Who Decides What We See? Algorithms, Platforms, and the Transformation of Cultural Production in the Social Media Age

Abstract

This article examines the transformation of the processes through which cultural content is produced, selected, made visible, and reinterpreted by users, as a consequence of the diffusion of digital platforms and their algorithmic logics. Drawing on the concept of platformization and on the notion of algorithmic culture, the article reconstructs, from a sociological standpoint, the shift from an editorial logic grounded in the expert judgment of professional gatekeepers to an algorithmic logic grounded in datafication and computational ranking. Through the discussion of documented empirical cases drawn from journalism, digital gaming, music streaming, fashion, and online video, the article shows how cultural producers have developed strategies for optimizing their visibility, which platform companies tend to recode as illegitimate manipulation, generating a dynamic here termed platform paternalism that consolidates the discursive and material power of digital intermediaries. The concluding discussion situates these processes within the broader questions of public value and governance raised by recent platform studies scholarship, proposing an integrated reading of algorithmic power as a phenomenon that is simultaneously technical and discursive. The article argues that answering the question of who decides what audiences see requires the sociology of cultural and communicative processes to develop conceptual tools capable of capturing the hybrid, material and symbolic nature of a power exercised as much in lines of code as in the way that code is named, invoked, and legitimized in public discourse.