Information literacy as a site for anticipation: temporal tactics for infrastructural meaning-making and algo-rhythm awareness

What is it about?

Information literacy needs to be rethought in a society where most information is mediated through commercial systems which employ algorithmic decision making and in particular predictive analytics. These systems include search engines, social media and recommender systems and streaming services. Algorithm awareness is an increasingly important part of information literacy, but since algorithms are invisible it is hard to achieve. We show how anticipation is a useful way to make algorithms visible for users. This can then be translated into algorithm awareness, or what we propose to call algo-rhythm awareness, and even enable possibilities for resistance to algorithmic decisions.

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