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3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
I recently noticed that my Spotify recommendations were increasingly the same songs over and over. Now, I do love Taylor and Sabrina but as someone who used to pride themselves on having eclectic music tastes, it has been jarring to see. I have had to make a conscious effort to seek out music that is not being recommended to me so that I might broaden my horizons beyond the recommended playlists that used to be full of a wide variety of musicians and genres but are now the same songs over and over. This experience among others is what this book is attempting to unpack and examine. And there is A LOT to unpack an examine.
This book describes a longing for deep connection and novel experience that I see among myself and my peers that I am starting to believe sits at the heart of the loneliness epidemic in our modern world. Where once the internet was an escape from a homogeneous world, it has (likely due to profit motives) become that homogeneous world. While acknowledging this longing and flattening of our cultural experiences (I did find the discussion of cafe aesthetic interesting- Instagram might be to blame for this specific example, but as a Midwest girl raised in a world of Applebees and Bennigans, etc this problem started long before Instagram), Chayka also acknowledges the benefits of algorithms as well, so this isn't one of those cases of throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. It's a bit ponderous, pacing wise, and does meander a bit before coming to any particular conclusions. I couldn't quite tell if that was because the author was undersure of the conclusion or if the reader was meant to draw their own.
If the reader is meant to draw their own, mine is: I think in the end it all comes down to the nature of extractive industries. Whether it's coal mining or data mining, if not handled responsibly, well, there will be problems down the road. Now what to do about these problems, neither I nor this book contain the answers. But it's definitely a good read to get you thinking.
This book describes a longing for deep connection and novel experience that I see among myself and my peers that I am starting to believe sits at the heart of the loneliness epidemic in our modern world. Where once the internet was an escape from a homogeneous world, it has (likely due to profit motives) become that homogeneous world. While acknowledging this longing and flattening of our cultural experiences (I did find the discussion of cafe aesthetic interesting- Instagram might be to blame for this specific example, but as a Midwest girl raised in a world of Applebees and Bennigans, etc this problem started long before Instagram), Chayka also acknowledges the benefits of algorithms as well, so this isn't one of those cases of throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. It's a bit ponderous, pacing wise, and does meander a bit before coming to any particular conclusions. I couldn't quite tell if that was because the author was undersure of the conclusion or if the reader was meant to draw their own.
If the reader is meant to draw their own, mine is: I think in the end it all comes down to the nature of extractive industries. Whether it's coal mining or data mining, if not handled responsibly, well, there will be problems down the road. Now what to do about these problems, neither I nor this book contain the answers. But it's definitely a good read to get you thinking.
Brilliant and robust argument. I am skeptical of "culture curators" because it begs the question of who curates and for who? But I appreciate the reflection on how digital culture (algorithms) impacts personal taste or lack thereof and identity. Recommended.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This was exactly what I was hoping to get from this type of book. There were so many great discussions from chapter to chapter discussing our current obsession with the internet and influences algorithms have on our daily actions. This gave me so much to think to about and makes me really happy that I’ve been working towards limited my social media usage. My favorite part was near the end on his discussion surrounding curtain and the importance of human involvement in maintaining culture and expanding your experiences in different formats of entertainment. I wish there was more information in the back for references on this topic, it would be great to learn more.
informative
slow-paced
my work is in this field so wanted to enjoy it more than i did. maybe it was the robotic voiced narrator, but i didn’t find this engaging nor did i learn much. there is an emphasis on history rather than forward-looking analyses and the book is bloated with the author’s clear other loves: cafes and music.
Interesting enough writing to get 3 stars as an introduction to various facets of algorithms. But it's missing critical analysis of these things. Algorithms aren't the only things that exist within a capitalistic society – so do people. I get his frustrations, but the power structures and tension between capital and curators is very similar to capital and algorithms. There's also this naive nostalgia about taste and tastemaking of yesteryear.
challenging
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
While the concept behind the book's idea was interesting, it unfortunately provides no real solutions to what it describes as culture being flattened. It seems content that Chayka was content with bemoaning that coffee shops look alike in different parts of the world and that millennials aren't buying fine art anymore. While there was some interesting analysis, particularly in the history and development of the algorithms themselves, I would have liked for him to suggest how readers could discover new music, movies, shows and books without relying on the algorithms of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon. It's an interesting examination that ultimately mires itself so much in pessimistic defeatism that it fails to make any actionable insights, instead giving itself to pedestrian observations of "computer suggestions are bad."
informative
reflective
A treatise on the downsides of the algorithms run by a handful of for-profit companies and their impact on arts, culture, commerce, and global travel. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter (X), Facebook, and Spotify seem to be the primary targets, which is mostly around their social media mobile applications, but he expands out to Google, Amazon, and Apple as well, showing how their use of algorithms tends have an overall flattening effect on culture.
I appreciated the critique of the user scrolling mindlessly through a feed of recommendations from content creators who have tailored their content to the algorithm for quick attention and cheap likes on platforms built on maximizing the attention of as many people as possible to generate ad revenue. In turn, he promotes the development of an intentionally curated personal culture, akin to how the slow food farm-to-table movement reacted to factory farms and the mass production processing of food. However, I’m not sure if the whole argument of the book always succeeds, as it’s largely limited to social media, (generally excluding the variety of ways that algorithms impact the rest of contemporary life - credit scores, resume screening, workforce scheduling and performance management), and his references sometimes come off as entitled and snobbish. He’s also clearly aware that art and culture has always changed with technology, (paint, photography, recorded music, radio, video, television, etc.) but he only minimally makes his case as to why this time of it’s different. And is everything becoming flat and homogenized? Or are recommendations becoming hyper-specifically tailored to each user? Maybe it’s both at the same time, but the target of the algorithmic impact seems to shift throughout the book. Nevertheless, the themes it explores in contemporary society are important to be aware of, and it’s a pretty quick and easy read, so I would definitely recommend it overall.
“As Keller told me: “We click with our monkey brains, the same ones that cause us to buy a candy bar in the checkout line at the grocery store.” Algorithmic feeds accelerate these worst impulses, not just on an individual level but an aggregate one, across all the users of a social network.”
“In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers.”
“According to Silicon Valley ideology, the pursuit of scale far outweighs any negative consequence it might have.”
“All of these small decisions used to be made one at a time by humans: A newspaper editor decided which stories to put on the front page, and a magazine photo editor selected photographs to publish; a film programmer picked out which films to play in a theater’s season; an independent radio station DJ assembled playlists of songs that fit their own mood and the particular vibe of a day or a place. While these decisions were of course subject to various social and economic forces, the person in charge of them ensured a basic level of quality, or even safety, that can be missing from the Internet’s accelerated feeds.”
“By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations.”
“Homogeneity in a diverse world is uncanny.”
“When whiteness and wealth are posed as the norm, a kind of force field of aesthetics and ideology keeps out anyone who does not fit the template.”
“The path of chasing something that will appeal to, or at least avoid offending, the highest number of people leads to homogeneity. And that homogeneity is inevitably cast in the mold of dominant groups: white, cisgender, heterosexual. It’s hard to develop an individualized identity through an algorithmic mold meant to apply to billions of people at once. By contrast, building smaller communities of consumption devoted to more specific subjects can lead to a much deeper sense of engagement, both with the content and among the users. Sustainability at a small scale still counts as success. That is something we’ve missed as the Internet has prioritized frictionless convenience and broadcasting to as many people as possible at once.”
“The hollowed-out meaning of taste in the Filterworld era has something in common with the way engagement is measured by digital platforms: it’s a snap judgment predicated mostly on whether something provokes immediate like or dislike. Taste’s moral capacity, the idea that it generally leads an individual toward a better society as well as better culture, is being lost. Instead, taste amounts to a form of consumerism in which what you buy or watch is the last word on your identity and dictates your future consumption as well.”
“Consumption without taste is just undiluted, accelerated capitalism.”
“The pressure that Hallie felt to make the rest of her artwork similarly bright, clear, and simple is much like the pressure that a musician feels to frontload the hook of a song so it succeeds on TikTok or a writer feels to have a take so hot it lights up the Twitter feed.”
“There is an element of elitism at play in any evaluation that casts social media as the opposite of art. Not everyone has access to the traditional, more acceptable routes of art making: Ivy League universities, literary magazines, Chelsea galleries.”
“Marshall McLuhan wrote his famous dictum “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He meant that the structure of a new medium—electric light, the telephone, television—is more important than the content that travels through it.”
“In September 2006… Facebook implemented one of its biggest changes, a feature that would set the course for its future as the big-box everything-for-sale store of the Internet. The News Feed, a running list of updates, posts, and alerts, became the primary feature of the platform… At first, the News Feed was ordered purely chronologically, with the most recent updates first, but it gradually followed a more algorithmic logic… Familiar websites have a way of feeling different when the feed mechanism changes. On Facebook, for instance, you may notice that you see less of your friends’ posts and more from groups or businesses, or that Instagram never shows you posts from a particular friend in your feed and you thus need to hunt them down using the search bar… In March 2016, the Instagram feed began switching from a chronological to an algorithmic arrangement.”
“For such a vast and powerful industry, affecting billions of people, the business of social networks doesn’t face much government regulation. It seems to fall into a gulf between the hardware industry, where devices and manufacturing supply chains face scrutiny, and the traditional media industry, where what kinds of content businesses can broadcast has been a legal issue since the US Constitution enshrined free speech. Should social networks be treated like newspapers and television channels, responsible for everything hosted within their domains? They have long escaped that responsibility.”
“Our feeds under a dramatically reformed Section 230 would look very different. Social networks would be forced to take responsibility for each piece of content on their sites that receives algorithmic promotion. Perhaps they would adapt by putting most content outside the reach of recommendations, meaning that users would have to intentionally follow or search for a given subject.”
I appreciated the critique of the user scrolling mindlessly through a feed of recommendations from content creators who have tailored their content to the algorithm for quick attention and cheap likes on platforms built on maximizing the attention of as many people as possible to generate ad revenue. In turn, he promotes the development of an intentionally curated personal culture, akin to how the slow food farm-to-table movement reacted to factory farms and the mass production processing of food. However, I’m not sure if the whole argument of the book always succeeds, as it’s largely limited to social media, (generally excluding the variety of ways that algorithms impact the rest of contemporary life - credit scores, resume screening, workforce scheduling and performance management), and his references sometimes come off as entitled and snobbish. He’s also clearly aware that art and culture has always changed with technology, (paint, photography, recorded music, radio, video, television, etc.) but he only minimally makes his case as to why this time of it’s different. And is everything becoming flat and homogenized? Or are recommendations becoming hyper-specifically tailored to each user? Maybe it’s both at the same time, but the target of the algorithmic impact seems to shift throughout the book. Nevertheless, the themes it explores in contemporary society are important to be aware of, and it’s a pretty quick and easy read, so I would definitely recommend it overall.
“As Keller told me: “We click with our monkey brains, the same ones that cause us to buy a candy bar in the checkout line at the grocery store.” Algorithmic feeds accelerate these worst impulses, not just on an individual level but an aggregate one, across all the users of a social network.”
“In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers.”
“According to Silicon Valley ideology, the pursuit of scale far outweighs any negative consequence it might have.”
“All of these small decisions used to be made one at a time by humans: A newspaper editor decided which stories to put on the front page, and a magazine photo editor selected photographs to publish; a film programmer picked out which films to play in a theater’s season; an independent radio station DJ assembled playlists of songs that fit their own mood and the particular vibe of a day or a place. While these decisions were of course subject to various social and economic forces, the person in charge of them ensured a basic level of quality, or even safety, that can be missing from the Internet’s accelerated feeds.”
“By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations.”
“Homogeneity in a diverse world is uncanny.”
“When whiteness and wealth are posed as the norm, a kind of force field of aesthetics and ideology keeps out anyone who does not fit the template.”
“The path of chasing something that will appeal to, or at least avoid offending, the highest number of people leads to homogeneity. And that homogeneity is inevitably cast in the mold of dominant groups: white, cisgender, heterosexual. It’s hard to develop an individualized identity through an algorithmic mold meant to apply to billions of people at once. By contrast, building smaller communities of consumption devoted to more specific subjects can lead to a much deeper sense of engagement, both with the content and among the users. Sustainability at a small scale still counts as success. That is something we’ve missed as the Internet has prioritized frictionless convenience and broadcasting to as many people as possible at once.”
“The hollowed-out meaning of taste in the Filterworld era has something in common with the way engagement is measured by digital platforms: it’s a snap judgment predicated mostly on whether something provokes immediate like or dislike. Taste’s moral capacity, the idea that it generally leads an individual toward a better society as well as better culture, is being lost. Instead, taste amounts to a form of consumerism in which what you buy or watch is the last word on your identity and dictates your future consumption as well.”
“Consumption without taste is just undiluted, accelerated capitalism.”
“The pressure that Hallie felt to make the rest of her artwork similarly bright, clear, and simple is much like the pressure that a musician feels to frontload the hook of a song so it succeeds on TikTok or a writer feels to have a take so hot it lights up the Twitter feed.”
“There is an element of elitism at play in any evaluation that casts social media as the opposite of art. Not everyone has access to the traditional, more acceptable routes of art making: Ivy League universities, literary magazines, Chelsea galleries.”
“Marshall McLuhan wrote his famous dictum “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He meant that the structure of a new medium—electric light, the telephone, television—is more important than the content that travels through it.”
“In September 2006… Facebook implemented one of its biggest changes, a feature that would set the course for its future as the big-box everything-for-sale store of the Internet. The News Feed, a running list of updates, posts, and alerts, became the primary feature of the platform… At first, the News Feed was ordered purely chronologically, with the most recent updates first, but it gradually followed a more algorithmic logic… Familiar websites have a way of feeling different when the feed mechanism changes. On Facebook, for instance, you may notice that you see less of your friends’ posts and more from groups or businesses, or that Instagram never shows you posts from a particular friend in your feed and you thus need to hunt them down using the search bar… In March 2016, the Instagram feed began switching from a chronological to an algorithmic arrangement.”
“For such a vast and powerful industry, affecting billions of people, the business of social networks doesn’t face much government regulation. It seems to fall into a gulf between the hardware industry, where devices and manufacturing supply chains face scrutiny, and the traditional media industry, where what kinds of content businesses can broadcast has been a legal issue since the US Constitution enshrined free speech. Should social networks be treated like newspapers and television channels, responsible for everything hosted within their domains? They have long escaped that responsibility.”
“Our feeds under a dramatically reformed Section 230 would look very different. Social networks would be forced to take responsibility for each piece of content on their sites that receives algorithmic promotion. Perhaps they would adapt by putting most content outside the reach of recommendations, meaning that users would have to intentionally follow or search for a given subject.”