Before reading this article, I had a somewhat negative view of algorithms. For me personally, when I think about algorithms, I think of how awful everyone thinks Instagram’s is. While the algorithms mentioned in Gallagher’s article are obviously very helpful and useful for marketing, I do think that this is something a lot of people have begun to catch up on and can sometimes be unhappy by the way it disrupts their timelines on social media. While a lot of the time it makes it very easy for us to get what we’re looking for on Google, it can sometimes mess up a flow that a platform has and makes it feel a little unnatural at times. In some ways these algorithms seem like they could be more harmful in some cases than helpful.
Something that didn’t really surprise me, but that I had never really considered, was how algorithms are skewed against minority groups because computer programmers just don’t consider them. Algorithms already favor people who have more popularity, so to add on to it that these groups are just not being taken into consideration is upsetting. I think that this is definitely something that needs to be worked on in the future because we’re losing out on very important voices and thought just because computers are a male dominated industry.
Most of the time we write or make something, we’re thinking of an audience seeing it, so it’s important that we realize what audience would be seeing something published online. While algorithms may have their faults, they’re needed have work be seen. Gallagher shows that fitting into their algorism can make or break success.
- What type of work and programs can be done to make this a more equal playing field? What type of content would people be missing out on that could be added to make it more easily found?
- Do ads play a role at all in algorithms? They’re usually tailored to exactly what we’ve searched recently, so would that count?
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