Home › Books › Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by
8/99
Critics' Rating Index
9/99
Readers' Rating Index
97/99
Scholars' Citation Index
92/99
Volume of Reviews
82/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
A history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself. From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices. The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we've grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal. This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called "Filterworld." Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question. In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet? To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.
Reviews
"Chayka's timely investigation shows how we can reject the algorithms of the digital era and reclaim our humanity."
"But culture also still exists beyond social media, a point it's easy to forget when reading Filterworld ..."
"Fans of the burgeoning genre of Big Tech ethnography will appreciate Chayka's astute historical analysis and philosophical rumination on the subject, all 'filtered' expertly with his own biography as a millennial who grew up amid the explosion of the socially fixated web."
"Chayka distinguishes himself with his focus on the old-fashioned idea of taste, revisiting among many other works Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, the coppery-covered classic of sociology that many a college semiotician toted around ostentatiously in the '80s and '90s ..."
"It makes algorithms, those uncanniest of influencers, legible."
"The stylistic mode of Filterworld, however, seems to require Chayka to pull away quickly from such sociopolitical, structural approaches and back to a more personal perspective."
"Near the end of the book, when Chayka narrates his temporary break from social media and Spotify, his reflections feel trite, not revelatory: Yet another extremely online Twitter user has discovered the value (and limits) of logging off ..."
"Chayka vividly evokes the jarring sensation of trying to maintain cultural archives on platforms whose incentives are constantly shifting, at one point evocatively describing a Spotify layout change as 'a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room overnight.' And yet he often fails to ground his argument in a past that feels authentic ..."
"Filterworld's place in the growing bibliography of modern internet criticism sits somewhere between schematic and critique."
"Chayka's version of taste is an unreliable instrument for establishing the extent that Big Tech is achromatizing the last bit of color out of our souls ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!