Deconstructing the Notion of Algorithmic Control over Datapublics

This chapter develops an argument against the soft determinism implied in the way publics are said to be affected by data and algorithmic power. To do so, we introduce a sociocultural approach, focusing on media consumption as a distinct moment from media production, the actual locus of algorithmic power. The chapter argues that we need to distinguish between our ‘uses of media’ – what is essentially captured as data and turned into (limited) knowledge – and our sociocultural practices – which remain to date largely invisible and incomprehensible to the data episteme. The gap between uses and practices provides a reflexive space of agency for users to escape algorithmic power, which are conceptualized in relation to two moments in the data loop (Mathieu and Pruulmann Vengerfeldt, 2020) as inspective agency and inscriptive agency.