Stephanie G. Mathis The selection for today has the oddly specific and strangely titled “lo fi anti-folk Wednesday early morning”. To be clear, I am not anti-folk. This is a typical scene, despite the odd label.
Algorithms on technology platforms are well-known to us. They can choose for us TV music, products, or travel destinations.
These platforms can transform something that seems so personal , like music taste. The daylist embeds predictions about music preferences into our daily routines by matching music choices to the time of the day.
This article is a part of Quarter Life. It’s a series of articles about issues that affect those of us who are in our 20s and 30s. The challenges of starting a career, taking care of your mental health and the excitement of having a child, or adopting a pet, are all part of the Quarter Life series. These articles explore questions and provide answers to help us navigate through this turbulent time in our lives.
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We have lived with streaming for quite some time. For many people, our music choices have gone from being informed by radio, music press, magazines and TV shows, to a fine-grained level of personalisation.
Spotify’s algorithm is responsible for shaping your tastes.
Predicting and changing tastes
Spotify and other streaming platforms have been trying to ” compute taste” for over 15 years.
The streaming platforms have data on us and everyone else who streams through them. Despite all the data, it is still difficult to predict taste. Researchers have found that they are not focusing on predicting tastes, but rather predicting things like attention and engagement instead.
You will have an impact on someone if you use data to analyze and predict their music tastes. In sociological research, this problem is well-known. But, if you study social life, you will also change it. People change their behavior in response when they are analyzed.
We assume that there is a beginning point when we imagine our taste. We guess our tastes and how these algorithms are learning to respond. Taste does not exist in isolation. Spotify will continue to offer you certain genres and artists. You are more likely then to develop a liking or interest for the music. The data collected will then be used to confirm the prediction.
A recursive society
In isolation, an algorithmically created playlist or an automated song selection isn’t that important. The repetition of the process over time is what matters. Through constant exposure to these predictions, our tastes change in response to the things we are exposed to.
In my research, I have described this broader shift as ” Recursive Society “. In a recursive culture, we’re surrounded by analytical and algorithmic processes which have been repeated over a long period of time.
The choices and the outcomes of those choices have become less human and more algorithmic. Over time, this happens repeatedly and each step informs the next. This means that our society and individual experiences are the result of a recursive process in which automated data analysis shapes and impacts both the choices we make and those made about us. It goes back to the days before Spotify and includes things like CD recommendations on Amazon.
Daylist: chilled, happy Wednesday commute. Ottawa/Shutterstock
It is impossible to separate our identity, our knowledge, and our taste from algorithmic processing loops, as these choices keep the same cycle going. The algorithms can’t be separated from music taste. You have been influenced by streaming platforms, even if you stop using them today. If you choose to do this, you will likely find that the music you listen to is a result of others being influenced by their choices.
We have lived in the midst of these processes for far too long. It’s possible that you don’t remember a time when music and other cultural content were consumed through streaming platforms.
Musical taste is not a personal thing. It is a result of the way we are socialized through our friendship networks, where we live, family, the media, and other cultural institutions.
Our identities and day lists
It matters because the music we like is central to our ability to form and present who we are. We also use it as a way of connecting with others and establishing a feeling of belonging. The algorithms that shape our tastes also influence how we perceive ourselves.
The Spotify daylists reveal how the system anticipates our tastes in a way that keeps us coming back to it. The detailed and responsive adaptations to the time and day of the week and the different aspects of our music listening show us how complex our data has become.
The daylist is only possible in a society that has a recursive system and where we have long-term data analysis systems which collect and store information about us. It reveals that our tastes are constructed over time by many algorithmic loops, changing us rather than reflecting who we are.
