Reading 4 - Truc Le

(source)

In the article “THE POWER OF ALGORITHMS: HOW SOFTWARE FORMATS THE CULTURE”, (2014), Sandra Alvaro reviewed the roles and impacts of algorithms on today’s Information Age. Alvaro analyzed the positive outcomes of popular websites’ algorithms such as Facebook’s, Twitter’s, and Amazon’s etc. However, according to Alvaro, although algorithms help organizing mass data and fetching the right information to the right people, they can hinder people from discovering new sites that are not related to their internet history. Therefore, internet users stand a risk of being unconsciously limited to seeing only familiar topics rather than being able to discover the internet’s diversity.

I agree with Alvaro on the information-distributing power of algorithms. If looking at algorithms in an artistic perspective, I think that an algorithm is a kind of art too. A good artwork is likely to have followed many artistic laws in order to be able to create specific emotions on its audience. Algorithms, too, have to follow a strict set of logical orders in order to achieve specific outputs that will satisfy its users. These outputs can be suggestions of information that might interest the users (like Facebook’s friend suggestions and Youtube’s video suggestions). They can also be digital art pieces which utilize algorithms to create stunning data visualization programs. However, although I agree that algorithms can prevent people from discovering new things, I think that there are ways to cease this prevention. For example, Youtube programmers can rewrite the site’s algorithms so that a couple of new clips from unfamiliar categories will appear in the “What to watch” suggestion box each time the user log in. Programmers can put some randomness in the suggestion contents so that users will be exposed to a variety of topics that are not related to those they saw before.

Alvaro concluded her article emphasizing that the public should be acknowledged about algorithms in order to recognize and break out of algorithms’ mundanity. I agree with her, but I think that programmers have to be the first ones to be acknowledged about this mundanity in order to get rid of it as it will take a long time for the teachings of algorithms to reach the mass public.