The Everyday Life of an Algorithm

by Daniel Neyland

This open access book begins with an algorithm–a set of IF…THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm’s design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others.

213 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 17, 2018

About the author

Daniel Neyland is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Reviews

[Deepika Fernando]

The tittle gave me the impression that this is a nonfiction on algorithms but it is an academic piece of work that studies algorithms on a social context. I'm not an academic to give an informed rating hence the three starts - it could be bad or it could be the best. Not suitable for general reading.

[Stubbs]

This was odd. Maybe I'm not used sociology. Maybe it was a genuinely strange book. I might never know.