'The Beatles with the Lower Score, it Breaks my Heart': Framing a Media Education Response to Datafication and Algorithmic Recommendations in Digital Media Infrastructures

The digital platforms now mediate most of the actions we take when reading news, watching videos, buying goods, finding ways, chatting people, etc. The growing influence of some, such as Google, Amazon or Facebook, raises both hopes (e.g. freedom, economy, etc.) and concerns (e.g. competition, surveillance, etc.). These tensions propel us to invent better ways to discuss the recent and rapid transformations brought by such platforms. The challenge is, both, to make sense of the main social and technical processes that shape these digital platforms and to design situations in which their consequences become discussible, for anyone concerned. Thus, with the hope of addressing these issues, we sought to bridge recent research led in digital media education, about digital literacy and critical education, as well as in science and technology studies, about engineering practices or digital infrastructures. We decided to focus on the recommender systems at the core of most of these digital platforms. They promise to provide, both, a unique algorithmic technique for enabling users to orient themselves amidst the wealth of available information and a unique business strategy to keep users engaged with the platforms’ contents and advertisements. They need to be approached, both, as technical infrastructures, which foster interactions between specific users and specific items, and as media interfaces, which partly automate the editorial process. The tension between, on the one side, the opaqueness of their functioning due to technical complexity and business confidentiality and, on the other side, the significance of these systems for the information we exchange and the actions we take, need public debate. The educational challenge lies in making sense of how these social and technical dimensions mingle. To address this problem, we devised an educational activity, titled “In the shoes of an algorithm”, that would enable people to understand and critically discuss the problems