4.1: Steven Braun

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Visiting Assistant Professor, Northeastern University https://www.stevengbraun.com

Every day, we interact with systems that have been engineered to carefully control our access to information, often without realizing that access has been rearranged and modulated by the same systems we trust to read the news, connect with friends and family, or do our work. The rapid proliferation of these algorithm-driven platforms — encouraged under the guise of making our daily lives more efficient, productive, and profitable — has displaced our capacity for doing the critical interpretive work these systems demand, stripping individuals of the responsibility to interpret the facticity of the information these systems give us when that interpretation has been performed by the algorithms themselves.

These algorithms pervade nearly every domain in our lives, and in that ubiquity, we are subconsciously challenged to flex many different literacies — information, data, visual, statistical, and technological literacies, to name a few — to interrogate the intentions of those systems, how they are constructed, and how they control our access to information. Whether we realize it or not, this continuous assault can quickly fatigue our ability to question those systems themselves, tightening the control they have over us even further. In the face of this engineered reality, it can feel easy to become nihilistic about the agency we exercise in responding to these systems as they reconstruct our daily lived experience. Perhaps, the most radical act we can perform, then, is to reject that nihilism and recognize our role as actors in exposing how these systems deprivilege complex, nuanced, and situated knowledges in favor of objective, privileged, and canonical narratives. By reclaiming the responsibility for doing the interpretive work these algorithms have taken from us, we can become more critical consumers of the information they yield and ultimately encourage a culture in which those systems are designed and consumed in more intentional, ethical ways.

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