Umut Yener Kara- CULTURE ON ALIEN SHORES/ Yabancı Kıyılarda Kültür

Algorithms, once obscure objects of technical art, have lately been subject to considerable popular and scholarly scrutiny. What does it mean to adopt the algorithm as an object of analytic attention? What is in view, and out of view, when we focus on the algorithm? Using Niklaus Wirth's 1975 formulation that ''algorithms þ data structures ¼ programs'' as a launching-off point, this paper examines how an algorithmic lens shapes the way in which we might inquire into contemporary digital culture.

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2015

Over the last 30 years or so, human beings have been delegating the work of culture – the sorting, classifying and hierarchizing of people, places, objects and ideas – increasingly to computational processes. Such a shift significantly alters how the category culture has long been practiced, experienced and understood, giving rise to what, following Alexander Galloway, I am calling ‘algorithmic culture’. The purpose of this essay is to trace some of the conceptual conditions out of which algorithmic culture has emerged and, in doing so, to offer a preliminary treatment on what it is. In the vein of Raymond Williams’ Keywords, I single out three terms whose bearing on the meaning of the word culture seems to have been unusually strong during the period in question: information, crowd and algorithm. My claim is that the offloading of cultural work onto computers, databases and other types of digital technologies has prompted a reshuffling of some of the words most closely associated with culture, giving rise to new senses of the term that may be experientially available but have yet to be well named, documented or recorded. This essay, though largely historical, concludes by connecting the dots critically to the present day. What is at stake in algorithmic culture is the gradual abandonment of culture’s publicness and the emergence of a strange new breed of elite culture purporting to be its opposite.

AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2021

How we imagine our place within the structure of sociotechnical-human relationships—specifically, in domains of life affected by data-analytics and the probabilistic bets institutions and people in power make on the future of our credit worthiness, political leanings, shopping habits etc.—is our “algorithmic imagination.” The purpose of this panel is to explore the “algorithmic imagination” as it manifests in particular scholarly, historical, socio-cultural, and technical contexts. The panelists prioritize how social actors, situated in distinct settings, go about constructing an “algorithmic imagination” in conversation/opposition with how computational systems have “imagined” them; they will also reflect critically and self-reflexively on the implications of an algorithmic imagination, so conceived. Collectively, the panelists demure from monolithic understandings of the “algorithmic imagination” while also embracing algorithmic intersectionality. The primary contention of this pa...

This article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term ''algorithm.'' Where some have suggested that critical scholars should align their use of the term with its common definition in professional computer science, I argue that we should instead approach algorithms as ''multiples''-unstable objects that are enacted through the varied practices that people use to engage with them, including the practices of ''outsider'' researchers. This approach builds on the work of Laura Devendorf, Elizabeth Goodman, and Annemarie Mol. Different ways of enacting algorithms foreground certain issues while occluding others: computer scientists enact algorithms as conceptual objects indifferent to implementation details, while calls for accountability enact algorithms as closed boxes to be opened. I propose that critical researchers might seek to enact algorithms ethnographically, seeing them as heterogeneous and diffuse sociotechnical systems, rather than rigidly constrained and procedural formulas. To do so, I suggest thinking of algorithms not ''in'' culture, as the event occasioning this essay was titled, but ''as'' culture: part of broad patterns of meaning and practice that can be engaged with empirically. I offer a set of practical tactics for the ethnographic enactment of algorithmic systems, which do not depend on pinning down a singular ''algorithm'' or achieving ''access,'' but which rather work from the partial and mobile position of an outsider.

2017

2023

As soon as something implicit intrudes consciousness human thought undergoes a radical change. The introduction of any new tool or code brings a shift in cognition; every micro-step layering new semiotic forms within each macroevolutionary-stage has buttressed a new semantic leap. Our mechanization of everyday life and the techsystems we interact with are impacting communication, cultural norms and values, market-aesthetics, and economics, in societies at large. Undergirded by a survey of the role and significance of tools in human evolution, this study arrives at what is already a well-entrenched new era: the digital, screen-mediated age. Revolutionized by the algorithm, introduced by computers, this age is dominated by the addictive quality of instant contact, unlimited information, virtual gaming, and titillating service-forms, all at our finger tips. Aside from the interpersonal impact on the new humans growing up with devices in hand, how does this disembodied, digital code-form through which our interactions are mediated condition human cognition? How does its seductive efficiency interfere with how we relate, feel, assign meanings, think? Rooted in Code Biology macro-evolutionary and psychoanalytic principles, this paper examines the algorithm itself and takes a sweeping interdisciplinary approach to the developmental, psychosocial, and cognitive implications for the human mind/brain as it interacts with its

The Datafied Society, 2017

Humans have long defined, assessed, analysed and calculated data as factors in how they navigate reality. Indeed, the rules for what constitute data, together with the logics of their assembly, make up a core component of culture. Whether they be omens or numbers, whether they are qualitative or quantitative, whether they involve heuristics, hermeneutics or the rules of mathematics, the dyad of data and their organizing schemes give cultural eras their specificity. Considering developments ranging from Mayan astronomical calendars to Copernicus's heliocentric observations, from seventeenth-century navigational charts to twentieth-century actuarial tables, one might say that this dyad underpins cultural possibility itself. 1 Data have never been more abundant than they are today. Their unprecedented quantity owes as much to the digital encoding of most traceable phenomena as to the production of data by actors beyond our species. Whereas in the past, human observation translated events in the world into data, today, networked non-human actors are capable of directly generating machine-readable data. But as in the past, all that data would be meaningless without an organizing scheme. Behind the quintillions of bytes, behind our computers' ever-growing processing power, is an organizing scheme in the form of the algorithm. Like data, algorithms can be human-or machine-generated. And although an ancient idea, the algorithm has-or so I will argue-reached a tipping point in terms of its cultural operations: it is now being deployed in ways that redefine long-held subjectobject relationships and, in so doing, it poses some rather fundamental epistemological questions. This change in the balance of things has produced its share of anxieties, as familiar ways of doing things seem superseded by 'the algorithm'. The recent explosion of headlines where the term 'algorithm' figures prominently and often apocalyptically suggests that we are re-enacting a familiar ritual in which 'new' technologies appear in the regalia of disruption. But the emerging algorithmic regime is more than 'just another' temporarily unruly 1 Portions of this essay first appeared as William Uricchio, 'Recommended for You: Prediction, Creation and the Cultural Work of Algorithms,'

We commonly think of society as made of and by humans, but with the proliferation of machine learning and AI technologies, this is clearly no longer the case. Billions of automated systems tacitly contribute to the social construction of reality by drawing algorithmic distinctions between the visible and the invisible, the relevant and the irrelevant, the likely and the unlikely – on and beyond platforms. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this book develops an original sociology of algorithms as social agents, actively participating in social life. Through a wide range of examples, Massimo Airoldi shows how society shapes algorithmic code, and how this culture in the code guides the practical behaviour of the code in the culture, shaping society in turn. The ‘machine habitus’ is the generative mechanism at work throughout myriads of feedback loops linking humans with artificial social agents, in the context of digital infrastructures and pre-digital social structures. Machine Habitus will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, media and cultural studies, science and technology studies and information technology, and to anyone interested in the growing role of algorithms and AI in our social and cultural life.

Anna Aragno's work sounds like an appeal, an SOS to raise awareness of the issues of Anthropocene change (Haraway, 2016). Are we all in danger of turning ourselves into machines? Is there still something that can resist this process that drives us into the Post-Human (Braidotti, 2019)? There would be humanistic culture to act as a point of resistance, if it

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

Computing does not only imply a logical interaction with and through machines, but also-maybe more poignantly-a way of thinking. As historians of technology acknowledge, computing meant in the past so much as counting, or even reasoning. But in this sense, the history of computing has a much earlier beginning than what is popularly thought. The first machines that we can recognize as abstract computers were imagined by Charles Babbage in the 19 th Century, but the first algorithms were assembled centuries before, to be performed by social machineries. Drawing on an expanded understanding of Tomasello's hypothesis on the nature of collective thinking, this article argues that collective intentionalities-which can be thought of as pre-conceptual or non-conscious states of collective organization-are inherent settings embedded in social algorithms, and that they play an important role in the sociocomputing infrastructure in which these algorithms perform. The article then investigates this path by exploring historical samples of social algorithms and collective intentionalities, from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to contemporary socio-algorithmic practices. It then attempts to reconstruct the functional patterns and the complex relations they afford, while it looks at some of the cognitive articulations they conform. In the end, the article explains an algorithm as a collective social technology that emerges as a cultural script, where we find recurring process of signifying, inscribing and interpreting, and in which a given form of social thinking, involving a characteristic worldview, is always mobilized.