Screen-mediated simultaneity creates opaque copresence illegible even to data miners

Evidence

At the same time, today’s communications media afford a sense of simultaneity at the level of the screen, which engenders a more opaque, and hence less well understood, copresence. The underlying mechanism is here hidden code rather than the newspaper’s visible ordering of text (via the display of calendrical day). The complex algorithms driving, mining, and controlling the traffic of commodified personal data are often not fully legible even by data miners themselves. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 139

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the claim that algorithms are ‘not fully legible even by data miners themselves’ — how does this bear on regulatory transparency and accountability?
• XREF: Connects to Anderson’s print-based simultaneity undermining national imagination — the opacity of code replaces the visible newspaper page. — connects to: Seamless data flows breed opaque inequality and uncontrolled surveillance — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 607; Framing technology as autonomous disguises who profits from data extraction — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 511

Broader Connections

• Seamless data flows breed opaque inequality and uncontrolled surveillance #complicates (0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 607
• Framing technology as autonomous disguises who profits from data extraction #expands (0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 511