This week, while commenting on micro-ethnographies, I began the ‘algorithmic play’ activity, adding new lifestream feeds including Vimeo and Deezer and, inspired by ‘Show and Tell: Algorithmic Culture’ (Sandvig 2014) and Noble’s (2018) Algorithms of Oppression, played with Google search algorithms including their autocomplete…

I also discovered (some) of what Google “knows” about me, collected ‘algorithmic play’ notes/screenshots and recorded algorithm ‘recommendations’ from…
- SoundCloud’s “Discover” algorithm
- Pocket’s “Discover” algorithm
- Spotify “Recommended Songs” algorithm
- YouTube recommendations
- Facebook/Twitter timelines
I reflect on questions from Amoore (2019: 7)…
‘Do algorithms compute beyond the threshold of human perceptibility and consciousness? Can ‘cognizing’and ‘learning’ digital devices reflect or engage the durational experience of time? Do digital forms of cognition radically transform workings of the human brain and what humans can perceive or decide? How do algorithms act upon other algorithms, and how might we understand their recursive learning from each other? What kind of sociality or associative life emerges from the human-machinic cognitive relations that we see with association rules and analytics?’
…and, as I explore these ‘human-machinic cognitive relations’, look beyond the polished “app” user interfaces and reflect on how algorithms (despite how they are presented) are far from objective or neutral (Kitchin 2017: 18). I turn my attention to investigating discrimination and bias (Noble 2018 and #AlgorithmsForHer)…
I also investigate the notion of ‘data colonialism’ (Knox 2016: 14), rethink the relation between algorithms and power (Beer 2017) and look to the future of what this might all mean in an educational context (Knox et al. 2020; Williamson 2017).