Название: The Rise of the Algorithms: How YouTube and TikTok Conquered the World
Автор: John M. Jordan
Издательство: The Pennsylvania State University Press
Год: 2024
Страниц: 229
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 25.2 MB

The meteoric rise of online video is reshaping the competition for human attention. The Rise of the Algorithms argues that this new technology has changed the way we interact with others, our relationships with public institutions, and our very own behaviors and psyches.

In tracing the origins and evolution of online video, John M. Jordan examines the mechanics—and the ethical stakes—of online video platforms, especially YouTube and TikTok but also others, such as Twitch. Tracing the use of algorithms pioneered by Facebook and Google and so successfully exploited by TikTok’s corporate parent, ByteDance, Jordan shows how these platforms now engineer human behavior—with consequences for culture, politics, and identity. Jordan argues that we are at an inflection point. Until now we have proved, as a society, ill-prepared or unwilling to address such problems as the power of digital platforms, the personal cost of viral celebrity, the invasion of privacy, and the proliferation of disinformation. The Rise of the Algorithms combines this urgent assessment with a clear-eyed discussion of present challenges and recommendations for reclaiming our online futures.

A valuable resource for understanding the transformations that have been and will be brought by YouTube, TikTok, and similar platforms, Jordan’s timely book is a vital work for anyone who uses the internet and especially for policy makers, technologists, communication and media specialists, and researchers who have a direct hand in determining the future of our online world.

As humans have uploaded, one at a time, billions of videos to repositories of huge scale, machines are watching us humans watch the videos. Unlike when conducting a Google search, users don’t leave the YouTube site or the TikTok app. Accordingly, the computational models are designed to and effective in getting us to stay on the site longer, to “like, comment, and subscribe,” and to come back later today and again tomorrow. TikTok usage is evolving rapidly, but one report stated that 90 percent of users checked the app daily, that US users spent thirty-three minutes per day on the service, and that that average US user opened the app eight times every day.11 We have in our midst not only a powerful new way to communicate but also unseen, unspoken rules of the game manipulating our attention to it. ByteDance, Facebook, and Google are the early leaders in collecting our contributions and making those rules to adjust our behaviors. Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Netflix, and others are near neighbors.

Machine Learning about users quickly fuels machine direction of them. As this tendency is more widely realized, familiar questions emerge, as they do with the rise of any new regime. What will people tolerate and when might they rebel? What platform practices will cross some legal, cultural, or emotional line? How will we each individually justify the costs of these platforms related to their benefits? These are the questions the book ultimately attempts to engage.