By Nick Seaver
”My goal here is to understand how recommender systems make sense to their makers — how they work, who they’re for, why they exist. To do this, we need to understand overload. Overload haunts the utopian fantasies of the information age, lurking beneath dreams of exponential growth and threatening to turn computers’ successes into failures. It feels reals, it feels new, and it feels tightly bound up with contemporary technologies of media circulation.
Here Nick Seaver puts silicon-valley novelty and presentism in historical context. New technology gives old promises a new shine. The incentives in this crazy funding climate is to tell a story that that is at once “natural” and timeless but also “new.” Its all about the novelty of now. Imagination needs to be able to discount the future. Seaver elucidates this:
And yet as we’ve already seen, its newness is old. What seemed like a natural response to on-demand streaming in the 2010s also seemed like a natural response to the ocean of CDs in the 1990s.
What are we to make of the simultaneous novelty and timelessness of overload? And what is there to say about the possibility that overload, self-evident as it seems, may not be a “real” problem at all but an invention?”
Seaver now connects the timeless problem of ‘overload’ into its to the way it binds together a society.
In what follows, I make the case for thinking about overload as a myth — not a falsehood or mistake, but a particular kind of story about the nature of the world. In anthropological usage, myths are cosmological stories that function beyond the realm of proof. Although we often find claims of overload accompanied by quantitative “evidence,” like the number of songs in a streaming catalog..
- Page 29, (Emphasis, mine)
“These accounts of overload all tie it to the then-recent developments in media technology: from the printing press to television to on-demand music streaming services […] they are stories about a scalar relationship between archives and individuals. Overload requires more than an overwhelming amount of stuff; it requires someone to feel overwhelmed. Scaling, as linguistic anthropologists might remind us, depends on social processes of comparison, which selectively objectify entities compared (Carr and Lemper 2016). Libraries are rendered large and people rendered small through comparison.”