Algorithms, Chayka reminds us, don't spring from the machine fully-formed. They're written by humans... to prioritize content that keeps us scrolling.
Songs are getting shorter, because it only takes 30 seconds to rack up a listen on Spotify. Poetry has enjoyed an unexpected revival on Instagram, but mostly when it is universal, aphoristic, and neatly formatted to work as image as well as text.
There's the phenomenon of the fake movie on streaming services like Netflix; these cultural artifacts have actors, plots, settings...but still seem slickly artificial, crowd-sourced and focus-grouped down to nothing.
#algorithmic-anxiety #culture #social-media-platforms #algorithmic-recommendations #content-flattening
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