Description
Book SynopsisAlgorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled.
Trade ReviewAlgorithmic 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. -- Charles R. Acland, author of
American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and WonderTed 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. -- Anne Balsamo, author of
Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at WorkMasterful 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. -- Tarleton Gillespie, author of
Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social MediaThis 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. -- Nick Seaver, author of
Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music RecommendationThis 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. -- Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of
Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines DemocracyRecommended. * Choice Reviews *
This book provides much food for thought to those who study the intersection of technology and media . . . Striphas’s account is bold in its independence, finding precedents in unexpected places. * Technology and Culture *
[This book] would appeal especially to those readers with an interest in intellectual history following the
1960s. * H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Welcome to the Machine
1. Key-Words
2. Algorithm
3. Culture
4. Algorithmic Culture
Epilogue: Coming to Terms
Notes
Index
