Two Kinds of Determinism: Stuart Hall and the Algorithm
The media don’t just tell us what happened. They tell us what it means. That’s a different kind of power — and a different kind of determinism.
There is a moment in James Curran and Jean Seaton’s Power Without Responsibility — the standard academic account of British press and broadcasting history — where the authors pause to take stock of two kinds of determinism this book has not yet fully addressed. In a section titled “the new determinists: class and market,” they survey a body of thinking that asks the same question this book asks about technology: does the media shape society, or does society shape the media? Their answer comes from a different intellectual tradition — not Marx’s machines or McLuhan’s extensions, but the sociology of ideology, class, and market structure. And buried in that section is a single sentence from Stuart Hall, written in 1977, that deserves to sit alongside anything Ellul or McLuhan ever wrote.
Hall’s sentence, quoted by Curran and Seaton, is this: media help us “not simply to know more about the world but to make sense of it.”
It is worth pausing on the precision of that distinction, because it is doing something genuinely different from the argument this book has spent eleven chapters making — and the difference matters.
Two Roads to the Same Conclusion
Technological determinism, as this book has traced it, asks whether the technology itself — its architecture, its protocols, its inherent properties as a medium — shapes human cognition, behaviour, and society, sometimes independent of who controls it or what they intend. McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message is, at its root, a claim about form: it does not much matter what a television programme contains, because the technology of television itself reshapes the viewer’s relationship to time, attention, and community.
Stuart Hall, writing from within the British cultural studies tradition associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, was asking a related but distinct question. Hall’s 1977 essay “Culture, the Media and the Ideological Effect” was not primarily concerned with what the technology of broadcasting does to its audience by virtue of being broadcasting. He was concerned with something closer to who gets to decide what an event means, and how that power is exercised through the media’s claim to be merely reporting rather than interpreting. Hall’s media do not shape us because they are televisions or newspapers. They shape us because they hold, almost invisibly, the power to classify — to decide which stories are news and which are noise, which framings are common sense and which are fringe, which interpretations of a riot or a strike or an election are presented as neutral description and which are flagged as opinion.
This is what Curran and Seaton mean by “the new determinists.” Not a determinism of the machine, but a determinism of class and market — the argument that the media’s power to shape how we understand reality is structured by who owns the media, what commercial pressures they operate under, and whose interests their professional codes of “objectivity” quietly serve. Hall’s insight was that media do not need to lie to shape ideology. They simply need to decide, consistently and almost without noticing they are doing it, what counts as the obvious, sensible, common-sense way to see things — and what counts as a fringe position that needs special justification.
“Not Simply to Know More — But to Make Sense”
The distinction Hall draws in reframes a question this book has asked repeatedly about the digital age.
To know more about the world is a quantitative claim — it is about the volume and reach of information. By this measure, the algorithmic feed is the greatest information delivery system human beings have ever built. You genuinely do know more facts, see more images, encounter more raw data about distant events than any generation before you.
To make sense of the world is a different claim entirely — it is about the frameworks, categories, and emotional textures through which that information becomes meaningful. It is the difference between being told a fact and being told what the fact signifies, who is to blame, whether it is alarming or reassuring, whether it confirms what you already suspected or challenges it. Hall’s argument is that the media’s deepest power was never simply the transmission of information. It was always the silent, structural work of telling us how to feel about what we now know.
This is precisely the work that the algorithmic feed does, and it does it with a sophistication that the broadcast media Hall was analysing in 1977 could never have achieved. The newspaper editor of Hall’s era selected and framed stories for an undifferentiated mass audience, embedding ideology in headlines and running orders that everyone, broadly, saw the same version of. The algorithm does something Hall did not have language for: it personalises the sense-making itself. It does not just tell society collectively how to feel about an event. It calculates, individually, what framing of that event is most likely to keep you specifically engaged — and in doing so, fragments the very “common sense” that Hall identified as the media’s central ideological product. Where the old determinism of class and market produced one dominant ideology contested by alternatives, the new architecture produces millions of dominant ideologies, one per user, each feeling like simple common sense to the person inside it.
Where Hall and the Technological Determinists Actually Meet
Curran and Seaton place Hall among “the new determinists” partly to distinguish his approach from the older base-superstructure Marxism that treated culture as a mechanical reflection of economic forces, and partly to position him against the media-effects researchers who saw media’s influence as a simple matter of message and persuasion. Hall’s media are not a hypodermic needle injecting ideology into a passive audience, and they are not McLuhan’s extensions of man reshaping cognition through pure technological form. They are something closer to a quiet, structural editor — present in every act of classification, selection, and naturalisation — that determines the boundaries of what feels like reasonable thought without ever needing to argue for it directly.
And yet the destination Hall arrives at is strikingly close to the one this book reaches by an entirely different road. Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, examined in Chapter Eight, is a market-structure argument almost in Hall’s own terms: a system that shapes behaviour not by force but by quietly controlling the architecture within which choices are made, naturalising its own logic as simply how digital life works. Lessig’s argument that code is law, from Chapter Two, is Hall’s ideological effect translated into software — the claim that power exercised through invisible structural design is more total and less contestable than power exercised through visible argument. Even McLuhan’s rear-view mirror problem — the idea that we cannot see the medium we are inside of, only the one we have just left — is a cousin of Hall’s observation that ideology works precisely by feeling like common sense rather than like an argument that could be otherwise.
Two traditions, one rooted in technology and form, the other in class, market, and ideology, keep arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion: the most powerful shaping of human understanding happens at the level we are least equipped to notice, because it has successfully disguised itself as simply how things are.
What This Means for Reading the Feed
Hall gives this book’s argument a vocabulary it did not previously have for a specific and increasingly urgent problem: not whether the algorithm shows you true things or false things, but what sense it is quietly teaching you to make of true things. Two people can read the identical, factually accurate news report about the same event and walk away with entirely different understandings of what it means, who the villain is, and what should happen next — not because either was lied to, but because the surrounding architecture of feed, framing, and emotional cue did the work of sense-making for them, so thoroughly that neither one experiences it as an interpretation at all. It simply feels like what happened.
Hall’s challenge to us, translated for the present moment, is this: the more urgent question is rarely is this information accurate? It is who decided what this information means, and have I noticed that a decision was made at all?