained in the standard repertoire of the way in which news outlets organize, produce and disseminate new content.3 However, to posit these changes and developments as new forces changing journalism is to miss the point. From the telegraph and the typewriter to databases, spreadsheets, and the personal computer, various forms of technology have for centuries been used to support and augment news work (Boczkowski, 2004; Pavlik, 2000; Weiss & Domingo, 2010). Indeed, computers have been part of journalistic practice at least since the mainframe computers of the 1960s, which also gave rise to the tradition of computer-assisted reporting (CAR). In his seminal book Precision Journalism, Philip Meyer ([1973]  2002) describes how computers and statistics would be the most efective tools by which journalists could strengthen journalistic objectivity and transform journalism more broadly.4 In order to fulfil the “real” goal of journalism, which in Meyer’s view was to reveal social injustices, journalists would have to work with statistical software packages, database programs, and spreadsheets to find stories in the data (Meyer, 2002: 86; Parasie & Dagiral, 2013).\n\n122\n\nI F . . . T H E N","previous_page":121,"next_page":123}