Balkinization: Assessing Algorithmic Authority: "Compared to these examples, the obscurity at the heart of our "cultural voting machines" (as I call dominant intermediaries) may seem trivial. But when a private entity grows important enough, its own secret laws deserve at least some scrutiny.
I have little faith that such scrutiny will come any time soon. But until it does, we should not forget that the success of algorithmic authorities depends in large part on their owners' ability to convince us of the importance--not merely the accuracy--of their results. A society that obsesses over the top Google News results has made those results important, and we are ill-advised to assume the reverse (that the results are obsessed over because they are important) without some narrative account of why the algorithm is superior to, say, the “news judgment” of editors at traditional media.
(Algorithmic authority may simply be a way of rewarding engineers (rather than media personalities) for amusing ourselves to death.) " 'via Blog this'
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