The Internet Suggests: Film, Recommender Systems, and Cultural Mediation

Abstract

Has there ever been a medium as hyped or hated as the internet? Of course, historians have shown that every new communications system, whether the telegraph, telephone, cinema, radio, broadcast television, or cable television, has inspired magical thinking and anxious moral panics about its supposed influence on users' lives and the body politic. 1 But none of these prior innovations enjoyed the internet's do-it-yourself generation-and-dissemination dynamics to promote and revile itself, at least since the late 1990s, when cyberspace (remember that?) expanded widely outside military installations and universities. That I and many of this journal's readers were intellectually and politically conscious at its birth hour only intensifies the visceral impact of the shrill voices of utopia and apocalypse that have competed, seemingly unabated, for attention ever since.In crucial ways, these hopes, dreams, anxieties, and nightmares have been more interesting to me than the forms and functionality of the technology itself. The internet has reinvigorated deep-seated beliefs about how society should be organized and who should lead or control its opinion-leading communications apparatus. Inevitably, commentators projected their own fantasies and paranoias onto this new thing. Aca-fans predicted the mainstreaming of cult tastes and surmised that media executives would henceforth pay them heed. 2 Entrepreneurs, as Andrew J. Bottomley's contribution to this In Focus indicates, envisioned tapping into vast new aggregations of value-that is, making money-by linking niche items with niche markets. 3

Picturing Diversity: Netflix’s Inclusion Strategy and the Netflix Recommender Algorithm (NRA)

“…Audiences can also actively exercise agency through their social networks. Recommendations from friends, peers, and other social networks also shape this relationship (Frey 2019, 167), as the example of Bridgerton shows, despite the persistent whitewashing of its promotional imagery. Algorithms thus form part of broader situated practices of sociality.…”

“Shudder” and the Aesthetics and Platform Logics of Genre-Specific SVOD services

“…Other categories on the platform include “Monster Mash,” “A Good Scare,” “Comedy of Terrors,” “Possessions: The Devil Made Me Do it!,” “Weird Science,” and “Smart Slashers”—the last of which features films that, according to the platform’s description, “forgo the formulas” to offer “distinctive deaths and smart scares you’ll never see coming” (Shudder 2021). Thus, in contrast to offering the first tier SVODs’ focus on “personalization” (Frey 2019, 165), Shudder’s catalog organization interpellates users as horror connoisseurs, already literate with the genre’s history, various subgenres, and icons.…”

Taking Netflix to the Cinema: National Cinema Value Chain Disruptions in the Age of Streaming

“…22 On the topic of cultural mediation, Frey asserts that video-on-demand (VOD) recommender systems need to be understood in the context of continuities with other media consumption guides (e.g., festival programs, video store clerks). 23 In seeking a "functional archaeology of cultural recommendation and media consumption choice," 24 Frey charts a more moderate position relative to the fraught debate over how digital disruption impacts the shaping of taste and cultural preference. References to taste and the disruption of hierarchies of cultural value (on a polarized continuum from utopian de-intermediation to new regimes of marketing surveillance) suggest a digital restaging of the art house versus mainstream distinction that pushes Netflix outside of cinephilic studies of SVOD.…”