Towards an Algorithmic Public Opinion?

Even though the need for revision theories and founding concepts in the field of communication research has been at the center of the scholarly debate for some time due to the emergence of hyper- personalized forms of communication based on "datafication", the research about the detrimental effects of personalization is more often inconsistent, but there is no doubt that this is the hermeneutic key to assessing the resilience of an autonomous digital public sphere. A cross-disciplinary approach is necessary to develop adequate regulatory proposals and drawing the attention of both researchers and public authorities to the ethical challenges embedded in structural phenomena such as algorithmic information processing systems. Thus, this essay explores the conceptual and semantic frames required to analyze how algorithms, understood as a socio-technical construct, interact in the communicative dynamics that are intertwined in the public sphere, by exploiting disperceptive phenomena and cognitive biases, implicit in the human learning processes. The purpose is to make them readable as forms of cultural and political decision-making. Indeed, these are analytical prisms that help us understand the way in which the ecosystem modifies power relations, reshaping the boundaries of the public discourse.