Beyond Algorithmic Determination: Why The Real World Is Hard To Flatten

Filterworld, meet Leicester

Last week, I read Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: a detailed analysis of the many ways the algorithms underpinning social media, product and entertainment platforms from Amazon and Facebook to Netflix and Spotify are beginning to “flatten” global digital cultures into a single, homogenous pancake of identikit “content” and aesthetics.

I also read – and wholeheartedly agreed with – a LinkedIn post from insight specialist Andy Crysell about the value of embedded cultural knowledge in research. That is: why it’s important to know a place and a cultural context intimately, or work in tandem with someone who does, if you’re going to speak with any sort of authority about that culture, that context.

And I saw, as I’m sure you did, more “AI” digital products and platforms than I can count purporting to offer “better than human” services to customers, in many cases by subtracting the human element altogether.

Hence, the article you’re reading now.

It would be very easy to look at the digital content we consume – and that consumes us – and conclude, as Kyle Chayka does, that the world as a whole is flattening. In some ways, I agree with him: his observation about the pervasiveness of the uniform, Instagram-ready look and feel of hospitality spaces from Kyōto to Brooklyn, for example, strikes me as spot-on. It’s certainly the case that certain venues, certain architectural forms, certain styles and cultural practices can be found as readily in parts of London, Berlin, Dublin and Buenos Aires as in parts of New York; sociologists like Bev Skeggs (and before her, Ulrich Beck) have been talking about cosmopolitanism and the (re)production of global knowledge almost as long as I’ve been alive.

But – this isn’t the whole of it. It’s not even a bite of a forkful of a sliver of the whole of it. Global cultures – all of them – are bigger, messier, uglier and more complicated than even the most powerful of algorithms can mould into a coherent shape. And they can’t be approximated digitally. To talk about any of those cultures with any real credibility, to know that what you’re saying is founded on demonstrable, visible cultural evidence and not a house of speculative cards – you have to be there. You have to know those cultures, to be embedded in them – or, where you can’t be, to put yourself in the hands of a capable observer who is and does.

(Friends who work in research, I realise, will wonder why I’m bothering to make this point at all. For anyone with even a passing interest in or knowledge of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and the rest, statements like “you need to go out into the world and look at things if you’re going to draw conclusions about them” are self-evident; they shouldn’t need saying.

But, given how often we’re told lately that human researchers, human analysts, human creators – human beings – can be subtracted from research, analysis and creation processes with no loss to anyone at all… perhaps they do need saying, still. Often, and loudly).

To illustrate the point I want to make here – that current physical-world cultural environments largely resist “flattening,” even as entertainment and social media content collapses into an ever more homogenous puddle; that you can’t infer all that much about how people live and how their worlds turn from digital sources alone; that you shouldn’t mistake what’s digitally available and easily assimilated by AI engines for rich or nuanced cultural knowledge – I want to take you to a place you may never have been, and perhaps have never wanted to go.

I want to take you to Leicester.

Now, I grew up in Leicester. I live here now, and – excepting extended sojourns to London, the US and sunny Sheffield in my 20s and 30s – have been based here for much of my life. I know the place well; my perspective on it is very much of the emic, not the etic variety.

And I am as certain as I’ve ever been about anything that you cannot get to know Leicester – its sights, sounds, smells and whatever cultural significance it might contain – from looking at and reading about it second-hand.

Just as I’m certain that Leicester, like all cities, isn’t actually “flat” at all, despite the efforts of Instagram’s filters and those homogenising algorithms. It’s spiked and it’s curved; it’s vertiginously steep and head-scratchingly winding. Like everywhere, it contains multitudes – not just the dead kings and fabulous paneer makhanis you might have heard about.

Like all cities, Leicester is weird. And. to really see and understand its weirdness, you have to dig a bit.

For example:

We have, as the local tourist boards are keen to emphasise, a rich cultural heritage. We have Roman names and artefacts and ruins, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with references to Plantagenet royals (like the one buried under that car park) and statues of Mahatma Gandhi. We’re a majority South Asian city, so we do Diwali and Mela and Vaisakhi and Eid; we do, as sites like The Fork will tell you, an excellent curry. We used to be a force to be reckoned with in textile manufacturing; to this day, one of our universities is internally recognised for its contour fashion and shoe design courses.

You can find out all of this, and more, in a 30-second Google search. And you might think, after that 30-second Google search, that you’d got a pretty decent handle on what Leicester is about.

You’d be wrong.

No amount of flattering (and flattening) photos of restaurants and monuments and cobbled streets (and, to Chayka’s point, coffee shops) uploaded by users and unearthed by a #leicester hashtag or a sweep of digitised image archives will tell you what it’s like to actually be here. Why people shop here but not there, when there is cheaper and more central; why that stretch of road is best avoided at night but this one is fine, no matter what the crime stats suggest; why older people still call this shopping centre by that name, when that name has been defunct for nearly 20 years.

Why people in the city might love this local product or regional ad campaign, but laugh that one out of the room.

And that’s before we get started on the multisensory semiotic cues that can’t be approximated by digital or mechanical reproduction: those sounds, those smells, those textures…

You might be asking: why should I care about Leicester? Isn’t it just another crap town in a part of the UK nobody thinks too much about unless they have to?

(Don’t feel bad, if you are. It’s nothing I haven’t asked myself before).

The answer is: because much of what I’ve said about Leicester – it’s weirdness, its resistance to the flattening influence of Filterworld and any straightforward assimilation into digital data-point form, its multisensory dimensions – could be said of anywhere. What’s true of Leicester is just as true of Coventry and Hull and Antrim and Aberdeen; of Frankfurt, Chengdu, Amsterdam and Yogyakarta.

Hell: it’s true of London and New York, Cape Town and S?o Paulo, once you scrape away the thin veneer of aesthetic uniformity that seems to flatten them out and group them together, if only at the coffee shop level.

No amount of digital digging, no proprietary tool or algorithm can tell you what a place is actually like, on the ground. Or how the people there actually live, day-to-day.

If you want to know about people and places, about human behaviour and cultural environments – for your own edification, or to better understand and serve the needs of your customers – you need to Go and See.

#culturalinsight #culture #semiotics #research #filterworld #mrx