Algorithmic navigation: living with classification and ranking

What is found and chosen within markets is increasingly conditioned by platformed judgement devices – opaque, continually recalculated ratings and rankings on which the visibility and viability of what they sort turn. How producers act under this condition has been studied only in parts: optimisation, the technical tuning of a listing; reputation management, the social cultivation of standing; and, in critical algorithm studies, the cognitive negotiation of the algorithm's rules. This article advances algorithmic navigation to name this market work as a whole – work that takes the technical and the social together and recasts the producer's relation to the algorithm from negotiation to ongoing recalibration. It develops this concept through an ethnography of two algorithmically distinctive touristic organisations in Edinburgh, tracing three temporalities of socio-technological techniques through which they meet TripAdvisor's structural condition of visibility – its affective claim to attention: crafting constrained digital responses; prompting reviews at the close of encounters; and rearranging service to pre-empt those to come – each strategically channelling affective relations toward the platform's ranking. The article's contribution to market studies is twofold: a concept for how market work is at once shaped by and shapes the infrastructures that govern it; and an approach for attending to it.