TrustInInfo

This page contains quotes from the book:

Information Literacy in the Age of Algorithms: Student Experiences with News and Information, and The Need for Change by Alison J. Head, Ph.D., Barbara Fister and Margy MacMillan

We live in an era of ambient information. Amidst the daily flood of digital news, memes, opinion, advertising, and propaganda, there is rising concern about how popular platforms, and the algorithms they increasingly employ, may influence our lives, deepen divisions in society, and foment polarization, extremism, and distrust, (Head et al., n.d., p.1)

Algorithms — rule-based processes for solving problems — predate computers. It was not, however, until the word “Google” became synonymous with “to search online” in the early
2000s that the idea of algorithms entered the public consciousness. That was when we began
to notice how clever computer code influenced our daily lives by recommending Netflix films, remembering preferences for Amazon purchases, and finding our friends on Facebook’s precursors, such as Friendster and MySpace. Within a few years of its founding in 1998, Google
needed a profitable business model, so it began to make use of the digital trails we all leave behind to profit from personalized advertising. Facebook soon followed. The behemoth social media platform built its reputation and advertising might on its “social graph,” the interconnections among people online, enriched by metrics of “friends” and “likes.” During the same time, the news industry began to struggle as startups like Craigslist began to cannibalize classified ad revenues and subscriptions dwindled as readers enjoyed free news online. News organizations were forced to negotiate fraught relationships with platforms that increasingly dominated both digital advertising and monopolized audience attention, (Head et al., n.d., p. 3).