Who Decides What We See? Algorithms, Platforms, and the Transformation of Cultural Production in the Social Media Age
Abstract
This conceptual article examines how the algorithmic logic of digital platforms transforms the processes through which cultural content is produced, selected, made visible, and reinterpreted. It is based on a theory-driven integrative review of peer-reviewed scholarship in platform studies and the sociology of cultural production, which combines a core corpus of anchor studies with research published after 2019 and applies explicit criteria for selecting literature and illustrative cases. Drawing on the concepts of platformization and algorithmic culture, the article reconstructs the shift from an editorial logic grounded in expert judgment to an algorithmic logic grounded in datafication and computational ranking. Through documented cases from journalism, digital gaming, music streaming, fashion, and online video, it shows how cultural producers develop strategies to optimize their visibility and how platforms recode such strategies as illegitimate manipulation, a dynamic that previous research has termed platform paternalism. The analysis yields three propositions, concerning the contingency of cultural visibility, the asymmetric legitimacy of optimization practices, and the organized opacity of ranking systems. Its main contribution is an integrated model of the double register of algorithmic power, in which the material capacity to rank content and the discursive capacity to define legitimate visibility reinforce each other in a circuit of legitimation. The article concludes that this power is exercised as much in lines of code as in the ways that code is named, invoked, and legitimized in public discourse, and it outlines limitations and directions for empirical research.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Elia Fiorenza
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