[Commlist] New book: Netflix Recommends - Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste

  Netflix Recommends
Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste


Mattias Frey


https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520382046/netflix-recommends


Algorithmic recommender systems, deployed by media companies to suggest 
content based on users’ viewing histories, have inspired hopes for 
personalized, curated media but also dire warnings of filter bubbles and 
media homogeneity. Curiously, both proponents and detractors assume that 
recommender systems for choosing films and series are novel, effective, 
and widely used. Scrutinizing the world’s most subscribed streaming 
service, Netflix, this book challenges that consensus. Investigating 
real-life users, marketing rhetoric, technical processes, business 
models, and historical antecedents, Mattias Frey demonstrates that these 
choice aids are neither as revolutionary nor as alarming as their 
celebrants and critics maintain—and neither as trusted nor as widely 
used. Netflix Recommends brings to light the constellations of sources 
that real viewers use to choose films and series in the digital age and 
argues that although some lament AI’s hostile takeover of humanistic 
cultures, the thirst for filters, curators, and critics is stronger than 
ever.


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