Nick Seaver, "What Do People Do All Day?"

Nick Seaver, Asst. Prof. of Anthropology at Tufts University, presents:

"What do people do all day?"

Public Lecture, March 22, 2016, Cone 112, from 2:00-3:30

Abstract:The algorithmic infrastructures of the contemporary internet depend on a wild array of people to function. Surveying job titles and self-descriptions, we find gurus, farmers, alchemists, wizards, park rangers, gardeners, plumbers, and janitors (not to mention rockstars and ninjas). These disorderly titles, sometimes official, sometimes informal, are a striking feature of internet industries, marking jobs as novel or hip, contrasting starkly with the sedentary screenwork of programming. Although these terms serve promotional purposes, they also help people make sense of new kinds of jobs, drawing analogies that fit into existing prestige hierarchies (rockstars and janitors) or relationships to craft and technique (gardeners and alchemists). In this talk, I draw together fieldwork with the developers of music recommenders and a variety of social scientific literatures on role terms to interpret how the builders of algorithmic systems understand their jobs. These metaphorical borrowings of role terms provide an opportunity to examine emerging understandings of work and knowledge around data science, and they can be consequential for the organizational and epistemic life of novel technoscientific practices.

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Cosponsored by the CLAS Speaker Funds