{"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":66,"pdf_page":76,"physical_index":76,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8597e9e2d6bb0a143889f446f5c46cfec73bbf05b31644e006aafd864101e8b3"},"chapter":"IF...THEN","content":"Life at the Top\n\nEngineering Participation\n\nOver a decade ago, a geeky Harvard computer science undergraduate, together with a couple of friends, founded the world’s largest social networking site to date. With a claimed 1.4 billion daily active users, 25,105 employees, and a market value of \\$530 billion as of December 2017, Facebook is not just a site through which users can “stay connected with friends and family.”1 Facebook is also a multibillion dollar business, engineering company, sales operation, news site, computational platform, and infrastructure. As the feature film The Social Network (2010) nicely shows, Facebook is also a myth, an entrepreneurial dream, a geeky fairy tale. Far from just a Hollywood story with its founder Mark Zuckerberg in the leading role, Facebook is a carefully crafted brand, which over the past decade has been marketed as a technology company comprising a young, vibrant, and creative class of geeks and hackers. Its mission: to make the world more open and connected.\n\nIndeed, research suggests that, in many parts of the world, “Facebook is the Internet.” As one recent news article reported, “Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the Internet” (Mirani, 2015). When people in countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, and India were surveyed, many reported they did not use the Internet while, at the same time, indicating that they were avid users of Facebook. Despite some media reports about a teenage flight from Facebook to other social media platforms such as Snapchat, the sheer scale and volume of active users and content shared via Facebook remains historically unprecedented. In the American context, Facebook remains the most popular social media site with a large user base that continues to be very active. According to a Pew Research report on social media usage for 2014, fully 70% of Facebook users engage with the site on a daily basis, a significant increase from the 63% who did so in 2013 (Duggan et al., 2015). It is probably no exaggeration to state that, for many, Facebook has transformed the ways in which they live their lives—the way they communicate and coordinate with their friends and family, receive and read news, find jobs and are fired from jobs. Facebook is constitutive of what Deuze calls media life, shaping “the ways in which we experience, makes sense of and act upon the world” (2012: 5). As I argue in this book, our lived experiences are not just permeated by media in general but, increasingly and more specifically, by the principle of the algorithm. Algorithmic life is a form of life whose fabric is interwoven by algorithms—of what can and cannot be  adapted, translated, or incorporated into algorithmic expressions and logics. Facebook, as we will see, sits right at the center of this algorithmic fabric, making intelligible and valuable that which can be quantified, aggregated, and proceduralized. This fabric is the theme of this chapter, and the question I explore is, what kind of togetherness does software invent? If, as van Dijck (2012) suggests, Facebook is wrapping relationships in code by configuring connections algorithmically, the question is in what ways.\n\n66","previous_page":65,"next_page":67}