A path to understanding the effects of algorithm awareness

Abstract

The rise in prevalence of algorithmically curated feeds in online news and social media sites raises a new question for designers, critics, and scholars of media: how aware are users of the role of algorithms and filters in their news sources? This paper situates this problem within the history of design for interaction, with an emphasis on the contemporary challenges of studying, and designing for, the algorithmic "curation" of feeds. Such a problem presents particular challenges when, as is common, neither the user nor the researcher has access to the actual proprietary algorithms at work.