Editor in Chief’s Pick – Engines of Order: A Mechanology of Algorithmic Techniques

Abstract

Accounts of the rise and construction of dominant technologies can serve as a framework to understand how technologies can take root and acquire meaning in cultural domains such as arts, heritage, and digital humanities. On a broader, societal level, such frameworks can overlap with studies on datafication, which critically examine how dominant technologies transform the ordering of information and knowledge and its impacts on social life. In his recent book Engines of Order: A Mechanology of Algorithmic Techniques, new media scholar Bernhard Rieder examines how these information ordering techniques are embedded in technical infrastructures and economic logics, and how they “act as engines of order that actively modulate relationships between users and circulating units of various kind operate on existing patterns and fault lines in diversified yet unequal societies.”