Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

There are two forces forming our tastes. As I described previously, the first is our independent pursuit of what we individually enjoy, while the second is our awareness of what it appears that most other people like, the dominant mainstream. The two may move in opposite directions, but it’s often easier to follow the latter, particularly when the Internet makes what other people are consuming so immediately public. (If you didn’t post about it, did you really watch a TV show?) Algorithmic feeds further reinforce the presence of that mainstream, against which our personal choices are evaluated. Taste is inescapable; it involves “the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing, or decoration,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote in his 1984 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. These choices can be symbolic of a range of things beyond just our aesthetic preferences, such as economic class, political ideology, and social identity. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” Bourdieu wrote. No wonder that we worry about what to like, and sometimes find it simpler to export that responsibility to machines.