The Politics of Algorithms

Algorithms have become central actors in today’s digital world. In areas as diverse as social media, journalism, education, healthcare, and policing, computing technologies increasingly mediate communication processes. This course will provide an introduction to the social and cultural forces shaping the construction, institutionalization, operation, and uses of algorithms. In so doing, we will explore how algorithms relate to political issues of modernization, power, and inequality. Readings will range from social scientific analyses to media coverage of ongoing controversies relating to Big Data. Students will leave the course with a better appreciation of the broader challenges associated with researching, building, and using algorithms.

Week 1. April 3-5. Introduction. What are algorithms? Do they have politics? April 3 “A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning.” R2D3. April 5 O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Introduction and Chapter 1 in Weapons of Math Destruction. Crown. Winner, Langdon. 1980. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109(1): 121-136. Optional Daumé III, Hal. 2017. Chapter 1 in A Course in Machine Learning. Gillespie, Tarleton. 2014. “The relevance of algorithms.” Pp. 167-194 in T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski & K. A. Foot (eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. MIT Press. Seaver, Nick. 2016. “Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems.” Big Data & Society 1-12. boyd, danah and Kate Crawford. 2012. “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Information, Communication, & Society 15 (5): 662-679. Joerges, Bernward. 1999. “Do Politics Have Artefacts?” Social Studies of Science 29 (3): 411431. Woolgar, Steve, and Geoff Cooper. 1999. “Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence?” Social Studies of Science 29 (3): 433-449. White House. 2016. Big Data: A Report on Algorithmic Systems, Opportunities, and Civil Rights. Executive Office of the President. 4 Week 2. April 10-12. Facebook, Filter Bubbles, and the Public Sphere April 10 Pariser, Eli. 2011. Introduction and Chapter 1 in The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing What We Think and How We Read. Penguin. Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. Pp. 27-43 in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press. Keegan, John. 2018. “Blue Feed, Red Feed: See Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook Side By Side.” The Wall Street Journal. April 12 Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” Social Text 25/26: 56-80. Zuckerberg, Mark. 2016. “I Want to Share Some Thoughts on Facebook and the Election.” Zuckerberg, Mark. 2017. “The Question of Russian Interference in the US Elections.” Gillespie, Tarleton. 2010. “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” New Media & Society 12 (3): 347–64. Optional Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. 2015. “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook.” Science 348 (6239) Flaxman, Seth, Sharad Goel, and Justin M. Rao. 2016. “Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption.” Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (S1): 298-320. Schudson, Michael. 1995. “Was There Ever a Public Sphere?” Pp. 189-203 in The Power of News. Harvard University Press. Tufekci, Zeynep. 2017. Introduction and Chapter 1 in Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Heaven: Yale University Press. Week 3. April 17-19. Privacy, Surveillance, and Control April 17 Angwin, Julia. 2014. Chapter 1 and 2 in Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. Times Book. Solove, Daniel J. 2015. “Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nissenbaum, Helen. 2011. “A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online.” Daedalus 140(4): 32-48. April 19 Hill, Kashmir. 2018. “The House that Spied on Me.” Gizmodo, published February 7, 2018. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Chapter 3 in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59: 3-7. Levy, Karen, and Solon Barocas. 2018. “Refractive Surveillance. Monitoring Customers to Manage Workers.” International Journal of Communication 12: 1166-1188. Optional Agre, Philip E. 1994. “Surveillance and Capture. Two Models of Privacy.” The Information 5 Society 10(2): 101-127. Turow, Joseph. 2005. “Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597(1): 103-121. Tufecki, Zeynep. 2014. “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics,” First Monday 19 (7). Week 4. April 24-26. Algorithmic Discrimination and Inequality April 24 Sweeney, Latanya. 2013. “Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery.” ACM Queue 11(3): 1-19. Ananny, Mike. 2011. “The Curious Connection Between Apps for Gay Men and Sex Offenders.” The Atlantic. April 14 Eubanks, Virginia. 2017. Introduction and Chapter 2 in Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St Martin’s Press. April 26 Angwin Julia, Larson Jeff, Mattu Surya, and Krichner Lauren. 2016. Machine Bias. ProPublica, May 23, 2016. Corbett-Davis, Sam, Pierson, Emma, Feller, Avi and Goel, Sharad. 2016. “A Computer Program Used for Bail and Sentencing Decisions Was Labeled Biased Against Blacks. It’s Actually Not That Clear.” The Washington Post. October 17, 2016. Brayne, Sarah. 2017. “Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing.” American Sociological Review 82(5): 977-1008. Optional Introna, Lucas D., and Helen Nissenbaum. 2000. “Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters.” The Information Society 16: 169-185. Barocas Solon, and Selbst Andrew D. 2016. “Big Data’s Disparate Impact.” California Law Review 104: 671-732. Braun, Lundy. 2005. “Spirometry, Measurement, and Race in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60 (2): 135-69. Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy. 2016. “Seeing Like a Market.” Socio-Economic Review 121. Christin, Angèle. 2017. “The Mistrials of Algorithmic Sentencing.” Logic 03: https://logicmag.io/03-the-mistrials-of-algorithmic-sentencing/ Week 5. May 1-3. Algorithmic Selves I: Identities and Time May 1 Marwick, Alice E., and boyd, danah. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society, 13(1): 114133. 6 Duffy, Brooke Erin, and Emily Hund. 2015. “‘Having it All’ on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers.” Social Media + Society 1-15. Goffman, Erving. 1959. Pp. 1-34 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. May 3 *** Guest Lecture by Prof. Judy Wajcman *** Wajcman, Judy. 2015. Introduction and Chapter 6 in Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Optional Scholz, Trebor. 2017. Introduction to Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. Routledge. Vallas, Steven P., and Angèle Christin. 2018. “Work and Identity in an Era of Precarious Employment: How Workers Respond to ‘Personal Branding’ Discourse.” Work & Occupation 45(1): 1-17. Wajcman, Judy. 2008. “Life in the Fast Lane? Towards a Sociology of Technology and Time.” British Journal of Sociology 59 (1): 59-77. -- Midterm Paper Due on May 3 -- Week 6. May 8-10. Algorithmic Selves II: Intimacy, Friendship, and Bodies May 8 Illouz, Eva. 2007. “Romantic Webs” in Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity. Bucher, Taina. 2016. “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20(1): 30-44. Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Mitchell L. Stevens. 1998. “Commensuration as a Social Process.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1): 313–43. May 10 ***Guest lecture by Anna Gibson*** Lupton, Deborah. 2016. Chapter 3 in The Quantified Self. Malden: Polity. Crawford, Kate, Lingel, Jessa, and Karppi, Tero. 2015. “Our Metrics, Ourselves. A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18(4-5): 479-496. Weigel, Moira. 2016. “‘Fitbit For Your Periods’: The Rise of Fertility Tracking.” The Guardian, March 23, 2016. 7 Optional Igo, Sarah. 2007. Introduction and Chapter 6 in The Averaged American. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eslami, M., Rickman, A., Vaccaro, K., Aleyasen, A., Vuong, A., Karahalios, K., Hamilton, K., & Sandvig, C. 2015. “I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to [her]”: Reasoning about invisible algorithms in the news feed.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM: 153-162. Schull, Natasha. 2016. “Data for Life: Wearable Technology and the Design of Self Care,” BioSocieties 11(3): 317-33. Hicks, Marie. 2017. “The Mother of All Swipes.” Logic 02: https://logicmag.io/02-the-motherof-all-swipes/ Week 7. May 15-17. Algorithmic Institutions: Work and Money May 15 Rosenblat, Alex and Stark, Luke. 2016. “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries. A Case Study of Uber Drivers.” International Journal of Communication 10: 3758-3784. Shestakofsky, Benjamin. 2017. “Working Algorithms: Software Automation and the Future of Work.” Work and Occupations 44(4):376-423. Christin, Angèle. 2018. “Algorithms in Practice: Comparing Web Journalism and Criminal Justice.” Big Data & Society 4(2): 1-14. May 17 *** Guest lecture by Jeff Nagy *** Nakamoto, Satoshi. 2008. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Böhme, Rainer, Nicholas Christin, Benjamin Edelman, and Tyler Moore. 2015. “Bitcoin: Economics, Technology, and Governance.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(2): 213-238. Malmo, Christopher. “Bitcoin is Unsustainable.” Motherboard, June 29, 2015. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is-unsustainable Lustig, Caitlin and Bonnie Nardi. 2015. “Algorithmic Authority: The case of Bitcoin.” In 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS): 743-752. IEEE. Optional Bix, Amy Sue. 2001. Prologue and Chapter 1 in Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Zuboff, Shoshana. 1988. Introduction and Chapter 7 in In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. Basic Books. Aneesh, A. 2009. “Global Labor: Algocratic Modes of Organization.” Sociological Theory 27 (4): 347-370. Geiger, R. Stuart. 2017. “Beyond Opening Up the Black Box: Investigating the Role of Algorithmic Systems in Wikipedian Organizational Culture.” Big Data & Society 1-14. Narayanan, Arvind, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller, Steven Goldfeder, and 8 Jeremey Clark. 2016. “Preface: The Long Road to Bitcoin.” In Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dodd, Nigel. 2017. "The Social Life of Bitcoin." Theory, culture, & society. Week 8. May 22-24. Constructing Algorithms: Silicon Valley and elsewhere May 22 Saxenian, AnnaLee. 1994. Introduction and Chapter 2 in Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Harvard University Press. Neff, Gina, and David Stark. 2003. “Permanently Beta: Responsive Organization in the Internet Era,” Pp. 173-188 in Philip Howard and Steve Jones (Eds.), Society Online: The Internet in Context, Sage. Marwick, Alice. 2013. Introduction and Chapter 4 in Status Update. Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Yale University Press. May 24 Turner, Fred. 2009. “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production.” New Media & Society, 11(1-2), 73-94. Chen, Adrian. 2014. “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.” Wired. October 23, 2014. Optional Barley, Stephen R., and Gideon Kunda. 2004. Chapter 1 and 2 in Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2005. “The New Spirit of Capitalism.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 18 (3-4): 161-188. Neff, Gina. 2012. Chapter 3 from Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. MIT Press. Week 9. May 29-31. Regulating Algorithms May 29 O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Conclusion in Weapons of Mass Destruction. Crown. Diakopoulos, Nicholas, and Friedler, Sorelle. 2016. “How to Hold Algorithms Accountable.” MIT Technology Review, Nov. 17, 2016. Garcia, Megan. 2017. “How to Keep Your AI from Turning into a Racist Monster.” Wired. February 13, 2017. May 31 Pasquale, Frank. 2015. Chapter 1 and 2 in The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard University Press. Burrell, Jenna. 2016. “How the Machine ‘Thinks:’ Understanding Opacity in Machine Learning Algorithms.” Big Data & Society 3(1). Ananny, Mike, and Crawford, Kate. 2016. “Seeing Without Knowing: Limitations of the 9 Transparency Ideal and its Application to Algorithmic Accountability.” New Media & Society. Optional Schudson, Michael. 2015. Introduction, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1975. Harvard University Press. Crawford, Kate, and Jason Schultz. 2014. “Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms.” Boston College Law Review, 55(1). Ziewitz, Malte. 1016. “Governing Algorithms: Myth, Mess, and Methods.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(1): 3-16. Week 10. June 5. Wrapping things up Borgman, Christine L. 2015. Preface and Chapter 1 in Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World. MIT Press. Davies, William. 2017. “How Statistics Lost Their Power – And Why We Should Fear What Comes Next,” The Guardian. January 19, 2017. Optional Star, Susan Leigh, and Geoffrey C Bowker. 2000. Introduction (“To Classify Is Human”) in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology). MIT Press. -- Final Paper Due on June 5 -- 10