Ted Striphas

Watch this keynote on youtube. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7.

Affiliation

Associate Professor, Dept. of Communication & Culture, Indiana University (Bloomington, USA)

Keynote lecture: Algorithmic Culture

Increasingly we human beings are delegating the work of culture - the sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing of people, places, objects, and ideas - to computational process. This is evident everywhere from the personalized product recommendations we receive on shopping sites like Amazon.com to the searches we perform on Google and elsewhere. Such a shift, I believe, fundamentally alters how the category culture has long been practiced, experienced, and understood, giving rise to the phenomenon that I am calling "algorithmic culture." The purpose of this talk is to trace some of the conditions out of which algorithmic culture has emerged and, in doing so, to offer a preliminary treatment on what "it" is.

I proceed along the lines of the introduction to Raymond Williams' Culture and Society (1958). There, he traces the semantic context out of which early 20th century understandings of culture emerged, focusing specifically on four keywords: art, class, democracy, and industry. Similarly, I want to single out a small group of terms-three, to be precise - whose bearing on the meaning of the word culture has been unusually strong over the last two or three decades. My claim is that the offloading of cultural work onto computers, databases, and other types of digital technologies has prompted a major reshuffling of the terms surrounding the word culture, giving rise to whole new senses of the term that may be experientially available but have yet to be sufficiently well named or recorded. Williams identified the first one in his later work-information; the other two-crowd and algorithm - are my own. As the title of this talk suggests, the last of these is arguably the most decisive in terms of explaining what culture means and how it works today.

In addition to his keynote lecture, Ted Striphas will also organize a seminar entitled: Critical practice and the future of cultural studies

About

Ted Striphas is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, USA. His work focuses on the history of media and technologies of communication; the politics of intellectual properties, and the institutional formations of cultural studies. His research has appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cultural Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Television and New Media, among other journals. His book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia University Press, 2009) won the 2010 Book of the Year Award from the National Communication Association's (USA) Critical Cultural Studies Division. He maintains two blogs: Differences and Repetitions (http://www.diffandrep.org), about media, philosophy, and the politics of culture; and The Late Age of Print (http://www.thelateageofprint.org), about the past, present, and future of books.