At risk of sounding very Gen Z, there’s been a vibe whenever we’ve dug into the context of any cultural artifact or publication — it’s as if we were navigating the same media terrain but one of us had a busted compass.
Enter “Filterworld,” what Kyle Chayka defines in his book of the same name as “the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed.” Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer, argues that the dominance of algorithmic feeds — especially on social media and streaming platforms — is responsible for a “pervasive flattening … across culture,” wherein “the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most.”
…I have seen TikTok transform young people into more politically engaged and sensitive citizens. I have also seen how the forces of Filterworld have all but precluded students’ grasp of context. Why should students know or care about a specific author, audience, or place of publication when the vast majority of content they consume is stripped of these markers and algorithmically tailored to their individual tastes and values? Why should they think chronologically when most of the content they consume is devoid of historical tags — or tagged in a way that convolutes history?
Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, claimed “the medium is the message.” For Chayka, “the medium is the algorithmic feed; it has scaled and sped up humanity’s interconnection across the world to an unimaginable degree.” If algorithms skew content toward homogeneity, for which Chayka supplies considerable evidence, they also replace chronology as a framework to make sense of content. When I was in college, almost all the media I consumed — from Spin magazine to Cat Power CDs to weekly Survivor episodes to newly released DVDs from the local Family Video — were inherently historical at the time of consumption. When I joined Facebook and Twitter in my 20s and 30s, my feed supplied a steady narrative where time stamps were the norm: This post was from a specific friend on the Fourth of July; this tweet from two days later prompted a string of comments the following morning.
It’s different for students today. Their feeds send a constant, curated stream of content tailored just to them, often devoid of any sense of contextual origin.
Read more:
G’Sell, E. (2024, May 30). Algorithms and the Problem of Intellectual Passivity. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/algorithms-and-the-problem-of-intellectual-passivity