Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka: nonfiction review
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka Overall: 5 I read a lot of books about social media and the internet and even more articles on the topic. I am fascinated by the internet. Despite knowing the topic well and being familiar with many of the book's anecdotes like Mechanical Turk story that opens it, I still found Filterworld fascinating and a worthy read. If you are going to read one book about the internet, let it be this one. Filterworld focuses on algorithms and their increasing presence in our lives (even social media wasn't always completely algorithmically driven; anyone remember Tumblr?) and the insidious side of that both on and offline. Charting everything from TikTok's all knowing For You Page to your Netflix recommendations, Chayka gets to the heart of what these algorithms seem to do and what the tangible results are. For instance, many algorithms aren't as deeply personalized as they seem and simply push what's already popu