Nick Seaver, "Algorithmic Recommendations and Synaptic Functions", contributed by James Adams, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 5 August 2018, accessed 26 December 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/algorithmic-recommendations-and-synaptic-functions-1
Critical Commentary
In this article, Nick Seaver builds upon Marshal Sahlins' (1978) notion of the "synaptic function" of demographic marketing by considering the implications of a new algorithmic marketing technology: collaborative filtering. Seaver discusses how the developers of these algorithm-based recommenders are performatively rearticulating relationships between people and things in ways that complicate classic conceptions of collectivity, individuality, and the networks of correspondences between them.