Making sense of algorithms: learning how to carry on in digital media landscapes

Every day, millions of people take out their phones, open apps such as TikTok, and start scrolling. In that process, they engage with algorithmic systems that are seamlessly integrated in today’s digital media landscape. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this talk will discuss how a group of UK-based young adults negotiated a sense of trust in these systems and the role they played in shaping their everyday experience. In particular, the talk will foreground the socio-cultural foundations of this sense making and ways in which such affects abilities to deal with algorithms meaningfully.

More information

• https://andreasschellewald.com/
• Photo: Statue of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (Persian mathematician, c. 780 – c. 850), the term algorithm was named after him

^{Photo (top) by LoggaWiggler auf Pixabay}