Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy by Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin

Author:Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin [Haider, Jutta & Sundin, Olof]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000590289
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2022-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Here, a young person recounts an intervention where the platform service, in this case YouTube, is provided with user data, in the form of engagements, with the expressed aim of shaping future recommendations of videos. This direct and deliberate intervention then enables YouTube to predict different content to be relevant and populate the feed (or recommended videos) with.

The same person concludes their account by explaining: “So that is a way in which I try to change that algorithm”. In a strict sense, this is not what they do. They do not change the algorithm. On the contrary, they affirm it, play by its rules. They might even contribute to improving it (whatever that means). Nevertheless, it is an interesting statement, because it provides a glimpse into people’s algorithm awareness (Gran et al., 2021), and more precisely, into how they imagine algorithms to operate. We already encountered some of these algorithmic imaginaries in Chapter 2. These are, in the words of media researcher Taina Bucher, “the way in which people imagine, perceive and experience algorithms and what these imaginations make possible” (Bucher, 2017, p. 31). How people conceptualise invisible algorithms and algorithmic systems, how they make sense of their effects, and how they consider themselves and their actions in relation to them, cannot be dealt with in terms of correct or incorrect. Rather, the different ways of imagining algorithms and algorithmic systems have implications for how they are used, interpreted, and understood.

In fact, participants in our pair interviews describe enacting algorithmic imaginaries in their depictions of how they relate to the algorithmic systems in question, mainstream social media platforms, and their predictive decision-making. Unavoidably, the meaning attributed to the content encountered, and also to the content that is deterred, implicates these conceptualisations. It could be argued that infrastructural meaning-making occurs by way of algorithmic imaginaries and increasingly involves variously layered anticipatory strategies. Consider the following account conveyed by another participant in one of our pair interviews. This time the information system in question is Google Search:

For example, if I’m going to have a discussion with a friend, about something, then I google what I want to google, for example, “coffee causes cancer”. Then I google “coffee causes cancer” and I get a lot of articles. Then he googles “coffee is good for your health”, and then he also gets a lot of articles.

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