Algorithmic Noise: Ed Reform 2.0 and Work/Think/Playing With Methods of the Present

Abstract

As we become more and more algorithmic subjects, algorithms shape the news we access, our political and social views, how and what we buy, as well as the emotional tenor of our lives. Tracking how algorithms work on and with our senses and activate our bodies in different ways requires experimental approaches. To explore affect, algorithms, and method, we work/think/play via two reassemblages of algorithmic tools borrowed from the corporate and art worlds: Moodlens and the Listening Machine. Our algorithmic play with educational reformers’ images and tweets suggests a strategy for fattening our methods and theories to respond to ever-increasing data flows and thinking additively, fractally, and exponentially.

Embodying Affective Intra-Actions Online: Enacting Posthuman Methods in Virtual Spaces

“…Twitter, a social networking application that sees the majority of its users access the platform through mobile devices (Han et al, 2015), provides a great example of how digital technologies can extend the affective capacity of bodies. Niccolini and Lesko (2018) explore how three education reformers’ Twitter engagements become significant “algorithmic presences” (p. 628) that create “nodal points of intensity in larger education debates” (p. 630). Using emotional analysis apps, the authors visualize how these individuals become digital “‘radioactive’ conduits for stoking and circulating affects” (p. 628) and producing “a new infrastructure of feeling” (p. 626).…”

“…Experiencing digital spaces as virtual places, then, involves developing multisensorial awareness of the full affective presence, and agentic potential of digital materials and their ability to produce feelings and actions. Niccolini and Lesko (2018) argued that cultivating intimacies with digital technologies help humans become conscious of how digital materials, including algorithmic forces, affect humans to influence and reimagine humantechnology relations toward more affirmative and ethical futures. Recognizing the affective capacities of digital entities and the new potentials generated in these relational gatherings when humans come together in and through digital assemblages requires cultivating posthuman subjectivities.…”