Download or read book Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet written by Ted Striphas and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, algorithms exercise outsize influence on cultural decision-making, shaping and even reshaping the concept of culture. How were automated, computational processes empowered to perform this work? What forces prompted the emergence of algorithmic culture? Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled. From Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by way of medieval Baghdad, this book pinpoints the critical junctures at which algorithmic culture began to coalesce in language long before it materialized in the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. Revising and extending the methodology of “keywords,” Ted Striphas examines changing concepts and definitions of culture, including the development of the field of cultural studies, and stresses the importance of language in the history of technology. Offering historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship of culture and computation, this book provides urgently needed context for the algorithmic injustices that beset the world today.
Download or read book Algorithmic Cultures written by Robert Seyfert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides in-depth and wide-ranging analyses of the emergence, and subsequent ubiquity, of algorithms in diverse realms of social life. The plurality of Algorithmic Cultures emphasizes: 1) algorithms’ increasing importance in the formation of new epistemic and organizational paradigms; and 2) the multifaceted analyses of algorithms across an increasing number of research fields. The authors in this volume address the complex interrelations between social groups and algorithms in the construction of meaning and social interaction. The contributors highlight the performative dimensions of algorithms by exposing the dynamic processes through which algorithms – themselves the product of a specific approach to the world – frame reality, while at the same time organizing how people think about society. With contributions from leading experts from Media Studies, Social Studies of Science and Technology, Cultural and Media Sociology from Canada, France, Germany, UK and the USA, this volume presents cutting edge empirical and conceptual research that includes case studies on social media platforms, gaming, financial trading and mobile security infrastructures.
Download or read book The Late Age of Print written by Ted Striphas and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, the author assesses our modern book culture by focusing on five key elements including the explosion of retail bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and the formation of the Oprah Book Club.
Download or read book Algorithms of Oppression written by Safiya Umoja Noble and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledgments -- Introduction: the power of algorithms -- A society, searching -- Searching for Black girls -- Searching for people and communities -- Searching for protections from search engines -- The future of knowledge in the public -- The future of information culture -- Conclusion: algorithms of oppression -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author
Download or read book We Are Data written by John Cheney-Lippold and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What identity means in an algorithmic age: how it works, how our lives are controlled by it, and how we can resist it Algorithms are everywhere, organizing the near limitless data that exists in our world. Derived from our every search, like, click, and purchase, algorithms determine the news we get, the ads we see, the information accessible to us and even who our friends are. These complex configurations not only form knowledge and social relationships in the digital and physical world, but also determine who we are and who we can be, both on and offline. Algorithms create and recreate us, using our data to assign and reassign our gender, race, sexuality, and citizenship status. They can recognize us as celebrities or mark us as terrorists. In this era of ubiquitous surveillance, contemporary data collection entails more than gathering information about us. Entities like Google, Facebook, and the NSA also decide what that information means, constructing our worlds and the identities we inhabit in the process. We have little control over who we algorithmically are. Our identities are made useful not for us—but for someone else. Through a series of entertaining and engaging examples, John Cheney-Lippold draws on the social constructions of identity to advance a new understanding of our algorithmic identities. We Are Data will educate and inspire readers who want to wrest back some freedom in our increasingly surveilled and algorithmically-constructed world.
Download or read book Automate This written by Christopher Steiner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rousing story of the last gasp of human agency and how today’s best and brightest minds are endeavoring to put an end to it. It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills—and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These “bots” started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected. In this fascinating, frightening book, Christopher Steiner tells the story of how algorithms took over—and shows why the “bot revolution” is about to spill into every aspect of our lives, often silently, without our knowledge. The May 2010 “Flash Crash” exposed Wall Street’s reliance on trading bots to the tune of a 998-point market drop and $1 trillion in vanished market value. But that was just the beginning. In Automate This, we meet bots that are driving cars, penning haiku, and writing music mistaken for Bach’s. They listen in on our customer service calls and figure out what Iran would do in the event of a nuclear standoff. There are algorithms that can pick out the most cohesive crew of astronauts for a space mission or identify the next Jeremy Lin. Some can even ingest statistics from baseball games and spit out pitch-perfect sports journalism indistinguishable from that produced by humans. The interaction of man and machine can make our lives easier. But what will the world look like when algorithms control our hospitals, our roads, our culture, and our national security? What happens to businesses when we automate judgment and eliminate human instinct? And what role will be left for doctors, lawyers, writers, truck drivers, and many others? Who knows—maybe there’s a bot learning to do your job this minute.
Download or read book What Algorithms Want written by Ed Finn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-10 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek. We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman's curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking. Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things. If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.
Download or read book Mathematical and Algorithmic Foundations of the Internet written by Fabrizio Luccio and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2011-07-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To truly understand how the Internet and Web are organized and function requires knowledge of mathematics and computation theory. Mathematical and Algorithmic Foundations of the Internet introduces the concepts and methods upon which computer networks rely and explores their applications to the Internet and Web. The book offers a unique approach to mathematical and algorithmic concepts, demonstrating their universality by presenting ideas and examples from various fields, including literature, history, and art. Progressing from fundamental concepts to more specific topics and applications, the text covers computational complexity and randomness, networks and graphs, parallel and distributed computing, and search engines. While the mathematical treatment is rigorous, it is presented at a level that can be grasped by readers with an elementary mathematical background. The authors also present a lighter side to this complex subject by illustrating how many of the mathematical concepts have counterparts in everyday life. The book provides in-depth coverage of the mathematical prerequisites and assembles a complete presentation of how computer networks function. It is a useful resource for anyone interested in the inner functioning, design, and organization of the Internet.
Download or read book Algorithmic Culture written by Stefka Hristova and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life explores the complex ways in which algorithms and big data, or algorithmic culture, are simultaneously reshaping everyday culture while perpetuating inequality and intersectional discrimination. Contributors situate issues of humanity, identity, and culture in relation to free will, surveillance, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, solipsism, and creativity, offering a critique of the myriad constraints enacted by algorithms. This book argues that consumers are undergoing an ontological overhaul due to the enhanced manipulability and increasingly mandatory nature of algorithms in the market, while also positing that algorithms may help navigate through chaos that is intrinsically present in the market democracy. Ultimately, Algorithmic Culture calls attention to the present-day cultural landscape as a whole as it has been reconfigured and re-presented by algorithms.
Download or read book Race After Technology written by Ruha Benjamin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide here.
Download or read book The Algorithmic Society written by Marc Schuilenburg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an algorithmic society. Algorithms have become the main mediator through which power is enacted in our society. This book brings together three academic fields – Public Administration, Criminal Justice and Urban Governance – into a single conceptual framework, and offers a broad cultural-political analysis, addressing critical and ethical issues of algorithms. Governments are increasingly turning towards algorithms to predict criminality, deliver public services, allocate resources, and calculate recidivism rates. Mind-boggling amounts of data regarding our daily actions are analysed to make decisions that manage, control, and nudge our behaviour in everyday life. The contributions in this book offer a broad analysis of the mechanisms and social implications of algorithmic governance. Reporting from the cutting edge of scientific research, the result is illuminating and useful for understanding the relations between algorithms and power.Topics covered include: Algorithmic governmentality Transparency and accountability Fairness in criminal justice and predictive policing Principles of good digital administration Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the smart city This book is essential reading for students and scholars of Sociology, Criminology, Public Administration, Political Sciences, and Cultural Theory interested in the integration of algorithms into the governance of society.
Download or read book The Burden of Choice written by Jonathan Cohn and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Burden of Choice examines how recommendations for products, media, news, romantic partners, and even cosmetic surgery operations are produced and experienced online. Fundamentally concerned with how the recommendation has come to serve as a form of control that frames a contemporary American as heteronormative, white, and well off, this book asserts that the industries that use these automated recommendations tend to ignore and obscure all other identities in the service of making the type of affluence they are selling appear commonplace. Focusing on the period from the mid-1990s to approximately 2010 (while this technology was still novel), Jonathan Cohn argues that automated recommendations and algorithms are far from natural, neutral, or benevolent. Instead, they shape and are shaped by changing conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. With its cultural studies and humanities-driven methodologies focused on close readings, historical research, and qualitative analysis, The Burden of Choice models a promising avenue for the study of algorithms and culture.
Download or read book Media Technologies written by Tarleton Gillespie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-01-24 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars from communication and media studies join those from science and technology studies to examine media technologies as complex, sociomaterial phenomena. In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinct social, cultural, and political practices. Communication and media scholars have increasingly taken theoretical perspectives originating in science and technology studies (STS), while some STS scholars interested in information technologies have linked their research to media studies inquiries into the symbolic dimensions of these tools. In this volume, scholars from both fields come together to advance this view of media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena. The contributors first address the relationship between materiality and mediation, considering such topics as the lived realities of network infrastructure. The contributors then highlight media technologies as always in motion, held together through the minute, unobserved work of many, including efforts to keep these technologies alive. Contributors Pablo J. Boczkowski, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory J. Downey, Kirsten A. Foot, Tarleton Gillespie, Steven J. Jackson, Christopher M. Kelty, Leah A. Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, Fred Turner
Download or read book The Longing for Less written by Kyle Chayka and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Yorker staff writer and Filterworld author Kyle Chayka examines the deep roots-and untapped possibilities-of our newfound, all-consuming drive to reduce. “Less is more”: Everywhere we hear the mantra. Marie Kondo and other decluttering gurus promise that shedding our stuff will solve our problems. We commit to cleanse diets and strive for inbox zero. Amid the frantic pace and distraction of everyday life, we covet silence-and airy, Instagrammable spaces in which to enjoy it. The popular term for this brand of upscale austerity, “minimalism,” has mostly come to stand for things to buy and consume. But minimalism has richer, deeper, and altogether more valuable gifts to offer. In The Longing for Less, one of our sharpest cultural critics delves beneath the glossy surface of minimalist trends, seeking better ways to claim the time and space we crave. Kyle Chayka's search leads him to the philosophical and spiritual origins of minimalism, and to the stories of artists such as Agnes Martin and Donald Judd; composers such as John Cage and Julius Eastman; architects and designers; visionaries and misfits. As Chayka looks anew at their extraordinary lives and explores the places where they worked-from Manhattan lofts to the Texas high desert and the back alleys of Kyoto-he reminds us that what we most require is presence, not absence. The result is an elegant synthesis of our minimalist desires and our profound emotional needs. With a new afterword by the author.
Download or read book The Black Box Society written by Frank Pasquale and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior—silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so—and to set limits on how big data affects our lives. Hidden algorithms can make (or ruin) reputations, decide the destiny of entrepreneurs, or even devastate an entire economy. Shrouded in secrecy and complexity, decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms were long assumed to be neutral and technical. But leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on automated judgment. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy. Even after billions of dollars of fines have been levied, underfunded regulators may have only scratched the surface of this troubling behavior. Frank Pasquale exposes how powerful interests abuse secrecy for profit and explains ways to rein them in. Demanding transparency is only the first step. An intelligible society would assure that key decisions of its most important firms are fair, nondiscriminatory, and open to criticism. Silicon Valley and Wall Street need to accept as much accountability as they impose on others.
Download or read book Love in the Time of Algorithms written by Dan Slater and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If online dating can blunt the emotional pain of separation, if adults can afford to be increasingly demanding about what they want from a relationship, the effect of online dating seems positive. But what if it’s also the case that the prospect of finding an ever more compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, a paradox of choice that keeps us chasing the illusive bunny around the dating track?” It’s the mother of all search problems: how to find a spouse, a mate, a date. The escalating marriage age and declining marriage rate mean we’re spending a greater portion of our lives unattached, searching for love well into our thirties and forties. It’s no wonder that a third of America’s 90 million singles are turning to dating Web sites. Once considered the realm of the lonely and desperate, sites like eHarmony, Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish have been embraced by pretty much every demographic. Thanks to the increasingly efficient algorithms that power these sites, dating has been transformed from a daunting transaction based on scarcity to one in which the possibilities are almost endless. Now anyone—young, old, straight, gay, and even married—can search for exactly what they want, connect with more people, and get more information about those people than ever before. As journalist Dan Slater shows, online dating is changing society in more profound ways than we imagine. He explores how these new technologies, by altering our perception of what’s possible, are reconditioning our feelings about commitment and challenging the traditional paradigm of adult life. Like the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, the digital revolution is forcing us to ask new questions about what constitutes “normal”: Why should we settle for someone who falls short of our expectations if there are thousands of other options just a click away? Can commitment thrive in a world of unlimited choice? Can chemistry really be quantified by math geeks? As one of Slater’s subjects wonders, “What’s the etiquette here?” Blending history, psychology, and interviews with site creators and users, Slater takes readers behind the scenes of a fascinating business. Dating sites capitalize on our quest for love, but how do their creators’ ideas about profits, morality, and the nature of desire shape the virtual worlds they’ve created for us? Should we trust an industry whose revenue model benefits from our avoiding monogamy? Documenting the untold story of the online-dating industry’s rise from ignominy to ubiquity—beginning with its early days as “computer dating” at Harvard in 1965—Slater offers a lively, entertaining, and thought provoking account of how we have, for better and worse, embraced technology in the most intimate aspect of our lives.
Download or read book If Then written by Taina Bucher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world in which Google's search algorithms determine how we access information, Facebook's News Feed algorithms shape how we socialize, and Netflix collaborative filtering algorithms choose the media products we consume. As such, we live algorithmic lives. Life, however, is not blindly controlled or determined by algorithms. Nor are we simply victims of an ever-expanding artificial intelligence. Rather than looking at how technologies shape or are shaped by political institutions, this book is concerned with the ways in which informational infrastructure may be considered political in its capacity to shape social and cultural life. It looks specifically at the conditions of algorithmic life -- how algorithms work, both materially and discursively, to create the conditions for sociality and connectivity. The book argues that the most important aspect of algorithms is not what they are in terms of their specific technical details but rather how they become part of social practices and how different people enlist them as powerful brokers of information, communication and society. If we truly want to engage with the promises of automation and predictive analytics entailed by the promises of "big data", we also need to understand the contours of algorithmic life that condition such practices. Setting out to explore both the specific uses of algorithms and the cultural forms they generate, this book offers a novel understanding of the power and politics of algorithmic life as grounded in case studies that explore the material-discursive dimensions of software.
