Alison Powell at LSE Media Policy Project Blog: “Algorithms are everywhere, or so we are told, and the black boxes of algorithmic decision-making make oversight of processes that regulators and activists argue ought to be transparent more difficult than in the past. But when, and where, and which machines do we wish to make accountable, and for what purpose? In this post I discuss how algorithms discussed by scholars are most commonly those at work on media platforms whose main products are the social networks and attention of individuals. Algorithms, in this case, construct individual identities through patterns of behaviour, and provide the opportunity for finely targeted products and services. While there are serious concerns about, for instance, price discrimination, algorithmic systems for communicating and consuming are, in my view, less inherently problematic than processes that impact on our collective participation and belonging as citizenship. In this second sphere, algorithmic processes – especially machine learning – combine with processes of governance that focus on individual identity performance to profoundly transform how citizenship is understood and undertaken.
Communicating and consuming
In the communications sphere, algorithms are what makes it possible to make money from the web for example through advertising brokerage platforms that help companies bid for ads on major newspaper websites. IP address monitoring, which tracks clicks and web activity, creates detailed consumer profiles and transform the everyday experience of communication into a constantly-updated production of consumer information. This process of personal profiling is at the heart of many of the concerns about algorithmic accountability. The consequence of perpetual production of data by individuals and the increasing capacity to analyse it even when it doesn’t appear to relate has certainly revolutionalised advertising by allowing more precise targeting, but what has it done for areas of public interest?
John Cheney-Lippold identifies how the categories of identity are now developed algorithmically, since a category like gender is not based on self-discloure, but instead on patterns of behaviour that fit with expectations set by previous alignment to a norm. In assessing ‘algorithmic identities’, he notes that these produce identity profiles which are narrower and more behaviour-based than the identities that we perform. This is a result of the fact that many of the systems that inspired the design of algorithmic systems were based on using behaviour and other markers to optimise consumption. Algorithmic identity construction has spread from the world of marketing to the broader world of citizenship – as evidenced by the Citizen Ex experiment shown at the Web We Want Festival in 2015.
Individual consumer-citizens
What’s really at stake is that the expansion of algorithmic assessment of commercially derived big data has extended the frame of the individual consumer into all kinds of other areas of experience. In a supposed ‘age of austerity’ when governments believe it’s important to cut costs, this connects with the view of citizens as primarily consumers of services, and furthermore, with the idea that a citizen is an individual subject whose relation to a state can be disintermediated given enough technology. So, with sensors on your garbage bins you don’t need to even remember to take them out. With pothole reporting platforms like FixMyStreet, a city government can be responsive to an aggregate of individual reports. But what aspects of our citizenship are collective? When, in the algorithmic state, can we expect to be together?
Put another way, is there any algorithmic process to value the long term education, inclusion, and sustenance of a whole community for example through library services?…
Seeing algorithms – machine learning in particular – as supporting decision-making for broad collective benefit rather than as part of ever more specific individual targeting and segmentation might make them more accountable. But more importantly, this would help algorithms support society – not just individual consumers….(More)”