Overview

Today, algorithms exercise outsize influence on cultural decision-making, shaping and even reshaping the concept of culture. How were automated, computational processes empowered to perform this work? What forces prompted the emergence of algorithmic culture? Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled. From Cambridge, England to Cambridge, Massachusetts by way of medieval Baghdad, this book pinpoints the critical junctures at which algorithmic culture began to coalesce in language long before it materialized in the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. Revising and extending the methodology of keywords, Ted Striphas examines changing concepts and definitions of culture, including the development of the field of cultural studies, and stresses the importance of language in the history of technology. Offering historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship of culture and computation, this book provides urgently needed context for the algorithmic injustices that beset the world today.

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9780231206693

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Reviews

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. -- Nick Seaver, author of <i>Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation</i> Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet tackles a too-often neglected aspect of our computer world: the cultural dimensions of algorithmic certainty. Striphas shifts our critical gaze away from the supposedly 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 <i>American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder</i>

Author 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.

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