Towards Algorithmic Experience: Initial Efforts for Social Media Contexts

Algorithms influence most of our daily activities, decisions, and they guide our behaviors. It has been argued that algorithms even have a direct impact on democratic societies. Human - Computer Interaction research needs to develop analytical tools for describing the interaction with, and experience of algorithms. Based on user participatory workshops focused on scrutinizing Facebook’s newsfeed, an algorithm-influenced social media, we propose the concept of Algorithmic Experience (AX) as an analytic framing for making the interaction with and experience of algorithms explicit. Connecting it to design, we articulate five functional categories of AX that are particularly important to cater for in social media: profiling transparency and management, algorithmic awareness and control, and selective algorithmic memory.