Scissors, glue, magazines, and colourful pens are spread across the tables at Villa Kultur in Copenhagen. The task sounds a bit unusual: building your own algorithm. We joined the reception for Jannie Møller Hartley’s new book Just for You: Inside the Personalisation Algorithms that Curate Our Image of the World to find out what happens when we take the power to choose back from the machines – at least for an afternoon.
The book was published by Nordicom at the end of August, and now it was time to celebrate its release. In Just for You, Jannie Møller Hartley, Professor in Communication and Journalism at Roskilde University, explores the personalisation algorithms that increasingly shape what we see and encounter online – and what this means for journalism, our information environments, and ultimately our image of the world.
But how do you make something as invisible and complex as an algorithm tangible? At Villa Kultur, the answer is surprisingly analogue. We pick up our scissors, start flipping through magazines, and get to work on building algorithms of our own.
“This workshop is basically about fighting the power of the machines to make decisions for us – and to take the power back”, says Jannie Møller Hartley.
As we start choosing, cutting, and putting our algorithms together, something else becomes apparent. Looking around the tables, the algorithms we create are strikingly different from the feeds we encounter on our phones every day. They are messy, colourful, and unpredictable. Images and words are combined in ways that do not necessarily seem to follow what we have clicked on, watched, or “liked” before.
The exercise also brings us closer to one of the central messages of the book. The algorithms shaping our digital lives are not inevitable or beyond our influence. They are designed by people – which means there is also room to question what they should do and how we want them to work.
“That is kind of the message from the book, that we can decide the future if we just make an effort and have a reflection and a discussion about what sort of algorithms and AI systems we want to build”, says Jannie Møller Hartley.
There is something fitting about celebrating Just for You this way. This is not quite a conventional book reception – but then again, Just for You does not look or read like a conventional academic book either.
Hartley has worked with illustrator Zarah Juul to find a more visual and playful way of telling the story of personalisation algorithms. Ada Lovelace, the nineteenth-century mathematician and pioneer of computing, accompanies the reader through the book, while illustrations and stories drawn from Hartley’s research help make an otherwise abstract subject more tangible.
Read and download the book for free at Nordicoms website.
