Media by Nick Couldry

Media by Nick Couldry

Author:Nick Couldry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509515189
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-11-08T00:00:00+00:00


Society and the Algorithmic Imaginary

The word ‘algorithm’ has a beautiful history, deriving from the name of the ninth-century CE Arab mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. In the world of large-scale computing, algorithm refers to any automated mechanism for counting, performing calculations, and processing data repetitively. Almost all our interfaces with media today depend on algorithms in this sense, from ticketing sites to social media platforms. It might seem surprising to claim that these seemingly humble processes actually serve to reimagine our society. Yet Norwegian scholar Taina Bucher has gone so far as to say we live in the age of the ‘algorithmic imaginary’. As we shall see, this is a plausible reading of the power of algorithms in contemporary societies.

Much of our relaxation and social time is spent on digital platforms: social media like WhatsApp and wechat, game platforms, and so on. Much of our work time is taken up interfacing with platforms that, one way or the other, monitor what we are doing. An ever-higher percentage of our consumer transactions happen online using credit cards and other forms of electronic payment. In each case, our online activities are tracked and monitored.

All these forms of monitoring involve computers. Computers cannot monitor anything without counting and processing units of information. Algorithms are automated procedures, driven by computer software, for counting and aggregating data. When we go online via a computing device, data is gathered about what we do on that device; in the process, many items get counted and compared with preset expectations. The resulting ‘data’ may help our devices function, but it also has potential economic value, since it is usable by the sites we visit, and sellable to others, especially when combined with other data gathered about us. This data processing is now basic to how media operate, and, many argue, to the operations of contemporary capitalism.

But what, you might ask, has automated data processing got to do with media’s role in imagining society? The answer is that such tracking and processing are becoming the means to new understandings of the social world. Those understandings are not necessarily richer than those of traditional media industries, but they are certainly more useful to various commercial and governmental interests. The outputs of those understandings – in the form of predictions about how we will behave and how best we can be marketed to – are increasingly embedded in everyday life, reimagining our lives and our likely choices. How is this happening?

Services like Facebook are just the most familiar and dramatic example of a much larger trend towards reorganizing social life through softwarerun ‘platforms’. Platforms are of two basic sorts: platforms where we go to do very specific sorts of things, such as sell or buy something on eBay; and platforms where we go to hang out and pass time, for example share photos with distant family and friends as we wander round an overseas city. But even the second, more open type of platform limits what we can do, because it



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