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Some invest a lot of time and skill in crafting TikTok videos, but neither time nor skill is required. If TikTok “enables everyone to be a creator,” as its former mission statement proclaimed, this is because creative labor on the platform has been automated and deskilled.
ROGERS BRUBAKER • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents
Yet, the final component of the streaming ecosystem — artists and their teams — are still pretty much where they were in 2010 regarding algorithmic optimization. Today, most algorithmic strategies follow a kind of "throw spaghetti at a wall and see what sticks" approach: make sure that the metadata you provide to DSPs is as complete and accurate as... See more
Music Tomorrow • Towards Recommender System Optimization: Our Data Tool for Algorithmic Optimization on Spotify [Part 1]
Digital hyperconnectivity — the condition in which nearly everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time — has colonized the self, recast social interactions, reorganized the public sphere, revolutionized economic life and converted the whole of human culture into an unending stream of digital con
... See moreROGERS BRUBAKER • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents
Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into “walled gardens” and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the “triumph of seamless usability” to a new level. This “tyranny of convenience,” to borrow Tim Wu’s phrase , should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization proc
... See moreROGERS BRUBAKER • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents
It’s only on platforms where controversy and drama are prioritized for driving engagement where we’re rewarded for despising each other.
Vox • Every "chronically online" conversation is the same
Here we see a really pivotal moment of change, when art must become something that does not make people uncomfortable, so that they will spend money. The kind of person who is expected to consume art is transformed in the mind of the producer. The people who might very possibly love being expanded by what they see are never given the chance. They'
... See moreSarah Schulman • The Gentrification of the Mind
Spotify, for example, has invested heavily in its own curation services — both algorithmic and human — after finding that many of its listeners were baffled by superabundance, burdened by excessive choice and uninterested in charting their own paths through the digital wilderness.
Rogers Brubaker • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents
Moreover, as the critic Rob Horning has argued with respect to TikTok, algorithms do not simply discern what we want and serve it to us; they train us to want what they can serve us. Successful platforms do not just discover what consumers want — they produce the consumers and the forms of consumer desire that they need.
ROGERS BRUBAKER • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents
It’s that these reactions are so normalized online that they’re almost boring.