{"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":72,"pdf_page":82,"physical_index":82,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e21a9e9b54ed703e1a160eca4dfce1d8c081f73b99720b00731f839c278f6f9f"},"chapter":"IF...THEN","content":"The engineering of the engineer at which Tenanes hints clearly challenges the idea that artefacts are socially constructed, as if the social was already a given. Engineers do not simply engineer artefacts as if their intentions and ideas were the results of discursive and deliberate processes. These deliberations are always already imbued in materiality, whether it is the architecture of the headquarters, a piece of clothing, or the infrastructure of the work place. Just as the cultural dimension of computing maters, so does the material dimension of the culture of computing. It becomes apparent that thinking about the power of software and algorithms in terms of cause and determination will not do. While STS scholars have long argued for the necessary entanglement of materiality, practice, and poli tics (Gillespie, Boczkowski, & Foot, 2014: 4), there is a tendency still among communication scholars to frame technology as an outcome of culture. As Leah Lievrouw suggests, communication scholars only secondarily, if at all, consider material artefacts and devices to have anything resembling power (2014: 24). Indebted to the STS ideal of co-determination and the mutual shaping of technology and cultural practices, while at the same time explicitly opposing the preference for the social/cultural side of this sociotechnical duality, in this chapter I seek to atend more closely to the physical design and configuration of the (im)material architecture of the news feed. Echoing the idea of co-production or the dynamic relationship between the material and social, power is no longer seen as an abstract “force” or institutional “structure” but, rather, as instantiated and observable in the physical forms of social practices, relations, and material objects and artefacts (Lievrouw, 2014: 31).\n\nToward a Diagrammatics of News Feed Algorithms\n\nMy interest in questions of power stems from the view that power is increasingly materialized in and through software, as software and code have become ubiquitous, slipping into the “technological unconscious” of everyday life (Lash,  2007; Thrift, 2005). I hold that algorithms have productive capacities not merely by mediating the world but through their delegated capacities to do work in the world and by making a diference in how social formations and relations are formed and informed. Seting out to explore power through software and algorithms, indeed, seems to be a daunting and, perhaps, even impossible task. However, it is not my intention to investigate power as a totalizing force that can be located and described once and for all. As discussed in previous chapters, algorithms are never powerful in one way only but power always signifies the capacity to produce new realities. What we need, therefore, are diagrams or maps of power, tracing how and when power operates and functions in specific setings and through specific means.7 Following Deleuze in his reading of Foucault and the assertion that “every society has its diagram(s)” (2006: 31), what is at stake here is thus a diagrammatics of algorithms, understood as the cartography of strategies of power. Here, Foucault’s analysis of the architectural, technological, and conceptual nature of diagrams provides a useful methodological and analytical framework for examining Facebook’s news feed.\n\n72\n\nI F . . . T H E N","previous_page":71,"next_page":73}