Vivere e lavorare con gli algoritmi

In the last 15 years of his scientific activity, Fausto Colombo has thoroughly analyzed the relationship between media and power and its transformations in the digital ecosystem. A first fundamental point of this reflection is found in the Foucauldian reading of web 2.0 in the volume Sociable Power (2013), where Colombo observed how blogs and social media, long celebrated as new places of public participation, had progressively given rise to forms of widespread surveillance. If the power of mass media had traditionally been conceived in ideological terms and attributed to the methods of production or to the textual nature of the communication media, in social media power took on a reticular form, and was exercised performatively in relationships between users. A second and more recent arrival of this reflection concerns the processes of platformization of the media industries and of society as a whole. In line with many other scholars, Colombo has detected in these processes a moment of radical transformation of media power, which can no longer be interpreted only in terms of influence, but as a power to structure social reality, made possible by the programmable nature of digital platforms and the algorithmic systems underlying their functioning... (from the beginning)