(Blogtober Day 5)
I’ve been on a non-fiction kick for the last handful of years. Occasionally a science fiction or fantasy novel has creeped it’s way into the queue, but I would say nine out of ten books I read are non-fiction. They tend to be about history or on skills that I wish to acquire or sharpen, but this book is maybe the one of the first that went into a a topic that I think I feel the effects of every single day.
The book is called Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka.
Filterworld opens exactly how you probably expect. A kind of timeline of how an app or social media website, in this case Facebook, started as something built for people to explore and discover, and then eventually being taken over by algorithms pushing people to where the site thinks they should be looking. I assume everyone sort of knew this was a thing. I did. But I don’t think I realized the impact situations like that was really having on both myself and the rest of the world, in essentially every aspect of every day life, even for those people that don’t use the apps or websites with the algorithms.
This book approaches and explores how algorithms effect people from a number of different angles and it is full of interviews and references articles that dive into how an algorithm effected someone. From the band that stopped playing music over two decades ago finding themselves with a song rising in the charts on Spotify. To even how the author himself would try to game the algorithm to make his journalistic efforts be seen by more people. It is remarkably eye-opening, and it has dramatically changed my perspective on anything that utilizes a ‘feed’ or recommendation algorithms. Even things like Steam and XBox Game Pass.
If you need a little more convincing on possibly picking up the book for yourself what really made me want to read it was an interview with Ryan Chayka on Digging The Talks Youtube Channel.