You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
rosa_inverno 's review for:
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
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.