The Algorithmic Imaginary

A contemporary sociotechnical imaginary describing how publics imagine, anticipate and feel the workings of algorithmic systems — search, feeds, recommendation and ranking — and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Coined in media studies (Bucher, 2017) to capture the productive, affective and often opaque ways people picture what algorithms do, it extends the imaginary toward computational infrastructures and increasingly conditions how digitally-mediated and 'smart' built environments are produced and inhabited.