[Linganth] Nick Seaver on Computing Taste

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Nick Seaver answers Tarleton Gillespie's questions about his book,
Computing Taste, on the CaMP anthropology blog today.

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: Meet the people who design the algorithms that capture our
musical tastes.

The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want
to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences,
taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like
Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender
systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten
culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and
they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years of
ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver describes how the makers
of music recommendation navigate these tensions: how product managers
understand their relationship with the users they want to help and to
capture; how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data
processing; and how engineers imagine the geography of the world of music
as a space they care for and control.

*Computing Taste* rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world,
drawing attention to the people who build and maintain them. In this
vividly theorized book, Seaver brings the thinking of programmers into
conversation with the discipline of anthropology, opening up the cultural
world of computation in a wide-ranging exploration that travels from
cosmology to calculation, myth to machine learning, and captivation to care.
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