Tech and Politics Andreas Jungherr

Data are crucial for the discussion of politics and digital media. Understanding the core concepts and issues arising from the quantification of social and political life and the resulting data is important for engaging in many of the subsequent controversies of the uses of digital media in politics.

Quantification makes some things visible, while hiding others. To better understand this process, we have to examine how things become numbers, we have to examine measurement.

Data provide a reduced representation of the world and promise to uncover hidden patterns and connections between entities that remain invisible in their full, unreduced manifestation in the world. This allows people and organizations to make sense of the world, and increase their level of control.

This episode sketches the tensions that arise from the drive to generate data-enabled insights and people's expectations and rights to privacy.

Algorithms are sets of steps by which to solve pre-defined tasks. Today the term appears predominantly in connection with computing. Algorithms allow computers to perform tasks. They are crucial in the advances of computer-enabled analysis and automation.

Algorithms are also used to provide suggestions and advice.Iit is helpful to differentiate between algorithms providing advice and suggestions to experts and those providing advice and suggestions for lay people and users of digital communication environments and services.