As more and more of our online public discourse takes place on a select set of private content platforms and communication networks, and these providers turn to complex algorithms to manage, curate, and organize these massive collections, there is an important tension emerging between what we expect these algorithms to be, and what they in fact are. Not only must we recognize that these algorithms are not neutral, and that they encode political choices, and that they frame information in a particular way. We must also understand what it means that we are coming to rely on these algorithms, that we want them to be neutral, we want them to be reliable, we want them to be the effective ways in which we come to know what is most important.
Broad scrapes of huge data, like Twitter Trends, are in some ways meant to show us what we know to be true, and to show us what we are unable to perceive as true because of our limited scope. And we can never really tell which it is showing us, or failing to show us.
An interesting look at how the algorithms around us can subtly change the way we see reality as well as give us interesting insight into the limitations of our emotional understanding in an algorithmic world.