Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

In fact, for more than a decade before The World Is Flat, cultural theorists were already describing how globalization, particularly the accelerated version caused by the Internet, breeds sameness and monotony. There was also a rising anxiety about this sameness, a disaffection with the cultural consequences of globalization. In 1989, the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells conceived of the “space of flows,” which he defined as “the material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity,” as he wrote in a 1999 article. In other words, Castells argued, electronic telecommunications infrastructure like the Internet enabled shared culture to be collectively developed across distances rather than relying on physical proximity. The culture that formed was the same across the disparate places that the telecommunications networks covered. It was a departure from physical geography, which Castells labeled the “space of places.”