Why listen to parents talking algorithms? Why attend to their ‘expectations, anticipations and future beliefs’ (Beckert and Suckert, 2021) about algorithms? This book exists because, as a communications scholar and as a parent, I myself was curious about parents’ beliefs about the presence of algorithms in their parenting journeys, their own and their children's lives. These beliefs reveal, of course, parents’ divergent, differently resourced and restrained, and deeply contextual individual interpretations and preparations, and their own literacies. But, equally, these beliefs speak of their visions of the collective. As we spoke, parents, as citizens, thought about the children of other parents, and began to imagine, from muted to clearly articulated ways, what they might expect of those behind technological systems. Parents’ feelings around algorithms matter (see Ruckenstein, 2023), not solely in terms of how they feel about algorithmic shaping overtly, but also in terms of how their own feelings about parenthood, and their own parenting practices are in a relationship of mutual shaping with algorithmic interfaces. The experiences of parents in this book call attention to their agency, but not in a way that diminishes the power of algorithmic systems, but rather, in ways which highlight the potentials of parents’ often non-technical (Cotter, 2024) understandings and decodings (Lomborg and Kapsch, 2020) of algorithmic structures. Agency here, is rarely exercised or expressed in spectacular or even sustained ways. But it would be of interest to find out if, fleeting, everyday, often even mundane acts of ephemeral agency carry potentials, not solely to affect outcomes in the here and now, but perhaps in ways which build up, over time.

A summary

When Adi, a doctor working within the UK's National Health Service, unpacked his Google search results for me, he drew my attention to the predominance of medical journal papers and publications on PubMed in his search results in relation to toddlers crying and infant sleep and feeding. It spoke to me of the resources he had at his disposal in terms of his own professional training and the various privileges that come from his expertise within the medical sciences. These resources allow him to be aware of, sceptical of, skilled with and monitorial of his own data and the infrastructures within which such data travels and operates.