Theme 3 Post #1

Selected Research Journal:

New Media & Society is a highly ranked journal with focus on research of theory and practice in Media, Culture and communication. It was first published in 1999 and it’s latest impact factor was 3.110.

Selected Research Article:

Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture

B. Hallinan, T Striphas

Published in New Media & Society on June 23rd 2014

The article seeks out to analyse the effects of algorithms on our culture. Algorithms increasingly shape our culture in different ways. An example would be through recommender systems which provides a user with suggestions on items the user might like, be it music, movies or other things. In the article they analyse the Netflix Prize and try to draw conclusions on the effects of this algorithmic development on culture. The Netflix Prize was an open competition proposed by Netflix to improve their recommendation system. The first team to improve their movie recommendations by 10% would receive 1.000.000$ in price money. In the article they examine this competition on an abstract level and look on what effect algorithms have on culture.

Firstly they try to define what culture means. They admit that culture it’s hard to find a clear explanation of what culture is. They use their own as well as external sources to try show what culture could encompass. They further argue that there’s been a recent change in our society with the advent of new information technology. Today, engineers find themselves in a sweet spot of being able to almost define what culture is and in which direction to change it. Algorithms are forces which could come to shape our culture. What’s interesting about this competition is that not only is the focus on the algorithms but the competitors are also forced to understand the human culture and why people behave the way they do. For recommender systems it’s important to understand the underlying meaning of previous user ratings, in order to suggest items of interest in the future. Another important thing is that algorithms or other tools might reveal something about our culture. In the winning contribution they use a mathematical tool called Singular Value Decomposition. This has resulted in good performance but the interpretation of why it does so is in some ways a mystery. Algorithms are part of our culture as well as potential shapers of it, be it through recommendations or other applications.

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.

First of all, I think there’s no simple explanation of what theory is. It’s a word for which it’s hard to find consensus between people about the meaning of it. Even though it’s an abstract object, people do probably have opinons about its meaning. Before reading the texts I would have tried to explain that theory is a way of describing how something in the world works. I would also say that theory can exist on different levels. There could be a theory for an entire field of research and also for a subtopic in that field. Theory has multiple forms and it differs from field to field. I also subscribe to the notion of theory presented in the texts. which is about answering questions of the type why and also to make predictions about what things might lead to. It’s also important to mention which they do in the paper, that theory is not data or empirical results, but analytical thought of why the data turned out they way they did or thoughts about what this might result in. Theory is about humans trying to understand the world from a human perspective, how we interpret it.

2. Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

The article is a qualitative analysis of the impact of algortihms on culture. The major theory used is an explanatory one. The authors do make some minor predictive attempts but quite limited and I would argue that they’re not enough to classify it as a predictive theory. I would say that this should be, by the taxonomy established by Gregor, classified under the second category Explanation. It’s a too detailed explaination for it to be classified under the Analysis category, and the predictions lacks in precision for it to be categorized under the EP category. Furthermore, the predictions are not really testable which is a criteria for the EP category.

3. Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

Benefits are that the reader will get a chance to make predictions about the future. The authors just provide the backdrop on which the predictions can be based. This could as well be a limitation if it’s hard to draw any conclusions or generalize. What is then the purpose of the explanation if you can’t use it?

Another limitation with this theory is that explanations aren’t necessarily objective. Even if the explanations are based on recorded data the interpretations could be skewed or wrong (is the theory strong enough?).