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#trendingistrending: When algorithms become culture

Author: Tarleton Gillespie

In book: Algorithmic Cultures: Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies
Pages: 64–87
Year: 2016

Excerpt

Maybe the question about how algorithms shape culture is the wrong one, or wrong if left by itself. Instead, or at least also, it is about what happens when algorithms get taken up as culture, when their particular kinds of claims become legible, meaningful, and contested. We can continue to ask questions about how algorithms shape what is seen or privileged or categorized, about how they may discriminate or make mistakes or treat us like data or automate human judgment. But when algorithms are attending to social and cultural activity, we must remember two things: human activity is public, and algorithmic interventions are too. As Giddens (1984) noted, our scientific attention to human activity is different than to natural phenomena, because people know they are being observed, and act accordingly and often strategically. Algorithmic interventions into human activity face the same challenge. And when algorithmic interventions are also public, in their outputs if not their workings, then they too are observed, taken into account, and strategically contested. This means that the work of algorithms is cultural, and algorithms are not free of culture themselves. [emphasis added]