Eileen G’Sell wrote an article the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Algorithms and The Problem with Intellectual Passivity (30 May 2024).
« as of this past year — with a college class that started middle school around 2016, the year Instagram and Twitter swapped chronological for algorithmic feeds — something has felt different, and it’s not just the yawning gap between our ages. »
« Enter “Filterworld,” what Kyle Chayka defines in his book of the same name as “the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed.” Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer, argues that the dominance of algorithmic feeds — especially on social media and streaming platforms — is responsible for a “pervasive flattening … across culture,” wherein “the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most.” »
« the concept of Filterworld also helps me understand the wildly different ways my students approach media. I have seen TikTok transform young people into more politically engaged and sensitive citizens. I have also seen how the forces of Filterworld have all but precluded students’ grasp of context. Why should students know or care about a specific author, audience, or place of publication when the vast majority of content they consume is stripped of these markers and algorithmically tailored to their individual tastes and values? Why should they think chronologically when most of the content they consume is devoid of historical tags — or tagged in a way that convolutes history? »
« Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, claimed “the medium is the message.” For Chayka, “the medium is the algorithmic feed; it has scaled and sped up humanity’s interconnection across the world to an unimaginable degree.” If algorithms skew content toward homogeneity, for which Chayka supplies considerable evidence, they also replace chronology as a framework to make sense of content. »
« today’s algorithmically curated feeds discourage users from actively seeking out new knowledge and experiences. Why plug in terms from a keyboard if an invisible algo-deity is already doing that for you? Why hunt down another album if Spotify is sure to line up a track that so closely matches the last one you liked? We tend to assume that students have years of experience actively “surfing” the net, balancing on the Google search bar as they brave swells of information. The reality is that they’ve barely left their lounge chairs on the beach, catching sea shells of knowledge and entertainment cast in their exact direction. »
« This is strange to those of us who remember the 56k modem. Even undergrads five years ago were more likely to actively pursue content online — be it scholarship for a project or a definition on their smartphone. “The network of algorithms makes so many decisions for us,” Chayka writes. “The more automated an algorithmic feed is, the more passive it makes us as consumers.” This helps to explain why one of my brightest students critiquing “girlboss feminism” for her research project did not search JSTOR or Google Scholar for “girlboss feminism,” and assumed there was nothing academic on the topic. It’s tempting to blame indolence for these oversights. But these are students who regularly attend office hours and carry heavy course loads. Many of them applied to over 15 colleges in high school. And yet they are eerily thunderstruck when I pull up a scholarly source with a few search terms. »
« In 1985, the media theorist Neil Postman lamented the spate of Americans plunking down on their La-Z-Boys, picking up a remote, and aiming it at a console television. In Filterworld, those deliberative acts — moving, pointing, discerning, clicking — would seem downright assertive compared to the norm. Forty years after Postman decried the nation’s passivity in front of the tube, many of us would be thrilled to see undergraduates actively seeking out media that isn’t algorithmically channeled to them. »
« The detachment that students often have from relatively recent history can be alarming »
« Cultivating a more active mind-set »
« We can also model an active mind-set. If I don’t recognize a vocabulary word in a reading, I’ll announce my ignorance out loud, ask if anyone can define it, and, in the case no one can, look it up on the class desktop for all to see. The same goes for an unknown date, academic term, or citation-formatting question. In normalizing ignorance, and in our active pursuit to correct the ignorance, we show students that we have nothing against the internet; it’s how we approach it that matters. »
Articles of Interest 