Definitional Agency and Language Power

In this episode, Ted Striphas, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Alex Rivera Cartagena discuss Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet (Columbia University Press 2023), considering how some pre-digital human systems functioned through repetitive structures and automated processes that have similarities to electronic algorithms. They discuss how cognition has become digitized, dispersed across algorithmic and biological systems, and how digital tools attempt to overtake lived experiences and knowledges.

Their conversation traces the history of computation while engaging culture and language as analytical tools. Their dialogue connects analog media, cultural practices, and symbolic systems to reflect on the importance of words in the human experience. Long before digital code, verbal narratives shaped (or attempted to shape) our relationship with knowledge and power; building on that insight, an important analytical point to critique algorithms begins with culture, and that culture begins in language.

This episode and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes are sponsored in part by the Teagle Foundation.
Our conversation in Spanish about Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is available here.

Topics and scholars mentioned in this episode:

• Héctor José Huyke, Elogio a las cercanías: crítica a la cultura tecnológica actual (Editora Educación Emergente, 2024).

• The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia University Press, 2011).

• Erik Hoel's notion of a “consciousness winter.”

• Lawrence Grossberg

• Medium theory

• Joshua Myerwicz

• Janice Radway

• Scriptocentrism

• “Things that different forms of media do to us.” -Ted Striphas

• Scott Kushner, University of Rhode Island, “A turnstile is more persuasive than a person saying 'go this way.’"

• Alan Touring

• The Late Age of Print: Blog and book

• "The locus of cultural decision making [has been] shifting in the direction of computer systems and algorithms." -Ted Striphas

• “Build different meanings of words so we can build different worlds,” -Ted Striphas.

• “What is culture when human beings are not the only one producing it?” -Ted Striphas

• Pluriverse, A Post-Development Dictionary (Columbia University Press, 2019), edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta.

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