FULL HOUSES: Turning Data into Audiences

Are personalised search and online preferences narrowing our worldview?

Are algorithms editing our life and our choices? Kevin Slavin thinks so and presents a worrying picture in How algorithms shape our world (above).

You will be aware that there is no standard Google. Even if not logged in, Google takes into account 57 individual data points about YOU before serving you the results you searched for.

Algorithms are used to predict preferences or taste based on behaviour and recommend options. Do we risk saying goodbye to serendipity and innovation?

It is worrying though that a recent study at Columbia University found that a reliance on search engines for answers is actually changing the way humans think.

“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganising the way we remember things. Our brains rely on the internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker,” said report author Betsy Sparrow.

Also exploring this subject, Eli Pariser warns us to Beware online “filter bubbles”.

The same stuff again and again is not satisfying, Pariser suggests we get trapped in a “Filter Bubble”. He warns that personalised search might be narrowing our worldview. A Filter Bubble is your own personal universe online, but the risk is that you don’t decide what is in it and you don’t see what is excluded or edited out

We rely less and less on our own critical faculties and word of mouth and more on what Mr Slavin calls the “physics of culture”. Pariser uses the analogy that algorithms are delivering the lowest common denominator – junk food, rather than a balanced diet. Search results and recommendations should not just keyed to relevance, but should expand a person’s horizon. He suggests five equally important weighting criteria:

1. relevant
2. important
3. uncomfortable
4. challenging
5. other points of view

Hmmmmmm, sounds like a good premise for audience development in the arts to me.

Slavin moots a concept “the physics of culture” and discussed the recommendations of Netflix which account for 60% of films rented. Netflix has used a variety of agorithms to recommend films, Cinematch, Gravity and now the ominous sounding Pragmatic Chaos.

Just as we need a balanced diet of food, we similarly benefit and grow from a healthy balanced diet  of politics and culture. We need in effect a benevolent editor and Pariser suggests journalistic ethics encouraged this in the newspaper industry a century ago. Although it sounds like those ethics need to be revisited now Mr Murdoch.

24 August, 2011 at 2:40 pm Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment