I am writing this blog post on Valentine’s Day 2018. It is my first Valentine’s Day as a husband to my wonderful wife, who plays a critical role in this week’s blog post. While we do not usually buy into the hyper-consumerist approach surrounding what would otherwise be just another freezing and frigid day in central Illinois, I was feeling romantic since it was our first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, so I brought home some chocolate covered strawberries last night. After dinner we landed on the couch, turned on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I and divulged in the strawberries. At this point, I did not know my night was going to dominated by the rhetorical agency of algorithms.
My wife directed my attention to a picture of a woman holding a giant champagne bottle and told me Facebook suggested her as a friend. Okay—I thought—what is interesting here? Then my wife showed me another picture on her phone of her with the woman and the giant champagne bottle at a bar on my wife’s birthday. I thought about how best to approach this situation. I had just finished Jessica Reyman’s article, “The Rhetorical Agency of Algorithms” in which she explains how algorithms function to provide “more ‘personalized’ and ‘responsive’ experiences across the web” for users. My understanding of algorithms still in its infancy, I decided to abandon attempting to explain the rhetorical agency of algorithms to my wife. Not because she wouldn’t understand, she is a nurse, and is in fact smarter than me, but because I did not want to come off as a know it all, especially with the strawberries involved. My wife chalked up the coincidence to Big Brother watching, claiming the FBI Agent in her computer must have time share in her cell phone. Alas, I wanted to say something—I was experiencing a kairotic moment I could not pass up. I attempted a brief explanation. Later that night, I was lying in bed scrolling through my Twitter feed (I always ask myself, “What happened to reading a book to go to sleep?” Then I remember, we live in what John David Bolter calls the “late age of print” and I turn back to my zombie-like attention back to my screen, anyway,) I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and I saw a tweet that read: “Two MIT grads wrote an algorithm to match you with wine. Take the quiz to see your matches” and a link: https://www.brightcellars.com/ It was there, so obvious, so blatant. Algorithms. Wine. My wife. What I had to do was clear to me. I immediately tweeted the quiz to my wife. It was not until the next day that I truly understood the dramatic, situational, verbal irony (all the ironies) of my situation. Here I am, a student in a digital rhetoric class who has just read an article about algorithms when my wife brings up an instance where algorithms are obviously manipulating her user experience on the internet. What did I use to explain myself? An article about an algorithm that was presented to me based on algorithms. At least it was about wine, right?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Charles WoodsPhD student focusing on Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Archives
October 2019
Categories |