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Thursday, May 20, 2021

What Are All These Algorithms Doing to Us? | Expert Contributors - Built In

David Ryan Polgar, Founder of All Tech Is Human argues, Algorithmic curation is a useful solution that wrangles the massive amount of content on the web into a manageable format. 

Photo: Antonio Batinić from Pexels
But it comes with costs, and we need to think seriously about its effects on individuals and society at large. 

People post 6,000 tweets every second of every day. So, if you want to follow the pulse of the internet by reading tweets, you’re trying to swallow a firehose’s worth of content when you can only handle drinking from a water fountain. Gulp.

The web generally, and social media in particular, is a double-edged sword. Tapping into the web’s hivemind and having instant access to nearly all the world’s information is both its beauty and its curse. On social media platforms, the sheer volume of communication happening — even just by the accounts we choose to follow or be friends with — is an unmanageable amount of content to handle. Something needs to give.

Enter algorithmic curation, which serves as a helpful way to reduce the firehose of information into a usable water fountain. Unfortunately, it also transfers decision-making power from the individual to the platform. Worse, algorithmic curation means that individual users typically don’t understand how those platforms make decisions for them.

What Is Algorithmic Curation?
Algorithmic curation is a process by which a platform streamlines content into a usable and coherent package for users. Through the use of an algorithm that makes predictions based on past user behavior, the platform recommends certain content. This process is not without drawbacks, however, as the platform assumes control of shaping a user’s experience with the site and media diet...
 
Where Do We Go From Here?  

Thanks to the increased awareness around the impact that algorithmic curation has on individual behavior and society at large, what needs to change? I see four ways in which we can manage this problem:

Read more... 

Source: Built In