Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet - by Ted Striphas (Paperback)

About the Book

Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled.

Book Synopsis

Honorable Mention, 2024 Ángel David Nieves Book Award, American Studies Association, Digital Humanities Caucus

Today, algorithms exercise outsize influence on cultural decision-making, shaping and even reshaping the concept of culture. How were automated, computational processes empowered to perform this work? What forces prompted the emergence of algorithmic culture?

Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled. From Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by way of medieval Baghdad, this book pinpoints the critical junctures at which algorithmic culture began to coalesce in language long before it materialized in the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. Revising and extending the methodology of "keywords," Ted Striphas examines changing concepts and definitions of culture, including the development of the field of cultural studies, and stresses the importance of language in the history of technology.

Offering historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship of culture and computation, this book provides urgently needed context for the algorithmic injustices that beset the world today.

Review Quotes

[This book] would appeal especially to those readers with an interest in intellectual history following the
1960s.

-- "H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews"

This book provides much food for thought to those who study the intersection of technology and media . . . Striphas's account is bold in its independence, finding precedents in unexpected places.-- "Technology and Culture"

Recommended.-- "Choice Reviews"

Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet tackles a too-often neglected aspect of our computer world: the cultural dimensions of algorithmic certainty. Ted Striphas shifts our critical gaze away from the supposed historically and technologically unique features of digital mechanisms to construct a sweeping tale of terminology, logic, and instrumentality. He has written an essential study that is by equal measure surprising, convincing, and engaging.--Charles R. Acland, author of American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder

Masterful and fascinating. Each chapter, grappling with a keyword and uncovering its fraught construction, took me somewhere I didn't expect to go. This is the book we need to advance the study of algorithms as part of the history of culture.--Tarleton Gillespie, author of Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media

Ted Striphas writes engagingly about the history of the entanglement of the concepts of "culture" and "algorithm" by rethinking the cultural work of the humble keyword. This is the book--and the histories--we need to help us understand what is at stake in the prevailing articulation of culture, technology, and power.--Anne Balsamo, author of Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work

This book takes readers to unexpected places, making brilliant and original connections across vast bodies of knowledge. It is sure to enhance the historical understanding of anyone interested in computers, social media, and the culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.--Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

This prehistory of algorithmic culture steps back from the relentless novelty of much writing about computing, helping us realize that algorithms, culture, and the relationship between them are stranger and older than we might have thought.--Nick Seaver, author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation

About the Author

Ted Striphas is associate professor of media studies and affiliate faculty in information science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia, 2009) and coeditor of the journal Cultural Studies.