Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
Written by: Kyle Chayka and published in 2024 by Vintage
The irony of being recommended this book by a social media algorithm is not lost on me. However, I am grateful for it.
Reading this book gave me the time and space to think about social media’s recommendation system on me and my life. It’s one thing to talk about doom scrolling or phone addictions as though they are happening, and to be aware of the hours that can pass with flicks of a finger on an endless feed, but another entirely on the specific impacts on me and my time.
I started to think about the last time I browsed the audiobook section on my Libby app and chose a book I hadn’t seen talked about online. I started to consider the last time I found a new artist on a music streaming platform that they didn’t chose for me in a playlist or that I didn’t see a creator talk about. I started to think about when the last time I went on a walk to find a coffee shop without checking in on a business social media page to confirm wifi or outlets or the vibe of a place.
As someone who has spent many an afternoon in a cafe, photos abounding in my camera roll of the space, the coffee, the work I was focused on, I was particularly drawn in by the section on travel and coffee shops. How the author positions one example of culture flattening as being able to find the same coffee shop nearly anywhere in the world; how the designs look the same, how the menus compare with what goes viral online, and how people show up into the spaces being able to expect what they get from a coffee shop from their home.
I’ve benefited from these spaces throughout my years away from my home country and also I’ve felt some disgust towards myself for wanting them. Tourism supports many economies, yes, but I always wonder, who really benefits from the money in the places that cater to those who want the same everywhere they go? And does a coffee shop that looks like every other one displace a neighborhood gathering spot for locals? Who gets to decide if that trade off is worth it? And what of rising rents and short term rentals that follow tourism crowds? Is the flattening of culture through coffee shops just another form colonization? Is that what all of flattening culture is?
Who are the people who are recommending things and places to us? Do we spend time curating that on our feeds? Curation is another point that this author covers in a way that I really appreciated. It explored the history of the word, how it has shifted throughout the years, and what it means in this age of recommendation to have an individual sense of taste outside of algorithm served content. How human judgement is necessary to make sense of so much data and where taste plays a role in that for our expression and identity.
It also gave me pause to challenge the ‘it’s always been this way’ narrative that tech pushes or sells (for example, with machine learning products this looks like a ‘AI is coming, we have to learn to live with it’ story). Feeds didn’t use to be endless, there were not metric dashboards, there were not a wide range of emoji reacts, usernames used to be anonymous and now everyone is told to have a personal brand. There is so much that has changed since the early days of social media, but there is not an advantage for technology companies to remind us of that. We are enticed to incorporate what new features and expectations are provided to us and then we are encouraged to remember things as having always been this way.
This book gave me much to mull over and I believe it will stick with me for awhile.
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The book can be purchased at an independent bookstore of your choosing through this affiliate link: https://bookshop.org/lists/read-in-2025-sydney-conroy-s-reads/ (which has the added bonus of supporting me so I have increased opportunity to write out more thoughts, musings, and considerations)!