Yes – the internet was better back then.
There is no better combination of words to express that collective feeling we have about the platforms we use everyday. Although we hang out in the same digital spaces, and have done so for the past 15-ish years, they seem to have lost their spark. It’s not purely the nostalgia of times when world news was not as terrifying, or perhaps of times when we were too young to be aware of them. It is rather much more simple: like a small cafe that day-by-day gets so popular it loses all the details and quirks that made it unique, the platforms we delicately perused in have now been gentrified. It is very commonplace nowadays to blame capitalism for all our problems, but in this case it has robbed us of an internet created to feed our hunger for discovery.
The life cycle of a digital platform or app is elemental to this discussion. To directly quote this article by Cory Doctorow: “First, [digital platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” In that article, several well known platforms like Facebook and Amazon are mentioned, but the one my peers and I have surely witnessed more is the development of TikTok. Formerly known as Musical.ly, it did not even come close to TikTok’s dimensions in terms of engagement, number of users, or – let’s face it – quality of content. For the most part, it was an app where middle schoolers lip-synced to popular audios and songs. The platform was good to its users.
The acquisition of Musical.ly by ByteDance and the introduction of its new algorithm was the key ingredient in the incredibly successful recipe we know today. Before the app rose to the popularity it now enjoys, it continued to be good to its users. However, the new advanced algorithm made the platform much more scalable than its predecessor, soon turning it into the perfect breeding ground for influencers and brands to capitalise on. They abused their users to make things better for their business customers.
Algorithms nurture the lifecycle of platforms by feeding appropriate content to its users in order to maximise business partners’ returns, with the biggest winner always being the platform itself. A great example mentioned in the article is the case of Amazon. With every search you make on the site, you are presented with a list of results, 50% of which are ads for products distributed by Amazon’s own sellers. Third party sellers that have been driven to Amazon due to its customer traffic have to pay a 45% fee to Amazon which the company naturally does not impose on itself. They abused those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Now, what does all that have to do with how you and I discover and consume media?
Good; You’re asking questions. That is step 1.
The impact of platforms’ reliance on algorithmically recommended content was not as apparent before the boom of TikTok. Most users on the app spend hours upon hours scrolling through their For You Page (FYP for short), a collection of unlimited, algorithmically generated content. What differentiates TikTok from other video content platforms like YouTube (apart from video length) is the following: the user does not have to actively search for the content they watch; the app already knows what they want to watch and gives it to them thought-free. Or so we think.
At this point, piecing everything together is not too difficult. Instead of using the digital platforms as a means of individual discovery, searching for things that fit our taste and exploring new interests in the process, we are recommended things that we kind of like and we slowly devolve into what everyone else likes without noticing. Based on whatever cookie crumbs the app has collected on our behaviour, the content on our FYP over time becomes exponentially aligned with existing popular preferences, leading to a homogenised cultural experience. Algorithms manage to inhibit research and the discovery of novel or unusual media by continuously displaying content that is well-known or familiar. Depending too much on algorithmic suggestions has therefore impaired people’s capacity to recognise and cultivate their own preferences by allowing them to comfortably hibernate in an echo chamber.
This is not only contained in things like the music we listen to or the food we enjoy. Content homogeneity blocks us from being exposed to challenging opinions, opposing views, and alternative takes on anything and everything. It blocks us from the empirical part of education, the process of engaging in critical thinking and all that we can learn from actively trying to answer our questions by preventing us from asking those questions in the first place. By presenting us with approaches we already agree with, the algorithms feed our sense of self-assurance while robbing us from the ability to exit our comfort zones.
In summary: the algorithm limits our growth.
How do we reclaim it? Although there is nothing profoundly wrong with liking what is en vogue or “basic,” there is a difference between liking something popular by choice and liking it because you have been so overexposed to it that it has numbed your sense of preference. There is no clean-cut way to regain what we have lost to the algorithms, but being aware of what has been stolen from us makes us more eager to look for it.
It might sound odd to care so much about taste, but taste is what shapes us as individuals. We are merely a mosaic of all of our experiences, opinions, and preferences; a beautiful concoction of our unique perception of the world around us. In the end, we all experience life in a different way. Why should we let our tastes be the same?
Featured image provided by Google DeepMind.
