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

The Internet Suggests:Film, Recommender Systems, and Cultural Mediation Mattias Frey (bio) 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. Acafans predicted the mainstreaming of cult tastes and [End Page 163] 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 Foucauldians and Deleuzians feared yet further losses of privacy and more insidious forms of surveillance and top-down control.4 Some celebrated a new era of active grassroots democracy and declared a definitive end to gatekeeping and cultural hierarchies; others complained about passive, dumbed-down consumers and humanity losing its monopoly on determining cultural value.5 In my home field of cinema studies—the little "c" that for worse, or more probably for better, has been melting into a big "M" of SCMS—similar aspirations abounded. The approaches were many. There have been deliberations over online videos and streaming aesthetics and no shortage of contemplations about the move from cinema to internet-based domestic spectatorship, even if viewing films at home had been the norm for a long time before streaming.6 Cinephiles harbored hopes that streaming media platforms would deliver new access to all manner of titles and erase distribution windows.7 They also despaired over geoblocking, shrinking catalogs, and missing credit sequences and DVD extras, not to mention having to subscribe to multiple platforms to re-create the selection of the old local video store.8 Of course, I am not immune to projection. My own long-standing concerns surrounding film criticism caused me to question how the internet and the computational processing capabilities abetted by or developed in concert with it have intervened into the presentation, selection, and above all recommendation of films and other moving-image media objects. Critics had spent much of the later 2000s and 2010s in existential crisis, propelled by leisure consumers' rising use of the internet and plummeting purchases of print newspapers and magazines.9 Faced with their own obsolescence, critics perceived Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, and other online communities as devaluing the individual, authoritative critic's taste-making powers. These challenges, as [End Page 164] earnestly as initially received, now pale in comparison to the specter of algorithmic recommender systems, such as those deployed by Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Suddenly, reviews and other traditional pathways of cultural suggestion and evaluation are being rerouted, if not bypassed altogether, as recommendation is integrated into the consumption interface itself. To be sure, Netflix, YouTube, and other internet streaming services' algorithmic recommendations constitute the culmination of a consumerist fantasy: personalization. For many commentators, these systems—which suggest content likely to interest viewers on the basis of their prior viewing histories—represent a fundamentally new way of connecting cultural objects and human beings. Computer scientists and business gurus swoon over the ability to scale the provision of cultural recommendation using big data, which they call "collective intelligence" and "wisdom of crowds."10 One market researcher has calculated the...