Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet

Ted Striphas

Published by Columbia University Press 2023

Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet

Ted Striphas

https://doi.org/10.7312/stri20668

Overview
Contents

About this book

Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled.

Author / Editor information

Ted Striphas is associate professor of media studies and affiliate faculty in information science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia, 2009) and coeditor of the journal Cultural Studies.

Reviews

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy:
This book takes readers to unexpected places, making brilliant and original connections across vast bodies of knowledge. It is sure to enhance the historical understanding of anyone interested in computers, social media, and the culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Nick Seaver, author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation:
This prehistory of algorithmic culture steps back from the relentless novelty of much writing about computing, helping us realize that algorithms, culture, and the relationship between them are stranger and older than we might have thought.

Tarleton Gillespie, author of Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media:
Masterful and fascinating. Each chapter, grappling with a keyword and uncovering its fraught construction, took me somewhere I didn’t expect to go. This is the book we need to advance the study of algorithms as part of the history of culture.

Anne Balsamo, author of Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work:
Ted Striphas writes engagingly about the history of the entanglement of the concepts of “culture” and “algorithm” by rethinking the cultural work of the humble keyword. This is the book—and the histories—we need to help us understand what is at stake in the prevailing articulation of culture, technology, and power.

Charles R. Acland, author of American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder:
Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet tackles a too-often neglected aspect of our computer world: the cultural dimensions of algorithmic certainty. Ted Striphas shifts our critical gaze away from the supposed historically and technologically unique features of digital mechanisms to construct a sweeping tale of terminology, logic, and instrumentality. He has written an essential study that is by equal measure surprising, convincing, and engaging.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Welcome to the Machine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Key- Words Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
2 Algorithm Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
3 Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
4 Algorithmic Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Epilogue: Coming to Terms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	319

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 11 b&w illustrations

eBook

Published: June 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780231556606