I'm excited to dive into the HASTAC conversation and to start thinking about how CCS connects to my own work. A lot of the research I'm doing on the literary marketplace explores how new computational algorithms are changing cultural systems (i.e. the seasons of book production, which operate a little like Hollywood's summer blockbusters, winter Oscar-bait formula). But what I want to dwell on briefly here is how we are all learning to "read" algorithms ourselves on the front end. That's one of the basic sources of challenge in videogames, for instance. An example from my dissertation work might be the way we reverse-engineer recommendation systems (to figure out why something was suggested to us).
A still better example is Slate's Facebook parodies, which at their best adapt the functionality and rhetoric of the site's algorithms for political satire. For instance, in "100 Days of Barack Obama's Facebook news feed," the authors mimic Facebook's social media tracking for comedic effect:
Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2217225/
Here we have humans 'faking' algorithms for their own purposes, and I think the satire effectively skewers Facebook as well as politics. Ultimately, Slate's pieces work because they ask us if American politics is turning into a stylized, algorithmically deterministic system, a sadly unwitting self-parody. Or, as Aaron Sorkin put it, whether "socializing on the Internet is to socializing, what reality TV is to reality."
Of course, the CCS people would point out that there's no real code here, but I guess my point is that we're all involved in interpreting algorithms in various ways, whether or not we're coders. Perhaps my contribution to the HASTAC forum will be some of my own Perl code that I no longer understand!
