| An exerpt from Evelyn Wan’s introduction:
“We live in an algorithmic age. Invisible networks fill the environment, our devices searching hungrily for connectivity. Packets of data are sent through the ether, travelling across oceans along data cables, dancing past switches into the cloud. As Benjamin Bratton proposes in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2015), planetary-scale computation takes place across layers and layers of machine, interlacing hardware and software into what he calls ‘the Stack’. The Stack is not only comprised of fibre-optic cables, electrical circuits, dashboards, servers, as well as human interaction and socio-political forces. In what has been termed ‘the infrastructural turn’ in Media Studies, media scholars turn their attention to the materialities of the media landscape, studying the physical networks of communication that underpin digital culture as we know it.
Algorithms are, of course, an integral part in the infrastructure of digital culture. The Stack, envisioned by Bratton as a megastructure that spans Earth and beyond, requires algorithms to hold systems of data and information together. According to Ed Finn’s study of the term, an algorithm is “the vehicle or tool of computation,” techno-mathematical instructions for certain programmed tasks, programmed by engineers, read and executed by computer machines. An algorithm is “a recipe, an instruction set, a sequence of tasks,” used to solve a particular problem or to achieve a particular calculation. Or as Google describes it, “algorithms are the computer processes and formulas that take your questions and turn them into answers.” |