The Relevance of Algorithms is an essay written by Tareton
Gillepsie, an associate professor of both Communication and Information Science
at Cornell. He authored Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of
Digital Culture, and has a lot of relevant information society experience
in both academia and the industry itself. He is the co-founder of
Culture Digitally, a blogging service. With assistance from his colleagues and
the European Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship Programme, he wrote this
essay on algorithms in the information society for both an academic and
professional audience. I believe that his piece was generally received as
credible by its audience, because Gillepsie has since published many other peer-reviewed
publications. However, UW library databases did not yield any scholarly
reviewed results, nor did Google list any essay reviews in its search results (perhaps
the algorithm intentionally filtered them out). A list of other pieces on this
topic with varying conclusions is listed after my in-depth description
of Gillepsie’s essay.
Gillepsie’s
piece is comprised of sophisticated vocabulary one might expect an Ivy-League
Professor to use and it explores the significance of algorithmic search
engines, such as Google, in terms of our economic and political society. His
main claim is that an algorithm is a knowledge
logic, or a medium in which information can be explained from a certain, biased perspective. The example he used that I found most helpful is that an
editorial is also a knowledge logic in so far as it conveys information from a
biased perspective of an author. But how can an algorithm be biased? It is not
a human with emotions and it simply produces certain outputs from certain
inputs. First, the algorithmic formula may censor certain things out (something very prevalent
in China which has many political repercussions). Second, if one were to search
a qualitative query like “most athletic athletes,” it is inherently impossible
to produce results without using judgments. Is strength the primary factor to
be considered? What about hand-eye coordination, etc. For these two reasons, Gillepsie claims algorithms are knowledge logics.
Subconsciously,
internet users choose to use the search engine that is the least biased, according to Gillepsie. For
example, if 9 out of 10 results of a particular search engine were
advertisements, people would naturally switch services. For this reason,
companies like Google attempt to gain credibility by saying that their formulas
are the most objective. This is very hard to verify because the formulas are
proprietary and kept secret. At the same time, Google sells advertising space. Gillepsie
asserts that the relationship between users and service providers is entangled
because changes in user groups affect algorithms (through advertisements) and
changes in algorithms affect user’s server preference.
From the idea that an
algorithmic search engine is biased, Gillepsie describes its implications to
the online community, which he coins the networked
publics. Search engines form a calculated
public by using algorithms to determine what appears atop a query. In basic
terms, algorithms and Google decide what is popular in networked publics. A
good example of this is Twitter’s use of the hashtag to show what is trending
in different areas. One thought I had is that the exposure caused by being trending
may inspire more attention and might produce more popularity within the calculated public. Gillepsie says
that there is friction between the networked publics and the calculated publics
and one needs to account for this in assessing the societal impact of the
internet.
It is evident that commercial
institutions and government censorship impact algorithms, search results, and
the network society. Gillepsie cautions against the temptation to make
conclusions about the online society (networked public) based on the tremendous amount of data provided by
search engines because it is inherently biased. At last, the political
ramifications of algorithms online revolve around government censorship, while
the economic implications are largely concerned with advertisements. These are the main points in The Relevance of Algorithms that I found most relevant to the information society.
Other similar pieces on the topic that may have reached
different conclusions:
· Media Rituals: A Critical Approach by Nick
Couldry
· Counterculture
to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner
· A Private Sphere: Democracy in a
Digital Age by Zizi Papacharissi
· The Business and Culture
of Digital Games by Aphra Kerr
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