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Collaborating with Algorithms
Algorithms are everywhere in our daily life. We can let them roll over us or we can attempt to collaborate and guide them.
It’s not just that Spotify’s recommendations tend to be pleasant because it has a lot of data about me. It’s that Spotify has the listening history of 675 million people, whose interests may overlap with mine in countless different ways. Over the years, I’ve developed a set of habits that help me hone those recommendations — things like making playlists, rejecting recommendations I don’t like, exploring artists’ catalogs, and maybe most importantly, digging through other people’s playlists.
This is what I call lean-forward listening. While it’s easy enough to click on Discover Weekly every Monday, lean back and listen to the whole thing like a radio show, and then move on to the next playlist, the more effort you put into curating your experience, the better the algorithms will work next time. At the very least, you’ll find your way onto a playlist that algorithms didn’t create.
I purposely jump between genres to keep all the various lists and feeds fresh and diverse. It works for the most part. I’d go so far to say this might be an aspect of modern media literacy: possessing an awareness that the media you’re consuming is controlled by others and understanding how you can influence it matters.
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Cover roundup: Glycerine by Bush
Glycerine is a banger from the mid 90s by Bush. Probably the most famous version is the one Gavin Rossdale performed due a rainy 1996 MTV Spring Break.
Allison Lorenzen and Midwife add shoegazey fuzz
Easy listening lullaby version
Acoustic with female vocals
Piano really changes it
Or a string quartet
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The Smithsonian and what is history
The nation’s museum, The Smithsonian, becomes another front in the war on truth.
But even as the social history approach remade American museums, most Americans cling to an understanding of history that prioritizes the very things the social historians criticized. According to a 2021 survey of attitudes to history, conducted by researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the American Historical Association, the vast majority of Americans view history fundamentally differently than historians do. History, for about 70 percent of Americans, is simply what we remember about the past, especially names, dates and other facts. It isn’t, as most professional historians believe, the interpretation of those facts that constitutes history.
“We were always trying to get people to think, ‘What is history?’” Gardner says. “The goal was to think about meaning and perspectives.”
So, there is a paradox: Americans consume and enjoy social history on a daily basis, in museums, books and documentaries, but if asked to define history, they would give an account that sounds more like the rote lessons and recitations of fact that their grandparents and great-grandparents found tedious and boring decades ago.
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Harry Potter and the Problematic Author
Maia Kobabe illustrates the issues around Harry Potter’s author, J.K. Rowling. All that fame and fortune, and backing transphobia is what she decides to do.
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The story of Oregon Trail, the game
If you went to school in the 80s and 90s, you most likely played the game Oregon Trail. It influenced video gaming in numerous ways, such as naming your companion characters.
Fifty years after it was created, The Oregon Trail’s legacy remains powerful and, in many ways, surprising. Hundreds of millions of players have attempted the journey – though most never make it to Oregon. The phrase “You have died of dysentery”, a common end for voyagers, has spawned t-shirts and countless memes in its wake. The quote is even referenced in a bestselling 2022 novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, about an age bracket of Americans she calls “The Oregon Trail Generation“. The game has also seen dozens of sequels, spinoffs and parodies, and now an upcoming live-action movie.
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Who gets to participate in fandoms?
In 2020, fandom thrived. We saw people return to their old fandom favorites like Twilight or Sherlock, play so much Animal Crossing and The Sims, and fall down the BTS rabbit hole (leading the group to their first no. 1 song in “Dynamite”). Escapism has literally kept people going despite all kinds of crises, and the use of fandom as a solace will likely only continue now that we’re in 2021 and still awaiting easy access to vaccination. It allows people a reprieve, to bury their heads in the sand and pretend for a little while longer that everything isn’t so terrible.
Which is great… to an extent. But all experiences of escapism are not created equally. Escapism isn’t actually possible for everyone because of the nature of both fandom and the world around us. The best-worst example of the limits of fandom escapism? Racism.
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Video games bleeding into real life
The term Game Transfer Phenomenon, or GTP, was first coined by Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, a psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway. She first proposed the concept a decade ago while working on her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Mark Griffiths, head of Nottingham Trent University’s International Gaming Research Unit. Ortiz de Gortari was motivated by her own experience of GTP. One day, she was walking around her local supermarket and realised that she was imagining peering at products on the shelves through a rifle scope.
“I thought, ‘Wow! This is interesting’,” she recalls. “A phenomenon that changes your perception by encouraging you to see objects through the lens of the game you’re playing,” she says, adding that her response had felt involuntary, leaving her with serious questions about what it meant.
I’m sure we’ve all done something like this after a long Tetris or Super Mario session.
