This marks our final post of 2024, and we’ll be off until early January (we have some site maintenance being done on January 2 and 3 and plan to return with new posts on the 6th). I will apologize for leaving you until then on a worrisome note, but hey, it’s been that kind of year. Find below a look at our increasingly homogenized culture from The New York Times’ Kirby Ferguson. Ferguson notes that we are living in a period of “cultural stagnation”, where, “everything looks the same, sounds the same, is the same.” He attributes this to the handful of algorithms that are responsible for what gains attention, declaring that a technology hegemony has created cultural hegemony. To these algorithms, sameness rules, and what should be popular is what’s already popular.

It’s worth considering as we rapidly seem to be shifting much of our research and information discovery practices over to the AI systems driven by the algorithms from these very same companies. What happens to innovation when everyone is using the same tool with the same biases that is essentially built to offer us more of the same stuff that we already like/know? Is this a recipe for a similar homogenization and stagnation of science and knowledge building in general?

While I’m perhaps more skeptical about our ability to escape from the clutches of our technological overlords, Ferguson ends on an optimistic note, reminding us that periods of cultural repression and stagnation are often followed by significant explosive periods of new ideas and styles. All we have to do then, is survive to that point, assuming the Terminators don’t get us first.

And on that note, happy holidays to all. See you (hopefully) next year.

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

Discussion

2 Thoughts on "Our Algorithmically-driven Homogenized Future"

Thought provoking. Maybe even hopeful. But those early bursts of creativity did not have to deal with the hegemonic control of communication channels we now have with Big Tech. When you look at the way the billionaires, conspiracy theorists, and anti-science echelons are gathering, you have to wonder when and where the wheel is going to turn.

I hypothesize that observing this phenomenon says more about the observer than about the phenomenon, and name the possible causes of observation as (1) getting old (2) spending too much time looking on screens. In both cases, the suggested course of action is going outside for at least 5 km (3 miles) walk. Happy new year!

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