• Despite growing political and academic interest in increases in surveillance brought about by digital technology, users of these technologies themselves appear to remain relatively unconcerned with surveillance, accepting the trade-off of greater usability for decreased control. This article interrogates the contradiction between people’s professed opinions and their actual behaviours, and the contradiction between public and academic discourse and people’s everyday disregard. It does so by comparing a theoretical model currently in common use for analysing surveillance, focused around a Deleuzian conception of ‘control society’, with users’ own perceptions about the relative harm of surveillance, using data drawn from a qualitative study. In this enterprise, the study seeks to advance David Lyon’s call to understand whether and how users actually consent to surveillance in their everyday lives. The study finds two main points of difference and one point of commonality between control society analyses of surveillance and users’ own perceptions and experiences of being surveilled. Whereas a control society analysis points to the increasingly simulated quality of much of the data being generated about ‘dividuals’, users themselves hold onto notions about the truth and reliability of that information. Whereas a control society analysis conceptualizes surveillance in terms of postmodern forms of control which are dispersed, slippery and leak into everyday practice, users profess an ability to target surveillance attempts within specific spaces and attached to particular information domains. Control society analyses and user experiences of surveillance do converge, however, around the third tenet emerging from this scholarship: the notion of participatory surveillance, and how consent is currently operationalized. •

This article explores the new modalities of visibility engendered by new media, with a focus on the social networking site Facebook. Influenced by Foucault’s writings on Panopticism – that is, the architectural structuring of visibility – this article argues for understanding the construction of visibility on Facebook through an architectural framework that pays particular attention to underlying software processes and algorithmic power. Through an analysis of EdgeRank, the algorithm structuring the flow of information and communication on Facebook’s ‘News Feed’, I argue that the regime of visibility constructed imposes a perceived ‘threat of invisibility’ on the part of the participatory subject. As a result, I reverse Foucault’s notion of surveillance as a form of permanent visibility, arguing that participatory subjectivity is not constituted through the imposed threat of an all-seeing vision machine, but by the constant possibility of disappearing and becoming obsolete.

This lecture reviews the history of how the status and authority of media institutions over the past century have been entangled with wider claims about social knowledge and the order of societies. It analyses those relations in terms of three successive and now overlapping myths: ‘the myth of the mediated centre’ which claims that media (traditional mass media institutions) are privileged access points to our centre of social values and social reality; the ‘myth of us’ which is now emerging around the supposedly natural collectivities that ‘we’ form on commercial social media platforms; and, from outside the media industries, the ‘myth of big data’ which proclaims big data techniques are generating an entirely new and better form of social knowledge. All these myths require deconstruction by a particular hermeneutic, but the case of the myth of big data is the most paradoxical, since its claims amount to an anti-hermeneutic, a refusal to interpret the social anymore as the resultant of processes of meaning-making. This third myth, it is argued, requires a hermeneutic of the anti-hermeneutic if it is to be deconstructed and previous conceptions of social knowledge (from Weber onwards), and the claims to possible justice and politics based upon them, are to be preserved.

Drawing on a participatory observation in the popular social networking site (SNS) Netlog among Northern Belgium youngsters, this paper offers insights on how SNS institutions can be understood as actors that order storytelling practices in everyday life. Specifically, this paper deals with intimate storytelling practices that give meaning to sexuality, gender and relationships, developing a feminist and queer political critique on SNSs’ focus on the production of intelligible intimate identities and endless performative flows of stories. Theoretically, this paper proposes to put central everyday media-related practices to understand SNSs as actors shaping intimate stories, dialectically brought in relation to the website’s political economies and the cultural powers through which software is designed. Empirical illustrations show how de Certeau’s concept of tactics is useful to expose a complex struggle between digital media institutions power and everyday appropriations.

Drawing on empirical data, this article examines the ways in which young people negotiated messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp in their everyday lives, focusing in particular on the read-receipt feature embedded in the applications. While it is important to continue exposing and critically examining the power structures and socio-technological relations in which young people’s everyday engagement with social media platforms and messaging applications are entangled, the article argues that it is also crucial not to overlook the possibilities and forms of agency that can exist in this complex environment. Combining insights from Foucault and de Certeau, the article seeks to shed new light on the ways in which tactical agency can be enacted and cultivated by young people. This article contributes to current debates about agency, resistance and power in contemporary digital society as well as makes recommendations to foster more responsive digital literacies.

This paper explores the central role of computerized code in shaping the social and geographical politics of inequality in advanced societies. The central argument is that, while such processes are necessarily multifaceted, multiscaled, complex and ambivalent, a great variety of `software-sorting' techniques is now being widely applied in efforts to try to separate privileged and marginalized groups and places across a wide range of sectors and domains. This paper's central demonstration is that the overwhelming bulk of software-sorting applications is closely associated with broader transformations from Keynesian to neoliberal service regimes. To illustrate such processes of software-sorting, the paper analyses recent research addressing three examples of software-sorting in practice. These address physical and electronic mobility systems, online geographical information systems (GIS), and face-recognition closed circuit television (CCTV) systems covering city streets. The paper finishes by identifying theoretical, research and policy implications of the diffusion of software-sorted geographies within which computerized code continually orchestrates inequalities through technological systems embedded within urban environments.

How does algorithmic information processing affect the meaning of the word culture, and, by extension, cultural practice? We address this question by focusing on the Netflix Prize (2006–2009), a contest offering US$1m to the first individual or team to boost the accuracy of the company’s existing movie recommendation system by 10%. Although billed as a technical challenge intended for engineers, we argue that the Netflix Prize was equally an effort to reinterpret the meaning of culture in ways that overlapped with, but also diverged in important respects from, the three dominant senses of the term assayed by Raymond Williams. Thus, this essay explores the conceptual and semantic work required to render algorithmic information processing systems legible as forms of cultural decision making. It also then represents an effort to add depth and dimension to the concept of “algorithmic culture.”

Much of the work performed by the global translation industry is handled by freelance labor. This segment of the industry has seen a radical structural transformation that has accompanied a radical transformation in the media environment that supports its work. The emergence of online freelance translation marketplaces has married the logics of standardization, automation, and protocol to casual labor, motivated by incremental profit and lubricated by entrepreneurialism. Customs and practices native to contemporary internet culture generate a freelance translation machine made of equal parts flesh and silicon that manages skilled labor algorithmically. In parallel with the specific case of freelance translation practices, this article develops and deploys a notion of algorithmic culture that accounts for the integration of human cognition in computational processes. Consequently, the possibility emerges that users instrumentalize algorithms even as algorithms instrumentalize users.

YouTube has become a great showcase for audiovisual products and a source of income for a number of creators. Several pioneers of internet animation migrated to this platform to provide greater visibility and economic security for their productions. A group of YouTubers, so-called ‘Reply Girls’, achieved rapid economic benefits by publishing content without any value, neither artistic nor communicative, but that deceived YouTube’s remuneration system and prioritization algorithm. To fight this phenomenon, YouTube subsequently applied changes to its prioritization algorithm and monetization plans. In this article, the author examines more than 3,300 videos published by 25 animation channels between 2006 and 2018 with Digital Methods tools to analyse how the changes applied to the platform policies have influenced and shaped the evolution of animation production on the internet.

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.