{"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":16,"pdf_page":26,"physical_index":26,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"da11b8ffdd6f1544eb2412d07f0c7bf8a60501cbb66853c4b152df59134393b8"},"chapter":"IF...THEN","content":"Chapter 3 tackles the question of how algorithms can be known, proposing an epistemology of algorithms that moves beyond the popular conception of the algorithm as a black box. I draw on the concept of the black box as a heuristic device to discuss the nature of algorithms in contemporary media platforms, and how, we might atend to and study algorithms, despite, or even because of, their seemingly secret nature. The chapter develops a conceptual repertoire that moves beyond the textbook definition of algorithms as step-by-step instructions for solving a computational problem. It does so to beter account for the fundamental interlinking or entanglement of the social and material implicated by algorithms. To support such a view, chapter 3 builds on insights from relational materialism and process-relational philosophy (e.g., Barad, 2007; Mol, 2002; Whitehead, 1978). Here, I suggest a conceptual vocabulary that allows for investigating algorithms as eventful, understood as constituents that co-become, and their power and politics as tied to the ways in which these configurations have the capacity to produce certain orderings and disorderings of the world. In chapter 2 I introduced the notion of “ontological politics” (Mol, 2002) to convey how realities are never given but shaped and emerge through interactions. In chapter 3 I expand on these ideas by suggesting, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, that algorithms are not always important. Rather, their agency emerges as important only in particular setings or constellations. The argument is made that by shifting atention away from asking what and where agency is, to when agency is and to whom it belongs in specific situations, we see how the notion of algorithms as black boxes is a political claim. The chapter concludes by ofering some possible methodological routes for the study of algorithms premised on their eventfulness, which are operationalized in the chapters that follow.\n\nHaving outlined the ontological and epistemological contours of algorithms, the chapters 4–6 turn to specific constellations of algorithmic power and politics as it materializes is the contemporary media landscape. Each chapter presents a case study that is meant to get at two related concerns: the ways in which algorithmic systems govern the possible field of action of others, and how these possibilities are made more or less available or unavailable to certain actors in specific setings. Taken together, these case studies are concerned with the world-making capacities of algorithms, questioning how algorithmic systems shape encounters and orientations of diferent kinds, and how these systems are endowed with difused personhood and relational agency.\n\nChapter 4 pays atention to the mechanisms of power that work as a concerted distribution of people, information, actions, and ways of seeing and being seen. It uses Facebook’s news feed as a case study to develop the argument that algorithms now play a fundamental role in governing the conditions of the intelligible and sensible. The chapter looks at how the news feed operates algorithmically to govern the “distribution of the sensible [. . .] defining what is visible or not in a common space” (Ranciere,  2004: 12–13). While users feed Facebook with data, the techniques and  procedures to make sense of it, to navigate, assemble, and make meaningful connections among individual pieces of data are increasingly being delegated to various forms of algorithms. The question raised in this chapter is, how does this kind of algorithmic intervention into people’s information-sharing practices takes place? What are the principles and logics of Facebook’s algorithmic form of editing the news feed? What implications do these algorithmic processes have for users of the platform? Through an analysis of the algorithmic logics structuring the flow of information and communication on Facebook’s news feed, I argue that the regime of visibility constructed, imposes a perceived “threat of invisibility” on the part of the participatory subject. As a result, I reverse Foucault’s notion of surveillance as a form of permanent visibility, arguing that participatory subjectivity is not constituted through the imposed threat of an all-seeing vision machine, but by the constant possibility of disappearing and becoming obsolete. The intention is not so much to ofer a definite account of the role played by Facebook in capturing the world in code, but to open avenues for reflection on the new conditions through which in/visibility is constructed by algorithms online.\n\n16\n\nI F . . . T H E N","previous_page":15,"next_page":17}