Algorithmic logics and the construction of cultural taste of the Netflix Recommender System

Abstract

This article investigates algorithms and their construction of cultural taste through a socio-technical analysis of the Netflix Recommender System. I examined the key algorithmic processes in the intersection of its technological infrastructure, cultural processes, and social relations by employing Taina Bucher’s three methodological tactics for ‘unknowing’ algorithms. Drawing from media logic and computational logic, I propose the concept of ‘algorithmic logics’ to define the assumptions, processes, and mechanisms that govern the construction of taste within the Netflix platform. I identified these four logics of taste – datafication, reconfiguration, interpellation, and reproduction – and argue that they reappropriate old apparatuses of social control and generate new capacities in engineering cultural processes. Together, these logics transform algorithms from procedural to self-generative machines in the guise of algorithmic objectivity, user agency, and post-demographic experiences. Algorithmic logics function as an ‘interpretative schema’ in making sense algorithms in their entanglement with social actors, institutions, and infrastructures.