Abstract
This chapter argues for an engaged approach to the techno-politics of platforms, data, and algorithms, drawing on three empirical vignettes on music recommender systems. The three vignettes are neither about individual taste, nor about its colonialization by a metaphorical machinery of the cultural industry, but about how the logistics of music consumption has been transformed into data science and data engineering problems. Based on these vignettes the chapter will highlight three levels of techno-politics involved in the current upgrade of our TechnoScienceSocieties infrastructural nerves. On the level of platforms and infrastructures, these techno-politics reorganize a flexible infrastructure into integrated, but locked-up platforms; on the level of data they deal with rearranging existing assemblages of institutional and technical legacies; on the level of algorithms they are reorganizing our common world as computational processes. The chapter ends with a proposal for interventions and redesigns of such techno-politics of platforms, data and algorithms inside that array of projects, processes and practices of reassembling the infrastructural nerves of our TechnoScienceSocieties.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I use the term ‘techno-politics’ in the way that Timothy Mitchell has used it in his book on experts and Egypt to describe a “transformation at the material level as much as the level of representations” (Mitchel 2002). Mitchell does not really define his use of the term, but by opposing it to James C. Scott’s analysis of the uses and misuses of science and technology by modern nation states, he points out that his use of the term is to focus on the “social and political practice that produce simultaneously the powers of science and the powers of modern states” (Footnote 77: 43). I use the term in this way, although I use the term “politics” in a much broader sense that treats state-oriented politics as only one techno-political arrangement amongst others (see Passoth and Rowland 2010, 2015).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
In the strict terms of machine learning concepts, such a practice would not count as ‘teaching’ as this would require the careful collection of training data and (counter) examples to ‘learn’ the models in the first place.
References
Adorno, T.W. 2001. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. New York: Routledge.
Anderson, C.W. 2013. Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic Journalism. New Media & Society 15: 1005–1021.
Ang, I. 1991. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London/New York: Routledge.
Asaro, P.M. 2013. The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators. Social Semiotics 23: 196–224.
Barry, A. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Beer, David. 2009. Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society 11 (6): 985–1002.
Bermejo, F. 2009. Audience Manufacture in Historical Perspective: From Broadcasting to Google. New Media & Society 11: 133–154.
Black, M. 1962. Models and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Boczkowski, P., and L.A. Lievrouw. 2008. Bridging STS and Communication Studies. Scholarship on Media and Information Technology. In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. E.J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wajcman, 951–977. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bourdon, J., and C. Méadel. 2011. Inside Television Audience Measurement: Deconstructing the Ratings Machine. Media, Culture & Society 33: 791–800.
———. 2014. Television Audiences Across the World. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bowker, G.C. 2005. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bowker, G.C., and S.L. Star. 1996. How Things (actor-net) Work: Classification, Magic and the Ubiquity of Standards. Philosophia 25 (3/4): 195–220.
———. 1999. Sorting Things Out. In Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press.
———. 2001. Social Theoretical Issues in the Design of Collaboratories: Customized Software for Community Support Versus Large-Scale Infrastructure. In Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology, ed. G.M. Olson, T.W. Malone, and J.B. Smith, 713–738. Mahwah/New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Bowker, G.C., S.L. Star, W. Turner, and L. Gasser. 1999. Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 42: 132–134.
Bowker, G.C., K.S. Baker, F. Millerand, and D. Ribes. 2007. Towards Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment. In International Handbook of Internet Research, ed. J. Hunsinger, M. Allen, and L. Klastrup, 97–118. Dordrecht: Springer.
Boyd, D., and K. Crawford. 2012. Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communication & Society 15: 662–679.
Bunz, M. 2013. The Silent Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Callon, M., and F. Muniesa. 2005. Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices. Organization Studies 26: 1229–1250.
Chun, W.H.K. 2008. On “Sourcery,” or Code as Fetish. Configurations 16: 299–324.
Crawford, K., J. Lingel, and T. Karppi. 2015. Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device. European Journal of Cultural Studies 18: 479–496.
Deleuze, G. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59: 3–7.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? London: Verso.
Edwards, P.N., M.S. Mayernik, A.L. Batcheller, G.C. Bowker, and C.L. Borgman. 2011. Science Friction: Data, Metadata, and Collaboration. Social Studies of Science 41: 667–690.
Fraser, M. 2010. Facts, Ethics and Event. In Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology and Anthropology, ed. C.B. Jensen and K. Roedje, 52–82. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books.
Fuller, M. 2008. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Galloway, A.R. 2006. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolism: University of Minnesota Press.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Longman Higher Education.
Geiger, R.S. 2014. Bots, Bespoke, Code and the Materiality of Software Platforms. Information, Communication & Society 17: 342–356.
Gillespie, Tarleton. 2010. The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media & Society 12 (3): 347–364.
Gillespie, T. 2013. The Relevance of Algorithms. In Media Technologies, ed. G. Tarleton, P. Boczkowski, and K. Foot, 167–194. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hacking, I. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge/London: Cambridge University Press.
Harré, R. 1976. The Constructive Role of Models. In The Use of Models in the Social Sciences, ed. L. Collins, 16–43. London: Travistock.
Hennion, A. 1989. An Intermediary between Production and Consumption: The Producer of Popular Music. Science, Technology & Human Values 14: 400–424.
———. 2001. Music Lovers Taste as Performance. Theory Culture Society 18: 1–22.
Hennion, A., and C. Meadel. 1986. Programming Music: Radio as Mediator. Media, Culture & Society 8: 281–303.
Iliadis, A., and F. Russo. 2016. Critical Data Studies: An Introduction. Big Data & Society 3 (2): 1–7.
Jensen, C.B., and A. Morita. 2015. Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 1: 81–87.
Kitchin, R. 2014. Big Data, New Epistemologies and Paradigm Shifts. Big Data & Society 1: 1–7.
Kitchin, R., and T. Lauriault. 2018. Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and Their Work. In Thinking Big Data in Geography: New Regimes, New Research, ed. J. Thatcher, A. Shears, and J. Eckert, 3–20. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Kushner, S. 2013. The Freelance Translation Machine: Algorithmic Culture and the Invisible Industry. New Media Society 15: 1241–1258.
Latour, B. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Boston: Harvard University Press.
———. 2003. What If We Talked Politics a Little? Contemporary Political Theory 2: 143–164.
———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Law, J., and V. Singleton. 2013. ANT and Politics: Working in and on the World. Qualitative Sociology 36: 485–502.
Lenglet, M. 2011. Conflicting Codes and Codings: How Algorithmic Trading is Reshaping Financial Regulation. Theory, Culture & Society 28: 44–66.
Lievrouw, L.A., and S. Livingstone. 2006. How to Infrastructure. In Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of ICTs. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Looseley, D. 2006. Antoine Hennion and the Sociology of Music. International Journal of Cultural Policy 12: 341–354.
Marres, N. 2013. Why Political Ontology Must Be Experimentalized: On Eco-Show Homes as Devices of Participation. Social Studies of Science 43: 417–443.
Marres, N., and C. Gerlitz. 2014. Interface Methods: Renegotiating Relations Between Digital Research, STS and Sociology. The Sociological Review 64 (1): 21–46.
McLaughlin, K. 2016. Empowerment: A Critique. New York: Routledge.
Michael, M. 2012. “What Are We Busy Doing?”: Engaging the Idiot. Science, Technology, & Human Values 37: 528–554.
Mitchel, T. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mol, A. 1998. Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions. The Sociological Review 46: 74–89.
Montfort, Nick, and Ian Bogost. 2009. Racing the beam: The Atari video computer system. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Pariser, E. 2012. The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think. London: Penguin Books.
Pasquale, F. 2015. The Black Box Society. The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Passoth, J.-H., and N.J. Rowland. 2010. Actor-Network State: Integrating Actor-Network Theory and State Theory. International Sociology 25: 818–841.
Passoth, J.-H., and N. Rowland. 2015. Acting in International Relations? The State Hypothesis, ANT, and Agency. In Human Nature, Agency and Beyond. Reflecting on the Human Element in World Politics, ed. D. Jacobi and A. Freyberg-Inan, 286–304. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. 2018. Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society 20 (1): 293–310.
Rancière, J. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum.
Ribes, D., and C.P. Lee. 2010. Sociotechnical Studies of Cyberinfrastructure and e-Research: Current Themes and Future Trajectories. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 19: 231–244.
Steen, M. 2015. Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Full Exploring the Ethics in Design Practices. Science, Technology & Human Values 40: 389–420.
Stengers, I. 2000. The Invention of Modern Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2005. Deleuze and Guattari’s Last Enigmatic Message. Angelaki 10: 151–167.
Striphas, T. 2015. Algorithmic Culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies 18: 395–412.
Thaler, R.H., and C.R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Turing, A.M. 1936. On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2: 230–265.
Vollmer, H. 2007. How to do More with Numbers: Elementary Stakes, Framing, Keying, and the Three-Dimensional Character of Numerical Signs. Accounting, Organizations and Society 32: 577–600.
Wajcman, J., and P.K. Jones. 2012. Border Communication: Media Sociology and STS. Media, Culture & Society 34: 673–690.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Passoth, JH. (2020). Music, Recommender Systems and the Techno-Politics of Platforms, Data, and Algorithms. In: Maasen, S., Dickel, S., Schneider, C. (eds) TechnoScienceSociety. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43965-1_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43965-1_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-43964-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-43965-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)