Effects of Algorithm Awareness

* Essay: A Path to Understanding the Effects of Algorithm Awareness. By Kevin Hamilton et al.

URL = http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~eslamim2/publications/Hamilton_altchi_2014.pdf

Abstract

"The rise in prevalence of algorithmically curated feeds in online news and social media sites raises a new question for designers, critics, and scholars of media: how aware are users of the role of algorithms and filters in their news sources? This paper outlines an approach to studying how users perceive the algorithmic "curation" of their feeds, using Facebook as a sample case. Such a problem presents particular challenges when, as is common, neither the user nor the researcher has access to the actual proprietary algorithms at work."