Algorithms and the Problem of Intellectual Passivity

My co-instructor and I knew we had our work cut out for us. The seminar was “Modern Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Future” — and our students were arguably closer to the material than we were. I’m an Xennial raised on TGIF sitcoms and Christopher Pike paperbacks. In high school, I sent saucy Hotmail messages to a crush at a rival school while the nuns at my Catholic school taught us PageMaker. John, my co-instructor, grew up a latchkey kid addicted to cable in the ‘70s and ‘80s and went on to meet his husband in an AOL chat room. Our students were born after 9/11 and reared to the bouncy refrain of the Hannah Montana theme song. They learned how to scroll before learning how to ride a bike, and their smartphones are inseparable from their senses of self.

Is their technological environment “hostile to human development,” as a recent Jonathan Haidt Atlantic essay claims? Such generational hand-wringing is a well-trod path: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” asked Nicholas Carr in 2008. “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” fretted Jean M. Twenge nine years later. I don’t think the internet has made my students stupid, and I don’t think quirky memes have demolished their attention spans. As a feminist culture critic, I’ve undoubtedly benefited by learning from students what’s trending online, from the “coquette” aesthetic on Instagram to fear-mongering “age filter” TikTok videos.

But as of this past year — with a college class that started middle school around 2016, the year Instagram and Twitter swapped chronological for algorithmic feeds — something has felt different, and it’s not just the yawning gap between our ages. “Who’s the target audience?” I’d ask in class, followed with an ominous, “And why does that matter?” Contemplating everything from a Harper’s essay to an early Lana Del Rey video, my Gen Z students propose: “It targets Gen Z,” even when that seems all but impossible.

How many 8-year-olds were watching Del Rey’s “Video Games” in 2012? How many teens subscribe to a magazine whose back pages peddle orthopedic footwear? At risk of sounding very Gen Z, there’s been a vibe whenever we’ve dug into the context of any cultural artifact or publication — it’s as if we were navigating the same media terrain but one of us had a busted compass.

Enter “Filterworld,” what Kyle Chayka defines in his book of the same name as “the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed.” Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer, argues that the dominance of algorithmic feeds — especially on social media and streaming platforms — is responsible for a “pervasive flattening ... across culture,” wherein “the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most.”

This strikes me as true when I consider the death of midbudget cinema or the dearth of sonic variety on Top 40 radio stations. But the concept of Filterworld also helps me understand the wildly different ways my students approach media. I have seen TikTok transform young people into more politically engaged and sensitive citizens. I have also seen how the forces of Filterworld have all but precluded students’ grasp of context. Why should students know or care about a specific author, audience, or place of publication when the vast majority of content they consume is stripped of these markers and algorithmically tailored to their individual tastes and values? Why should they think chronologically when most of the content they consume is devoid of historical tags — or tagged in a way that convolutes history?

Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, claimed “the medium is the message.” For Chayka, “the medium is the algorithmic feed; it has scaled and sped up humanity’s interconnection across the world to an unimaginable degree.” If algorithms skew content toward homogeneity, for which Chayka supplies considerable evidence, they also replace chronology as a framework to make sense of content. When I was in college, almost all the media I consumed — from Spin magazine to Cat Power CDs to weekly Survivor episodes to newly released DVDs from the local Family Video — were inherently historical at the time of consumption. When I joined Facebook and Twitter in my 20s and 30s, my feed supplied a steady narrative where time stamps were the norm: This post was from a specific friend on the Fourth of July; this tweet from two days later prompted a string of comments the following morning.

It’s different for students today. Their feeds send a constant, curated stream of content tailored just to them, often devoid of any sense of contextual origin. A thumbnail for Friends floats next to Euphoria on the Max homepage; Spotify lines up Phoebe Bridgers after PJ Harvey. Years after the untimely death of the Cranberries’ lead vocalist, the refrain from 1993’s “Linger” has been memefied on TikTok to mean self-consciously indulging in ennui. When I encourage students to analyze relatively recent cultural artifacts, on or off social media, many seem entirely at a loss for how to delineate the basic rhetorical situation. It’s not their fault. The creator, original date, and audience are rarely specified online.

As Chayka points out, TikTok — by far the most popular app for my undergrads — boasts an almost entirely algorithmic “For You” feed. From its inception, the “app experience was less about who the users chose to follow,” he writes, “than which content the recommendation algorithm selected for them.” Whether it be the viral dance moves of Charli D’Amelio or what I’ve learned are called “skinfluencer” vids, “the culture that thrives in Filterworld tends to be accessible, replicable, participatory, and ambient.”

No wonder that curious undergrads often shirk ambiguous texts, from poetry to film to irreverent advertisements; what is not “relatable” can often come across as automatically elitist, a far cry from the advisedly offbeat fare that filled out my media diet in college. “Whichever content fits in that zone of averageness sees accelerated promotion and growth,” Chayka claims, “while the rest falls to the wayside.” Our students aren’t incentivized to devote time developing a taste palate distinct from their peers’ — the badge of honor that, for instance, prompted repeat listens to Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele or plodding through the byzantine chapters of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (which, I concede, was totally overrated).

But more than a dampened zest for difficulty due to the homogenization of content, today’s algorithmically curated feeds discourage users from actively seeking out new knowledge and experiences. Why plug in terms from a keyboard if an invisible algo-deity is already doing that for you? Why hunt down another album if Spotify is sure to line up a track that so closely matches the last one you liked? We tend to assume that students have years of experience actively “surfing” the net, balancing on the Google search bar as they brave swells of information. The reality is that they’ve barely left their lounge chairs on the beach, catching sea shells of knowledge and entertainment cast in their exact direction.

This is strange to those of us who remember the 56k modem. Even undergrads five years ago were more likely to actively pursue content online — be it scholarship for a project or a definition on their smartphone. “The network of algorithms makes so many decisions for us,” Chayka writes. “The more automated an algorithmic feed is, the more passive it makes us as consumers.” This helps to explain why one of my brightest students critiquing “girlboss feminism” for her research project did not search JSTOR or Google Scholar for “girlboss feminism,” and assumed there was nothing academic on the topic. It’s tempting to blame indolence for these oversights. But these are students who regularly attend office hours and carry heavy course loads. Many of them applied to over 15 colleges in high school. And yet they are eerily thunderstruck when I pull up a scholarly source with a few search terms.

In 1985, the media theorist Neil Postman lamented the spate of Americans plunking down on their La-Z-Boys, picking up a remote, and aiming it at a console television. In Filterworld, those deliberative acts — moving, pointing, discerning, clicking — would seem downright assertive compared to the norm. Forty years after Postman decried the nation’s passivity in front of the tube, many of us would be thrilled to see undergraduates actively seeking out media that isn’t algorithmically channeled to them.

In my modern-media class, I was especially surprised at how hard it was to teach students about older forms of media. For their final presentations, our students were asked to compare and contrast the reportage of a chosen news event from a traditional source of media versus a new media platform. One student distributed a print copy of a Wired interview with a notorious tech maverick, explaining that a “magazine’s role was to give readers information” (as though the mag were a dry repository of facts). By contrast, “YouTube,” evidently, “targets Gen Z” (even though the finance video in question was helmed by a bunch of broey 30-somethings). Many students assumed that any media that existed in the 20th century must certainly be less biased and more reliable, and that anything online was targeting “the current generation” — i.e., them — and not the majority of planet’s population still breathing oxygen at present.

For many of my students, the 20th century is a colorful blur of wars, protests, and polyester (though not always in that order). Several of them seemed genuinely startled when I clarified that Taylor Swift is not a “Gen Z pop star,” that she is closer to my age (cringe). Students often refer to anything prior to the 21st century as the “1900s,” as though suffragettes and riot grrrls were interchangeable. In discussing the drop in sports fandom among Gen Z, I mused that a decline in regionalism might play a role. Apparently not: “The actual reason is eugenics,” announced an especially punctilious student. “In the 1900s,” he explained, “eugenics was popular and connected to sports popularity, and was connected to fascism. Gen Z doesn’t want to affiliate with that.” In these moments, I can only be grateful that my bangs conceal the furrows of my brow.

The detachment that students often have from relatively recent history can be alarming for anyone with an audiovisual Rolodex of decades past. To be sure, the pandemic didn’t help young people in this regard, but Filterworld seems the real culprit. And we’re all implicated by that — professors as much as students. I too kowtow to formats that dull my sense of nuance and narrative. How often do I mindlessly scroll Twitter or Facebook, even when my feed is littered with ads for anti-aging gimmicks and the endlessly repeated news of a colleague’s enviable book deal? How often do I click on Netflix recommendations rather than actively scout out a new TV show? As a film and culture critic, I purposely pursue new content a lot more than most — it’s part of the job — but I still get snagged in Filterworld’s web.

How might we embrace a less filtered path? “We cannot just rid ourselves of algorithmic influence,” Chayka writes, “since the technology has already inexorably shaped our era.” That said, “by moving away from the mind-set of passive consumption … we demonstrate that the influence of algorithms is neither inevitable nor permanent.” Cultivating a more active mind-set could mean scanning an FM radio dial for a quirky independent channel or physically browsing a bookstore at least once a month. It could mean rereading a book from the distant past rather than downloading the most recent best seller.

As educators, we should aim to emphasize narrative and historical context whenever possible, even when that context feels self-evident. Did this film come out during the War on Drugs, or was it the War on Terror? Was this novel published during the Great Recession or the Great Resignation? We can repeatedly ask students to name authors, dates, and publications — and if they don’t know, we can blithely show them how to look it up. We can also model an active mind-set. If I don’t recognize a vocabulary word in a reading, I’ll announce my ignorance out loud, ask if anyone can define it, and, in the case no one can, look it up on the class desktop for all to see. The same goes for an unknown date, academic term, or citation-formatting question. In normalizing ignorance, and in our active pursuit to correct the ignorance, we show students that we have nothing against the internet; it’s how we approach it that matters.

We can also encourage students to apply knowledge acquired on their laptop screens to new physical spaces and primary sources. “How does this new foyer convey institutional capital?” I ask my “College Writing” students at the entrance of our university art museum. “How does this 1930s varsity sweater relate to Samuel McDonald’s recent essay about men’s fashion?” I ask when we visit the library’s special collections. When students regularly connect abstract concepts to the material world, they are less likely to ignore chronology — whether in contextualizing media or in narrating their own lives.

“Something new is on the horizon,” Chayka writes in his conclusion. Whether “it is a flood of even more artificial content generated by artificial-intelligence machines or a renaissance for human self-expression depends on our choices.” Even if it can feel like a burden, as educators we have the rare privilege of guiding our students through Filterworld toward brighter, more unexpected vistas. To do so will demand real patience and compassion — not just for the minds of young people but for ourselves as we trek through an ever-thickening forest of digital content.