You just want to see your friends and relatives, is that asking too much? The complaints that have been voiced over the past few weeks about an upcoming redesign of Facebook and Instagram have sounded something like this. To tackle the increasing competition from the video app Tiktok, will the update Provide more content from people outside of your own social circle. So, instead of holiday snaps and friends’ new babies, you’re going to see professional jesters who they call creators these days.
The innovation is called Discovery Engine in-house. It’s just a nice expression of the fact that in the future you’ll have to let the platform dictate what kind of content you consume. The headwind that the parent company Meta has caught is considerable. Users do not want to accept such paternalism. Especially not just because the business model no longer works and Meta almost compulsively replaces the functionalities of the competition copied.
How fitting that that new Yorker just an algorithmic anxiety diagnosed, which is increasingly affecting Internet users. The literal translation – fear – does not go far enough. Rather, it is the digital equivalent of the nervousness that sociologists like Georg Simmel ascribed to people in the big city at the beginning of the 20th century. The psyche can no longer keep up with the environment.
Are we misperceived or recognized incredibly precisely?
Algorithmic anxiety describes the modern Internet user’s feeling of constantly having to deal with machine assessments of their wishes: Beset by automated recommendations, we have to guess exactly how they affect us. While information about one’s own usage behavior is constantly being collected and interpreted, there is no opportunity to give feedback as to whether the software is correct at all. In some moments we feel misperceived or misled, and in other moments recognized with uncanny precision.
Algorithmic anxiety is the constant suspicion that one’s inclinations and tastes are being reshaped. Do you see things because you really find them interesting – or just because the AI thinks you might find them interesting? It takes away the joy you used to get from discovering something new. For example Spotify: Although you have access to almost all of the music in human history, nothing necessarily feels exciting, emotional or personal, according to the industry portal Pitchfork.com a while ago. The ease and randomness with which the content is served devalues it.
For some people, this creates the feeling that they no longer know exactly who is responsible for their own actions and decisions. You or the recommendation engines? It can feel like each app is trying to guess what the user wants before their brain has time to come up with its own answer. When a machine prompter constantly accompanies one’s own paths on the Internet, at some point one becomes unsure: How would we have behaved if the decision had been left to us?
With all these considerations, perhaps too much creative power is ascribed to “the algorithm”. The word has long since lost its original meaning as a sequence of calculation steps and has become a metaphor. In its new interpretation, the algorithm is perceived more as a force of nature or arcane art. Either way, but as an entity that is beyond human control.