Computing Taste : Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation

Nick Seaver

ISBN 10: 0226822974 / ISBN 13: 9780226822976

Editore: University Of Chicago Press Dez 2022, 2022

Riguardo questo articolo

Neuware - 'For the people who make them, music recommender systems hold a utopian promise: they can broaden listeners' horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and their kin. But for critics, recommender systems have come to epitomize the potential harms of algorithms: they seem to reduce expressive culture to numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends, tearing the social fabric into isolated patches of atomized individuals. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver offers an account of 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 engineers imagine the abstract geography of the 'world of music' as a space they control and care for, how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing. The book rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, foregrounding the ideas animating the people who build and maintain them. Seaver braids together the thinking of programmers and anthropologists, opening up the cultural world of computation in a vividly theorized book that ranges widely from cosmology to calculation, metaphor to myth, and captivation to care'.

Codice articolo 9780226822976

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Computing Taste : Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation
• Editore: University Of Chicago Press Dez 2022
• Data di pubblicazione: 2022
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0226822974
• ISBN 13: 9780226822976
• Rilegatura: Taschenbuch
• Condizione: Neu
• Dimensioni: 226 L x 147 A x 15 P (millimetri) 226 millimetri di larghezza per 147 millimetri di altezza per 15 millimetri di profondità
• Peso: 348 grammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

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.

Informazioni sull?autore

Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. He is coeditor of Towards an Anthropology of Data.