Just as a bit of a devil’s advocate thought process, isn’t reading a newspaper, magazine, or watching a TV station very similar in basic concept to an algorithmic content feed?
They’re more crude but it’s the same idea. You tell a company you like a general topic by choosing a channel, magazine, or section of the newspaper. They give you content that is curated. This curation is automatic and sophisticated in social media apps but is more manual in legacy media, but the idea is generally the same. At some point someone or something is taking a guess at what kind of content you want to see.
All of these forms of passive content involve advertiser influence just the same as social media algorithms.
Maybe algorithmic media isn’t always so alarmingly bad? Maybe it’s okay to have some downtime and just allow someone else to fill that time? It was acceptable for the comics section of the newspaper to waste some time in your day but it’s so harmful for for some silly meme content to do the same just because technology was involved in the latter.
They’re more crude but it’s the same idea. You tell a company you like a general topic by choosing a channel, magazine, or section of the newspaper. They give you content that is curated. This curation is automatic and sophisticated in social media apps but is more manual in legacy media, but the idea is generally the same. At some point someone or something is taking a guess at what kind of content you want to see.
All of these forms of passive content involve advertiser influence just the same as social media algorithms.
Maybe algorithmic media isn’t always so alarmingly bad? Maybe it’s okay to have some downtime and just allow someone else to fill that time? It was acceptable for the comics section of the newspaper to waste some time in your day but it’s so harmful for for some silly meme content to do the same just because technology was involved in the latter.