Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data

This book critically explores forms and techniques of calculation that emerge with digital computation, and their implications. The contributors demonstrate that digital calculative devices matter beyond their specific functions as they progressively shape, transform and govern all areas of our life. In particular, it addresses such questions as:

• How does the drive to make sense of, and productively use, large amounts of diverse data, inform the development of new calculative devices, logics and techniques?
• How do these devices, logics and techniques affect our capacity to decide and to act?
• How do mundane elements of our physical and virtual existence become data to be analysed and rearranged in complex ensembles of people and things?
• In what ways are conventional notions of public and private, individual and population, certainty and probability, rule and exception transformed and what are the consequences?
• How does the search for ‘hidden’ connections and patterns change our understanding of social relations and associative life?
• Do contemporary modes of calculation produce new thresholds of calculability and computability, allowing for the improbable or the merely possible to be embraced and acted upon?
• As contemporary approaches to governing uncertain futures seek to anticipate future events, how are calculation and decision engaged anew?

Drawing together different strands of cutting-edge research that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book makes an important contribution to several areas of scholarship, including the emerging social science field of software studies, and will be a vital resource for students and scholars alike.

Table of Contents

PART I Algorithmic life
Chapter 1 The public and its algorithms: comparing and experimenting with calculated publics
Chapter 2 The libraryness of calculative devices: artificially intelligent librarians and their impact on information consumption

PART II Calculation in the age of big data
Chapter 3 Experiencing a personalised augmented reality: users of Foursquare in urban space
Chapter 4 A politics of redeployment: malleable technologies and the localisation of anticipatory calculation
Chapter 5 Seeing the invisible algorithm: the practical politics of tracking the credit trackers

PART III Signal, visualise, calculate
Chapter 6 Bodies of information: data, distance and decision-making at the limits of the war prison
Chapter 7 Data anxieties: objectivity and difference in early Vietnam War computing
Chapter 8 ‘Seeing futures’: politics of visuality and affect

PART IV Affective devices
Chapter 9 Love’s algorithm: the perfect parts for my machine
Chapter 10 Calculating obesity, pre-emptive power and the politics of futurity: the case of Change4Life