Technology Diary 1: Algorithms

After reading through the Technology Diary entries posted so far, with particular inspiration coming from Vita (on BIC “For Her” pens) and Cynthia’s (on Gillette Venus shaving razors) posts, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the dark world of marketing. Vita and Cynthia’s diary contributions are particularly valuable because they provide examples of technologies that yield different versions to market towards females and males. And yet, the differences are so superficial that it is often difficult to understand why distinct versions are necessary, or more importantly, how they are taken seriously. For consumers, maybe it stems from societal pressures to conform to rigid gender roles. For producers, profit incentive seems to play a large role, as both Vita and Cynthia point out the cost discrepancy between gendered versions of ultimately identical products.

Changing the scope slightly, I’d like to take a look at a different type of marketing, one that has gained enormous popularity in the past five years and drastically changed the way we browse the Internet: algorithmic marketing. Back in 2011, a political activist named Eli Pariser gave a TED Talk on just this issue. He stressed that search results, like advertisements, can now be tailored to users based on various facets of their online identity. He cited Facebook, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Yahoo News, some of the most widely visited websites, as companies that employ such personalized and personalizing algorithms to shape user experience and access of information. According to Pariser, Google’s algorithm “considers” 57 different traits when cultivating specific results for specific people (and how interesting that list of traits would be!). Clearly, gender certainly plays a role here, but is just one of many characteristics used to distinguish search results from user to user.

Pariser also pointed out a key flaw in the automation of cultivated results by exposing a dilemma discovered by researchers at Netflix regarding users’ queues: because algorithms build cases based on what users click first, they ignore the “epic struggle going on between our future aspiration selves and our more impulsive present selves. We all want to be someone who has watched Rashoman, but right now we want to watch Ace Ventura for the fourth time” (Pariser). In other words, algorithms fail to take into account the complexities and multiplicities of our tastes and interests. Another problem with this format is that users have no say as to how their results are shaped, nor can users gain access to the vast amount of information that is filtered out in the process. These issues hark back to Rosser’s critique of the separation between creator and user in technology design. The creator assumes authority over the standard of usage, while the user remains unconsulted and in the dark. Furthermore, because these algorithms rely on a combination of objective (physical location) and socially constructed (gender) traits, they surreptitiously reinforce the influence of the latter.

Pariser, Eli. (2011, March). Beware: online “filter bubbles”. TED Conference, Long Beach, CA.

Below are two TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks on algorithms, from two very different perspectives:

Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles”

Kevin Slavin on How Algorithms are Changing Our World