Books in Creative Technologies, Human-Computer Interaction, Communication & Society
Algorithms and Society
Routledge Book Series
This new book series is less about what algorithms are, and more about how they act in the world through “eventful” (Bucher, 2018, p.48) forms of “automated decision making” (Noble, 2018, loc. 141) which computational models are “based on choices made by fallible human beings” (O’Neil, 2016, loc. 126).
Decisions that used to be based on human reflection are now made automatically. Software encodes thousands of rules and instructions computed in a fraction of a second (Pasquale, 2015, loc. 189).
If, in the industrial era, the promise of automation was to displace manual labor, in the information age it is to pre-empt agency, spontaneity, and risk: to map out possible futures before they happen so objectionable ones can be foreclosed and desirable ones selected (Andrejevic, 2020, p.8).
[M]achine learning algorithms that anticipate our future propensities are seriously threatening the chances that we have to make possible alternative political futures (Amoore, 2020, p. xi).
Algorithms, definable pragmatically as “a method for solving a problem’’ (Finn, 2017, loc. 408), “leap from one field to the next” (O’Neil, loc. 525). They are “hyperobjects: things with such broad temporal and spatial reach that they exceed the phenomenological horizon of human subjects” (Hong, 2020, p. 30). While in the main, the technological systems taken up as volume topics are design solutions to problems for which there are commercial markets, organized communities or claims of state interest, their power and ubiquity generate new problems for inquiry. The series will do its part to track this domain fluidity across its volumes and contest, through critique and investigation, their “logic of secrecy” (Pasquale, 2015, loc. 68) and “obfuscation” (loc. 144).
These new social (rather than strictly computational) problems that are generated can in turn be taken up by many critical, policy and speculative discourses. At their most productive, such debates can potentially alter the ethical, legal and even imaginative parameters of the environments in which the algorithms of our information architectures and infrastructures operate, as algorithmic implementations often reflect a ‘desire for epistemic purity, of knowledge stripped of uncertainty and human guesswork” (Hong, 2020, p.20). The series aims to foster a general intervention in the conversation around these often ‘black boxed’ technologies, and track their pervasive effects in society.
Contemporary algorithms are not so much transgressing settled societal norms as establishing new patterns of good and bad, new thresholds of normality and abnormality, against which actions are calibrated (Amoore, 2020, p.5).
Less ‘hot button’ algorithmic topics are also of interest to the series, such as their use in the civil sphere by citizen scientists, activists and hobbyists, where there is usually not as much discursive attention. Beyond private, state and civil interests, the increasingly sophisticated technology-based activities of criminals, whether amateur or highly organised, deserve broader attention as now everyone must defend their digital identities. The information systems of companies and states conduct a general form of “ambient surveillance” (Pasquale, loc. 310), and anyone can be a target of a hacking operation.
Algorithms and Society thus aims to be an interdisciplinary series which is open to researchers from a broad range of academic backgrounds. While each volume has its defined scope, chapter contributions may come from many areas such as sociology, communications, critical legal studies, criminology, digital humanities, economics, computer science, geography, computational media and design, philosophy of technology, and anthropology along with others. Algorithms are “shaping the conditions of everyday life” (Bucher, 2018, p. 158) and operate “at the intersection of computational space, cultural systems, and human cognition” (Finn, 2017, loc. 160), so the multi-disciplinary terrain is vast indeed.
Since the series is based on the shorter Routledge Focus format, it can be nimble and responsive to emerging areas of debate in fast-changing technological domains and their socio-cultural impacts.
References
Amoore, L. (2020). Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Duke University Press.
Andrejevic, M. (2020). Automated Media. Taylor and Francis.
Bucher, T. (2018). If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford University Press.
Finn, E. (2017). What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing. MIT Press. Kindle version.
Hong, S-H. (2020). Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society. New York University Press.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression. New York University Press. Kindle version.
O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction. Broadway Books. Kindle version.
Pasquale, F. (2015). The Black Box Society. Harvard University Press. Kindle version.
