View of the Folly from the interior of Wimpole Hall. Click to enlarge. There’s something almost surreal about the appearance of the garden in the image. I’m reminded of Peter Greenaway’s film The Draughtsman’s Contract — though hope to escape the fate of said draughtsman.
This morning’s Observer column:
My eye was caught by a headline in Wired magazine: “When algorithms think you want to die”. Below it was an article by two academic researchers, Ysabel Gerrard and Tarleton Gillespie, about the “recommendation engines” that are a central feature of social media and e-commerce sites.
Everyone who uses the web is familiar with these engines. A recommendation algorithm is what prompts Amazon to tell me that since I’ve bought Custodians of the Internet, Gillespie’s excellent book on the moderation of online content, I might also be interested in Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and a host of other books about algorithmic power and bias. In that particular case, the algorithm’s guess is accurate and helpful: it informs me about stuff that I should have known about but hadn’t.
Recommendation engines are central to the “personalisation” of online content and were once seen as largely benign…