Bespoke content diets
The wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and vexation of spirit.
I recently re-read the wonderful article From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities by L.M. Sacasas by
. The argument I took from it:We can define a “common world” broadly as the people with whom we share information.
In pre-literate societies, one had a world in common with those in geographic proximity. Your world, so to speak, was the people who sat around your campfire.
With the development of information technology, limits on content got eroded, and our common world increased in size: think the common world of an early Church community, reading epistles from abroad and interpreting them together, or the common world of America in the 90s, watching Tom Brokaw on NBC.
Perhaps as late as the 2000s, we started to receive so much content that the limit shifted from how much we were provided to how much we chose to consume. This was determined by faction (e.g., do you watch Fox or CNN?) and is now increasingly being individualised by algorithms on social media.
In short, our “common worlds” have turned into “bespoke realities.” Our world has shifted from the people around our campfire, to the people of our nation, then down to the people of our belief faction, and now increasingly to a single-person content diet curated by an algorithm just for is.
At first, when I read this, I figured it didn’t apply to me. I don’t read much content curated via algorithms. I don’t use Instagram, nor TikTok, nor Facebook. Most of my content is fed to me via recommendations by friends, and then perhaps a chain of further recommendations from the authors of the websites and books they have recommended. Instead of relying on algorithms to curate information, I rely on recommendations of individuals I trust. But that is still a bespoke reality, just one curated by my network rather than by an algorithm.
I find this term “bespoke reality” intriguing. It captures an important truth: the content we view is being curated individually. Occasionally you’ll hear people say “algorithms curate the content you see.” But that doesn’t feel quite right - the algorithm is not curating content by its own value judgments. Rather, it is learning from you individually what content it should curate. I think that we consume a bespoke content diet regardless of whether we let algorithms do it or whether we start selecting for ourselves and using our networks. We don’t live around campfires anymore.
The fact we consume bespoke content diets either way raises a serious question for me: What is the difference between algorithms and friends who function as curators? Why is it that I prefer my content to be curated by the latter method? There is certainly a large difference - the content curated by social media algorithms is widely divergent from that curated by my e-mail inbox. Two points I note:
Algorithmically-curated content is much shorter. I suspect that, given the ease of switching content, I am much more likely to switch off at the first challenge. I wouldn’t stop my Instagram Explore feed to read an essay.
Algorithmically-curated content also speaks to more animalistic desires. TikTok videos on my feed are mostly stupid jokes, sexually-provocative videos, and things designed to produce anger.
I think the commonality between these two descriptions is that the algorithmically-curated content is not as challenging. The content provided by my favourite websites, authors, and friends doesn’t rely on providing what my instincts want, but rather challenges me to improve myself in some way. This would also explain the difficulty I have in choosing to consume it, if both are available: content curated by my friends is deliberately curated to be more challenging to me - it is often based on “Oh, you want to learn this? You should read that.” On the other hand, Instagram feeds are deliberately designed to be less challenging.
For my friends who choose to read this blog and would like to engage:
How do you curate your content? Do you think you consume a bespoke content diet?
Do you see differences between algorithms curating bespoke diets for you and whatever curator you use?