Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life explores the complex ways in which algorithms and big data, or algorithmic culture, are simultaneously reshaping everyday culture while perpetuating inequality and intersectional discrimination. Contributors situate issues of humanity, identity, and culture in relation to free will, surveillance, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, solipsism, and creativity, offering a critique of the myriad constraints enacted by algorithms. This book argues that consumers are undergoing an ontological overhaul due to the enhanced manipulability and increasingly mandatory nature of algorithms in the market, while also positing that algorithms may help navigate through chaos that is intrinsically present in the market democracy. Ultimately, Algorithmic Culture calls attention to the present-day cultural landscape as a whole as it has been reconfigured and re-presented by algorithms.
Stefka Hristova is associate professor of digital media at Michigan Technological University. Soonkwan Hong is associate professor of marketing at Michigan Technological University. Jennifer Daryl Slack is distinguished professor of communication and cultural studies and founding director of the Institute for Policy, Ethics, and Culture at Michigan Technological University.
Introduction: In the Presence of Algorithms Stefka Hristova, Soonkwan Hong, and Jennifer Daryl Slack Chapter 1: Why Do We Need the Concept of Algorithmic Culture? Jennifer Daryl Slack and Stefka Hristova Chapter 2: Fetishizing Algorithms and Rearticulating Consumption Soonkwan Hong Chapter 3: Monoculturalism, Aculturalism, and Post-Culturalism: The Exclusionary Culture of Algorithmic Development Ushnish Sengupta Chapter 4: "The Spectre of Self-Organization": Will Algorithms Guide Us towards Truth? Ravi Sekhar Chakraborty Chapter 5: Machines of Liberation, Machines of Control: The Ambiguous Roots of Data Capitalism Reka Patricia Gal Chapter 6: The Autoimmunitary Violence of the Algorithms of Mourning Stefka Hristova Chapter 7: Algorithms, Identity, and Cultural Consequences of Genetic Profiles Amanda K. Girard Chapter 8: Technologies of Convenience: An Examination of the Algorithmic Bias in the Input/Output System of Digital Cameras Joel S. Beatty Chapter 9: Generative Adversarial Networks: Contemporary Art and/as Algorithm James MacDevitt About the Contributors
