When it comes to the relationship between technology and culture there’s an apparent contradiction in how taste – in the sense of our subjective human preferences – is perceived. Few would challenge that when it comes to fashion, art or music, what we choose to like all comes down to a matter of taste. In other words, it’s a matter of personal preference, no wrong answers, live and let live.
Move into the technology space and, as anthropologist Nick Seaver observes in his new book ‘Computing Taste’, we enter a different world. Humans rarely express taste preferences for the engineering that goes into jet engines, nuclear power stations or, for that matter, algorithms. And yet, algorithms are the cornerstone of how music recommender systems such as Spotify or Apple Music work. Back in the subjective world of the arts, consumers are suspicious of software that tells them what they should like. This is because when strings of binary maths codify, anticipate...