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The Feel of Algorithms
Why do we feel excited, afraid, and frustrated by algorithms?
The Feel of Algorithms brings relatable first-person accounts of what it means to experience algorithms emotionally alongside interdisciplinary social science research, to reveal how political and economic processes are felt in the everyday. People’s algorithm stories might fail to separate fact and misconception, and circulate wishful, erroneous, or fearful views of digital technologies. Yet rather than treating algorithmic folklore as evidence of ignorance, this novel book explains why personal anecdotes are an important source of algorithmic knowledge. Minna Ruckenstein argues that we get to know algorithms by feeling their actions and telling stories about them. The Feel of Algorithms shows how taking everyday algorithmic emotions seriously balances the current discussion, which has a tendency to draw conclusions based on celebratory or oppositional responses to imagined future effects. An everyday focus zooms into experiences of pleasure, fear, and irritation, highlighting how political aims and ethical tensions play out in visions, practices, and emotional responses. This book shows that feelings aid in recognizing troubling practices, and also calls for alternatives that are currently ignored or suppressed.
The Feel of Algorithms brings relatable first-person accounts of what it means to experience algorithms emotionally alongside interdisciplinary social science research, to reveal how political and economic processes are felt in the everyday. People’s algorithm stories might fail to separate fact and misconception, and circulate wishful, erroneous, or fearful views of digital technologies. Yet rather than treating algorithmic folklore as evidence of ignorance, this novel book explains why personal anecdotes are an important source of algorithmic knowledge. Minna Ruckenstein argues that we get to know algorithms by feeling their actions and telling stories about them. The Feel of Algorithms shows how taking everyday algorithmic emotions seriously balances the current discussion, which has a tendency to draw conclusions based on celebratory or oppositional responses to imagined future effects. An everyday focus zooms into experiences of pleasure, fear, and irritation, highlighting how political aims and ethical tensions play out in visions, practices, and emotional responses. This book shows that feelings aid in recognizing troubling practices, and also calls for alternatives that are currently ignored or suppressed.
- GenresTechnologyNonfiction
240 pages, Hardcover
Published May 23, 2023
5 people are currently reading
117 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 16, 2024
This is a terribly interesting book, but not necessarily one you might learn a lot from. The problem is that we are so emersed in algorithms we probably think we know all there is to know about them. And this book isn’t really seeking to tell you things you don’t know about algorithms, rather she discusses how having our lives dominated by them makes us feel. This is a complicated story. We can all cite ways in which algorithms have made our lives better or ways they have made our lives worse or ways in which we now feel manipulated by them. The worst is the ways that we assume we are being manipulated by them, but that we aren’t entirely sure of. Did I buy a Mars Bar because I wanted one or did an algorithm know more about me than I do and flashed an ad in front of my face at just the right time? Or is social media really as bad for children as we have been told? These are not really questions with simple yes/no answers. The point of most algorithms isn’t really to make your life better, but to get you to buy something. And since our identity is so strongly linked to the things that we purchase, and to how we present ourselves online, the potential for things to get very messy, very quickly is obvious.
My mother and ex-partner were both certain that their telephone was listening in to everything they said and then directing ads at them due to their conversations. My mother left school at 14 and my ex has a PhD – these fears aren’t easily linkable to educational attainment. My brother used to work on a building site and would grab other people’s phones and say ‘penis enlargement’ or ‘I wish I didn’t have such a small dick’ into them. The author here says that she does not really believe Google or other apps actually analyse everything you say as a means to upsell. She says that this is mostly unnecessary, since analysing a few search results and clicks is much more efficient. That this is a kind of modern-day folktale that has come about because we have no idea how algorithms work and so we need to rely on interpreting our experiences of them. There are obvious problems with our experience. One is that we ignore when this doesn’t happen – when I say Mars Bar and I don’t see ads for chocolate bars, but that we are hypersensitive when it does work by coincidence. Not knowing how algorithms work isn’t something that can be easily fix and it feeds into our anxiety. If Google provided you with all of its algorithms to read over, would you have any idea what they did or how they did it? Other books I’ve read recently say that even those coding these things would struggle to tell you what they did, given coders are only given piecemeal parts to code. And Edward Snowden’s revelations that the US essentially listens in to every conversation across the world hardly disconfirms our fears here.
There are cute bits to this where people try to train the algorithm to provide them with things they like and to avoid things they don’t like. But this looks to me like a fool’s errand. You are always one click away from tearing the whole structure down. Oops…I just fat-fingered an ad for bedlinen. Which is the other thing she says. At least in the olden-days you could go into a shop, have a quick look at the bedspread at the entrance and then not be followed around by floor staff holding up various matching sheet sets.
While she has chapters on how good and how bad algorithms are, I think the best was one where she talked about how irritating they can be. I listen to quite a lot of Tom Waits on Spotify and for some reason the algorithm has decided I should also like Nick Drake. I know nothing of Nick Drake – but what I’ve heard of him hasn’t made me want to find out more. Not that Spotify seems to pay any attention to that. Despite my constantly stopping him a few seconds into a song, another is certain to appear again when I look away. Perhaps they get paid additional royalties for playing his songs? Maybe they think I’m being irrational and will soon grow to like him? Whatever the reason, following the ‘I’ll keep clicking NO until the algorithm finally catches on’ hasn’t worked for me so far. As the author explains, few algorithms are nuanced. Oh look, it is a woman between 18 and 40, she must want to get pregnant. Oh look, a man – beer and porn.
For a while on Facebook I had a friend who slowly sunk down a conspiracy rabbit hole. It was during Covid and she believed the whole thing was fake, a capitalist plot, and that the vaccines were just a way to make profit. I mostly ignored her posts. Then, I suddenly realised that I was receiving lots of other crazy stuff in my feed. This has also happened because I have some homosexual friends. The algorithm assumes I’m both gay and crazy. I blocked the woman, eventually the crazy stuff disappeared with her.
This book is based from lots of interviews with a broad range of people from Finland, different from each other in virtually all ways – other than being Finns, of course. I’m not sure it would be all that different if the interviews had been taken in any other country. Like I said, you might not feel you learn very much from this book that you don’t already know, particularly if you have read Weapons of Mass Destruction or say Surveillance Capitalism – but this really is trying to get you to look down the other end of the telescope – and for that it is well worth the read.
My mother and ex-partner were both certain that their telephone was listening in to everything they said and then directing ads at them due to their conversations. My mother left school at 14 and my ex has a PhD – these fears aren’t easily linkable to educational attainment. My brother used to work on a building site and would grab other people’s phones and say ‘penis enlargement’ or ‘I wish I didn’t have such a small dick’ into them. The author here says that she does not really believe Google or other apps actually analyse everything you say as a means to upsell. She says that this is mostly unnecessary, since analysing a few search results and clicks is much more efficient. That this is a kind of modern-day folktale that has come about because we have no idea how algorithms work and so we need to rely on interpreting our experiences of them. There are obvious problems with our experience. One is that we ignore when this doesn’t happen – when I say Mars Bar and I don’t see ads for chocolate bars, but that we are hypersensitive when it does work by coincidence. Not knowing how algorithms work isn’t something that can be easily fix and it feeds into our anxiety. If Google provided you with all of its algorithms to read over, would you have any idea what they did or how they did it? Other books I’ve read recently say that even those coding these things would struggle to tell you what they did, given coders are only given piecemeal parts to code. And Edward Snowden’s revelations that the US essentially listens in to every conversation across the world hardly disconfirms our fears here.
There are cute bits to this where people try to train the algorithm to provide them with things they like and to avoid things they don’t like. But this looks to me like a fool’s errand. You are always one click away from tearing the whole structure down. Oops…I just fat-fingered an ad for bedlinen. Which is the other thing she says. At least in the olden-days you could go into a shop, have a quick look at the bedspread at the entrance and then not be followed around by floor staff holding up various matching sheet sets.
While she has chapters on how good and how bad algorithms are, I think the best was one where she talked about how irritating they can be. I listen to quite a lot of Tom Waits on Spotify and for some reason the algorithm has decided I should also like Nick Drake. I know nothing of Nick Drake – but what I’ve heard of him hasn’t made me want to find out more. Not that Spotify seems to pay any attention to that. Despite my constantly stopping him a few seconds into a song, another is certain to appear again when I look away. Perhaps they get paid additional royalties for playing his songs? Maybe they think I’m being irrational and will soon grow to like him? Whatever the reason, following the ‘I’ll keep clicking NO until the algorithm finally catches on’ hasn’t worked for me so far. As the author explains, few algorithms are nuanced. Oh look, it is a woman between 18 and 40, she must want to get pregnant. Oh look, a man – beer and porn.
For a while on Facebook I had a friend who slowly sunk down a conspiracy rabbit hole. It was during Covid and she believed the whole thing was fake, a capitalist plot, and that the vaccines were just a way to make profit. I mostly ignored her posts. Then, I suddenly realised that I was receiving lots of other crazy stuff in my feed. This has also happened because I have some homosexual friends. The algorithm assumes I’m both gay and crazy. I blocked the woman, eventually the crazy stuff disappeared with her.
This book is based from lots of interviews with a broad range of people from Finland, different from each other in virtually all ways – other than being Finns, of course. I’m not sure it would be all that different if the interviews had been taken in any other country. Like I said, you might not feel you learn very much from this book that you don’t already know, particularly if you have read Weapons of Mass Destruction or say Surveillance Capitalism – but this really is trying to get you to look down the other end of the telescope – and for that it is well worth the read.
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