Algorithms are like an online culture colander

Algorithms are often described as recommendation engines or digital gatekeepers. For us, the consumer or others- the produser- it filters some content out and keeps what it calculates we would continue to consume. I've literally watched my TikTok feed change within a day because of a specific set of videos. This can be helpful in some instances and in others... deterring and distracting. After reading the Flinterud & Bucher articles, I found myself imagining algorithms as something else entirely: a culture colander. They do not create culture, but they help determine which parts of culture pass through to us, which parts are retained, and ultimately, which stories are most likely to survive.

Flinterud's article posits that algorithms don't create folklore. Humans still create stories, jokes, traditions, rumors, and memes. But algorithms influence which of those stories become visible and continue circulating. Below are memes that were and still are, in some spaces, viral. Your respective algorithms are probably why you've seen one over the other, or neither. I quickly surveyed my wife on this, and she'd never seen the first meme, which I presumed was the more popular one. But she said she saw the Kermit meme last week on her Instagram feed from the dark side, instructing her to forget about cooking and to DoorDash. She did DoorDash, indeed.

Aforementioned Meme 1

Aforementioned Meme 2

Bucher's article introduces the idea of the algorithmic imaginary: users assume rewards for posting content at certain times of the day (I'm looking accusatively at my wife again as I type this), using certain words and tags, and using trending filters or formats. For example, in Bucher's article, the musician learns that posts with certain wording, timing, and engagement patterns receive more visibility. He's trying to create content that the algorithm "holds onto" rather than letting it slip away unnoticed. The thing is, the entire online culture (everyone) is the folks that define what the shapes of the holes are and what gets caught in the colander. I can't imagine everyone knows what beliefs are objectively true with an online culture that alters the algorithm of what content we see moment-to-moment... it helps to be chronically online, I'm sure. Those people try to learn what the colander catches and then reshape themselves so they won't be discarded. I just wish everyone would collectively shift the colander to let '67' fall into the sink.

Comments

Does the digital native/immigrant dichotomy work?

I felt, as I was reading the Prenska article, that my knee-jerk reaction was that I was fortunate to have grown up at the right time (mid-late 2000s), when Web 2.0 features were coming into mainstream culture. I was learning them like everyone else, and I had an advantage. My reaction to the digital immigrants was that these were relatively older users I saw on Facebook, either using ChatGPT for the first time and sharing a tacky image (see Figure 1), or exclusively using their online interactions in my local ‘rants, raves, and reviews’ to initiate arguments. My brain's intuition couldn't have been right. Is there a right way to interact with online communities? That's what constitutes me as a digital native? Are these users who use Facebook and AI in those other ways digital immigrants? Although it's a niche of folks who argue on Facebook, they still use that social media website as it was intended: to connect and interact with others online. So, what is ...

Prodigy Slander won't be tolerated....well, maybe

Happy Summer, educators. In Florida, anyway! While embarking on my Reddit Challenge, I came across a post on r/edtech about the learning game Prodigy, which has role-playing elements that I've used in my own math instruction. I figured I'd post my initial reactions to this article and talk about how EdTech in the classroom, and more specifically, game-based learning, has been more divisive than we think. https://web.archive.org/web/20260516165144/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/homework-video-games-ed-tech/687198/ The author of this Atlantic article, Will Oremus, begins and ends the piece with observations of his son playing the Prodigy learning platform that many classrooms are adopting and integrating into their curricula. From my personal experience in a niche example in 1 school district out of the nation's 18,000ish, Prodigy is used more in elementary contexts (K-5) and then tapers off at the middle and high school levels. The author's...

Understanding Hashtags: From my insufferable, 2011 Instagram Posts, to Legit Instructional Materials

I've never used hashtags to filter my virtual consent consumption until recently. My first attempts at tagging my Instagram posts... 15 years ago... were used to provide additional information about the post and, of course, for comedic effect. They were not used for the practical purpose of having my posts sorted by content. Tags' prevalence in the early 2010s seemed irrelevant to me, personally. At the time, since I had mostly used YouTube and Facebook, tags weren't available until Twitter came along. YouTube was easily categorized by content creators using keywords, and Facebook's search engine found keywords mentioned in posts. I never explicitly saw the #. Now, when X (FKA Twitter) came to my attention in the early-to-late 2010s, the 'tweets' stood out to me as a unique format: a short, concise update followed by a hashtag. On mobile, the hashtags were always linked and took the user to an organized subsection of popular/'hot' posts that contained th...

Blake's Bistro