Dr John Cheney-Lippold is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. His work uses a variety of philosophical concepts to provide an ontological review of the intersections between commercial and domestic surveillance, identity profiling, cultural participation, and the processes of becoming. [1] Dr Cheney-Lippold’s concept Algorithmic Identity illustrates how the intensity of identity profiling in commercial surveillance practices curates an identity based sense of reality for digital technology users. [2] Dr Cheney-Lippold reflects this new mode of media distribution that utilizes data to target identity categories deserves significant ontological considerations.

[1] John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves(New York: New York University Press, 2017).

[2] John Cheney-Lippold, 5; Natascha Just and Michael Latzer, “Governance by Algorithms: Reality Construction by Algorithmic Selection on the Internet,” Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 2 (March 2017): 238–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643157; Smith, “On You: Networks, Subjectivity and Algorithmic Identity, 2018; Cornelius Schubert, “The social life of computer simulations: On the social construction of algorithms and the algorithmic construction of the social,” in Simulieren und Entscheiden, ed. Nicole J. Saam, Michael Resch, and Andreas Kaminski, Sozialwissenschaftliche Simulationen und die Soziologie der Simulation (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2019), 145–69, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-26042-2_6.