Archive

Governing Algorithms Welcome Note

This is the sec­ond day of our con­fer­ence on gov­ern­ing algo­rithms and we’ve already been treat­ed to two out­stand­ing pre­sen­ta­tions by Bob Tarjan and Claudia Perlich, with insights into what…well, a lit­tle bit into what algo­rithms do. And today we con­tin­ue to explore the social, philo­soph­i­cal, eth­i­cal, legal sig­nif­i­cance of algorithms. 

Open Discussion on Lucas Introna’s Algorithms, Performativity and Governability”

I just want to be clear that I’m not say­ing that the details of the algo­rithms are irrel­e­vant. In a way they can mat­ter very much, and you know, in a cer­tain cir­cum­stance, in a cer­tain sit­u­at­ed use, it might mat­ter sig­nif­i­cant­ly what the algo­rithm does but we can’t say that a pri­ori. So we need to both open up the algo­rithms, we need to under­stand them as much as pos­si­ble, but we must not be seduced to believe that if we under­stand them there­fore we know what they do.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

One of the things that I think is real­ly impor­tant is that we’re pay­ing atten­tion to how we might be able to recu­per­ate and recov­er from these kinds of prac­tices. So rather than think­ing of this as just a tem­po­rary kind of glitch, in fact I’m going to show you sev­er­al of these glitch­es and maybe we might see a pattern.