The Everyday Life of an Algorithm
Digital and Social Consequences
Published on 3. January 2019
Book
Hardback
IX, 151 pages
978-3-030-00577-1 (ISBN)
Description
This open access book begins with an algorithm-a set of IF.THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm's design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others.
More details
Edition
2019 ed.
Language
English
Place of publication
Cham
Switzerland
Publishing group
Springer International Publishing
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
2 s/w Abbildungen, 12 farbige Abbildungen
IX, 151 p. 14 illus., 12 illus. in color.
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 153 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
333 gr
ISBN-13
978-3-030-00577-1 (9783030005771)
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-00578-8
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Daniel Neyland is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, the University of London, UK. His research engages with issues of governance, accountability and ethics in forms of science, technology and organization. He has published books on privacy and surveillance, organizational ethnography, mundane governance (co-authored with Steve Woolgar) and markets (co-authored with Vera Ehrenstein and Sveta Milyaeva).
Content
1. Introduction: Everyday life and the algorithm.- 2. Experimentation with a probable human-shaped object.- 3. Accountability and the algorithm.- 4. The deleting machine and its discontents.- 5. Demonstrating the algorithm.- 6. Market value and the everyday life of the algorithm.