Amazonfail Case Study: The Relevance Of Algorithms?

My contribution to the presentation involved an insight to the categorization of algorithms and an in-depth analysis of the #AmazonFail case study. To research the area of focus I concentrated on Gillespie’s essay ‘The Relevance of Algorithms’ (2012). I looked in depth about the categorisation of algorithms as Gillespie (2012) explains that in the earliest database architectures information was organized in “strict and inflexible hierarchies.” From this I discovered that since the development of relational and “object-oriented” database architectures, information can be systemised in more adaptable ways. Bits of data can have numerous associations with other data, meaning these groupings can change over time and figures can be investigated
Hoping the issue was a mistake, he wrote to Amazon customer service and the reply explained that Amazon had a policy of filtering ‘adult’ material out of most product listings. Probst posted an account of the incident in anger on his blog pointing out the conflicts in the retailer’s policy. The story was subsequently picked up by major news outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times and the BBC, who all traced incidences of gay and lesbian titles disappearing from Amazon’s main product list back to February 2009 (Lavallee,
This case revealed that there was somewhat a positive outcome to this matter due to the recognition that it was an issue and that more companies will avoid situations like this in the future.

Researching the back-end data infrastructure, I learned from Striphas (2010) how Amazon collects sensitive data which provided some insight to how it profiles and then markets products to customers based on their browsing and purchasing patterns, which again demonstrated my point of the unknown extensive use of algorithms in everyday life. The #AmazonFail episode illustrates the degree to which shopping, merchandizing and a host of other everyday cultural activities are now data-driven activities subject to machine-based information processing (Striphas, 2009).

The case study also introduced a form of hashtag activism as the #AmazonFail on twitter directed tens of thousands of messages, indicating that something had gone terribly wrong with the company and brought the matter to public attention. This case study was an example of the many ways human beings have been allocating the work of culture – the sorting, classifying and hierarchizing of people, places, objects and ideas – to data-intensive computational