Imagining Publics through Emerging Technologies

This chapter uses the concept of ‘imaginaries’ as an overarching heuristic to analyse how publics are discursively constructed through imaginaries of measurement technologies. We illustrate this empirically through a case study of a technological drama, the launching of and responses to a personalization algorithm at the New York Times. Thus, we argue first that different imaginaries of the public and the press as cultivators of those publics are invoked when attempting to legitimize or delegitimize emergent technologies. Second, by linking our case study to a historization of the increasingly datafied distribution and audience measurement technologies, we explore how publics/audiences are constructed differently as new measurement technologies emerge, from democratic collectives to segmented consumers, and finally, with the introduction of personalized recommendations as aggregated datapoints.