I didn’t have a chance to read Ted Striphas’s latest book, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet, before mine came out, because it was published at roughly the same time last summer. I had previously read and enjoyed his 2011 The Late Age of Print, about the history of the American book industry, though I should point out that I bought a used copy from Better World Books, which is another online bookselling phenomenon that Striphas didn’t address, although he did discuss the history of book piracy and publishers’ attempts to derail the “pass-along book trade” (page 41). Clearly, once the physical book is gone for good, “faiir use” along with the used book market will disappear as well, I fear.
In any case, the new book is an expansion of his essay “Algorithmic Culture” from the European Journal of Cultural Studies, adopting and adapting Raymond Williams’ approach to keyword analysis, in which Striphas says that
“moments of catachresis– instances of lexical ‘misuse’ that help concretize an alternative semantics for particular words and word clusters… [may] enable new or at least different ways of figuring reality through language, for example, in drawing what was long taken to be the conceptual sine qua non of qualitative human experience – culture – into the orbit of computational data processing.. . [T]he semantic dimensions of algorithmic culture (and also then of the related phenomena of big data, data mining and analytics)… are at least as important as the technological ones, the latter, for perhaps obvious reasons, tending to command the spotlight. But as Williams (1983) noted, ‘some important social and historical processes occur within language’, giving rise to new existential territories that only later come to be populated by technical artifacts (p. 22; see also Striphas, 2014). Moreover, a keywords approach is useful in apprehending latencies of sense and meaning that persist, insist and subsist in contemporary usage as ‘traces without … an inventory’ (Gramsci, 1971: 324; see also Seigworth, 2000: 237). Logging that inventory,
as it were, allows one to not only situate algorithmic culture within a longer durée but also reflect on claims to objectivity and egalitarianism that are now made in its name. Beyond semantics, what is at stake in algorithmic culture is the gradual abandonment of culture’s publicness and thus the emergence of a new breed of elite culture purporting to
be its opposite” (Striphas, 2015, page 397).
His latest book is, I think, an excellent counterpart tto my own, as his history focuses on culture and computerization while mine focuses on information and indexing, both with the goal of better understanding today’s sociocultural environment (and both with numerous references well worth pursuing, if I may say so myself!) Also, he takes a more critical approach to recent technological developments and to “information” as a keyword, which as I mentioned in an earlier post (My Missing Foreword), I didn’t (with the exception of Chapters 9 and 10) probably because much of the LIS community is still captivated (and increasingly held captive) by these. As two of my graduate degrees (MLS 1979, PhD 2004) are from the “original” “Information School (Syracuse) and the third is an MBA, it isn’t surprising that my perspective has largely mirrored my professional training (as Striphas most likely mirrors his, though I don’t know him personally.)
Don’t wait for a used copy to read Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet!
P.S. I just checked to see if there were in fact any used copies available. There aren’t, though I was appalled to observe that Amazon kept “correcting” my search for “Ted Striphas” in Books to “red stripes” in All Departments. Someone needs to do an article about this impact of AI!
Keywords In and Out of Context 