DeepSummary
Neil Patel interviews Kyle Chayka, author of the book 'Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,' about how algorithmic recommendations on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have led to a homogenization of culture, where everything from physical spaces to music and art start to look and feel the same. Chayka traces the origins of this 'filter world' to the rise of platforms optimizing content for virality and engagement.
They discuss how the flattening of culture happens through an 'averaging' effect, where things that resonate most broadly become amplified, even if they started as parodies or niche trends. Chayka highlights the example of TikTok creator Nigel Kavina, who optimized his videos for the algorithm by stripping away personal identity markers.
While acknowledging the downsides of filter world, Chayka and Patel also explore potential upsides, such as increased access and bottom-up participation in culture. They discuss the role of human curation and tastemaking institutions in counterbalancing algorithmic homogeneity and helping people develop more authentic personal tastes.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Algorithmic recommendations on social media platforms have led to a homogenization and 'flattening' of culture across various domains like music, art, fashion, and even physical spaces.
- This 'filter world' effect arises from algorithms optimizing for virality and mass engagement, resulting in an 'averaging' of cultural expression to broadly appealing aesthetics and trends.
- While increasing access and bottom-up participation, filter world can diminish diversity of expression and personal authenticity as people optimize to algorithmic incentives.
- Human curation and tastemaking from trusted institutions may provide a necessary counterbalance to the purely algorithmic distribution of culture.
- Individuals can try to develop more thoughtful relationships to their personal tastes by consciously consuming culture disconnected from algorithmic feeds and social metrics.
- Online fandoms represent a tension between algorithms' homogenizing force and bottom-up communities coalescing around niche interests.
- The evolving internet landscape driven by platforms and algorithms requires rethinking the role and form of media institutions to maintain cultural diversity.
- Finding the right balance between algorithmic recommendation and human curation is key to optimizing accessibility while avoiding overly flattened culture.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “I think the culture has changed. And I think there's this dawning sense that these are not doing good things for us, like generally being immersed in algorithmic feeds and copying what everyone else is doing and letting TikTok show you what it wants to show you is actually bad for you and is not leading you to a constructive place.“ by Kyle Chayka
- “Being more thoughtful is a good start. I mean, I think what I came out of it with was, like, you want to know that you like what you like because you like it, not just because it was recommended to you and exposed to you repeatedly in a feed, thinking about your personal taste, having a real encounter with a song or a piece of art or a piece of clothing, where you don't think about how many people liked it, where you don't think about the Instagram account, where you just kind of sit with your own feelings and have an experience of culture that's in front of you.“ by Kyle Chayka
- “These fandoms are almost like military groups that everyone is drafted into, right? It's like you might be floating around in the hip hop community or whatever, and then gradually you get sucked into the Nicki Minaj fandom. Or, like, you might be a young woman who is interested in, I don't know, acoustic guitar or something, and then you are orbiting Taylor Swift, and then you get sucked into that bucket.“ by Kyle Chayka
- “I mean, I knew that what's presented in a newspaper or shown in a gallery or whatever is subject to the forces of digital platforms. But I was almost missing the community feeling of those feeds and of a fandom where it's like, I know that other people are consuming the same thing I am, and we're all chattering about the same stuff, and we're all leaving comments on the Instagram account, and we're all, like, clustering in our way around one piece of content.“ by Kyle Chayka
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Episode Information
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The Verge
3/11/24
Today, I’m talking to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a regular contributor to The Verge, and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Kyle has been writing for years now about how the culture of big social media platforms bleeds into real life, first affecting how things look, and now shaping how and what culture is created and the mechanisms by which that culture spreads all around the world.
If you’ve been listening to Decoder, this is all going to sound very familiar. The core thesis of Kyle’s book — that algorithmic recommendations make everything feel the same — hits at an idea that we’ve talked about countless times on the show: that how content is distributed shapes what content is made. So I was really excited to sit down with Kyle and dig into Filterworld and his thoughts on how this happened and what we might be able to do about it.
Links:
- Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture — Kyle Chayka
- Welcome to AirSpace — The Verge
- The Stanley water bottle craze, explained — Vox
- TikTok and the vibes revival — The New Yorker
- Why the internet isn’t fun anymore — The New Yorker
- The age of algorithmic anxiety — The New Yorker
- Lo-fi beats to quarantine to are booming on YouTube — The Verge
- Taylor Swift has encouraged her fans' numerology habit yet again — AV Club
- How fandom built the internet as we know it, with Kaitlyn Tiffany — Decoder
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23858379
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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