WHEN TRAIN TRAVEL and skyscrapers became a mainstay of the urban landscape, a chorus of commentators lamented that all cities would begin to look the same. Today, the prevalence of global franchises, Insta-worthy cafés and concrete towers coalesce to lend all cities at least a flavour of familiarity – but most critics will now argue that it’s globalisation, social media and AI that are the cause.  

The argument that the internet and social media have fundamentally homogenised cultural taste is well-worn, but is the implication – that taste was more varied before the internet – actually true? Has the in/out sorting mechanism intrinsic to algorithms eliminated the possibility of individual style and taste?  

TO UNDERSTAND SOCIAL media’s impact on our predictability, it’s important to understand how its influence has changed since its inception. When the internet first became widely accessible, it had a curatorial nature; it acted as an encyclopedia of world knowledge, and Google searches were unmarred by advertising money and search engine optimisation (whatever that is). This steadily evolved as social media platforms began using the data their users provided to advertise products back to them. The meteoric rise of social media accelerated this type of advertising, in which a network of users generates a growing pool of data that enables platforms to create targeted content to gain even more users.  

In its infancy, this kind of targeted advertising was relatively simplistic. It would observe the traits you displayed to a platform (age, gender, interests) and make best-effort predictions that were often stereotypical: oh, you’re a female in the twenty to twenty-five age range – here’s an advertisement about hair removal! Nowadays, social media’s algorithmic advertising is no longer observational and predictive but instead uses binary questions that feed into a sorting mechanism: do you like this or not? Do you follow this creator or not? Even the length of time you spend watching a TikTok is a way for your taste to be evaluated, sorted and then fed back to you. The algorithm has evolved to inform not just advertising but the entire digital ecosystem you have access to. It’s abstracted to the degree that the difference between the sorting mechanism and the user becomes asymptotically small. By feeding a user content that it predicts they’ll like, a platform helps that user become the person it wants them to be. Quite subtly, the algorithm and the platform have evolved into a behaviour-modification system that makes its users both more observable and more predictable.  

In mindlessly scrolling through Instagram (the irony of this is not lost on me), I came across a video shared by the account @etymologynerd exploring the origins of the suffix ‘-core’ in describing certain aesthetics (grandma-core, cottagecore, fairy-core). He suggests that these sub-aesthetics are manufactured micro-identities that have replaced the old demographic categories used to create targeted commercials. As the user aligns themselves with these hyper-compartmentalised identities, they become a more predictable advertising target. The rise in popularity of suffixes like -core (-coded, -pilled, -punk) exemplifies the funnelling of culture into specific micro-identities. This means that aesthetic taste is not just becoming more generic, but that even the variations in taste have been digested by the algorithm to fit a well-understood framework. The real danger of this is not that these sub-aesthetics have been commercialised, but that they have become just another way to stereotype and marginalise people.  

When these hyper-identities are not used in pigeonholing a user’s aesthetic taste, the algorithm resorts to the most-generic style. In the case of interior design, minimalism represents the least-offensive aesthetic that can be fed to people with a high success rate – which is what ultimately ensures its enduring popularity. 

In Kyle Chayka’s new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, he describes the phenomenon of the generic coffee shop: from the early 2010s, he found the same subway-tiled, minimalist café with handmade ceramic mugs and fake plants in cities across the world. He partly attributes this to social media platforms evaluating his taste and suggesting cafés that they knew he would like. However, when Chayka discussed this on The Ezra Klein Show, Klein observed that those cafés were also there for him to find; the platforms were clearly feeding the same content to the café owners and designers. These cafés consistently sell themselves as local, but they are different to global chains only because they are ‘authentically connected to the new network of digital geography’. Chayka identifies that what lends the atmosphere of authenticity to these stores is not grounded in a physical location, but to an online identity that we’ve developed. This is an accumulation of the most appealing (and inevitably commercialised) aesthetic tastes that infect influencers, designers and café owners. Consequently, more people are exposed to and primed by this online identity, which then leads to more commercial success.  

YET PERSONAL TASTE has always been a victim of self-consciousness. So much of growing up is hearing what your friends like and pretending to also like that thing (I hope this wasn’t just me). Chayka would say that the ‘consciousness of how other people’s taste works occludes our own experience of that internal pleasure or aesthetic joy’. But our opinions are constantly evolving around new experiences and exposure to other people’s tastes. The difference now is that the algorithm has co-opted the self-conscious, recursive and self-reinforcing nature of taste-making by dictating the digital geography that surrounds the user.  

This is most obvious in the discourse surrounding TikTok’s surge in popularity. I often hear TikTok sceptics say that they don’t want ‘the algorithm to get to know me’, because ‘once it does, I’ll be hooked for life’. The algorithm is anthropomorphised into a toxic ex-lover you can’t stop going back to; it’s no longer just a mechanism for advertising but a being to engage with, one that plays back your own tastes.  

Regardless of whether influence comes from other people or an anthropomorphised algorithm, it’s often difficult to determine whether the reaction you have to a piece of art is intrinsic or an internalisation of the reaction that you understand the world to hold externally. Even those who think they have good taste will define it in opposition to what is currently popular or ‘basic’. In light of this, the notion of truly unique taste is a sham. 

The question then arises: is the algorithm really co-opting and flattening individual taste compared with when taste-making was a strictly human endeavour? The truth is that, historically, taste-making has a legacy of white middle-class ideology in which marginalised communities have frequently been dismissed or appropriated. The incidental tastes of poor immigrant households have become aestheticised in the white person’s home (or the British Museum). For example, in Jessica Au’s award-winning novel Cold Enough for Snow, the narrator describes the incongruous feeling of seeing the famous qing hua blue-and-white porcelain bowls of her childhood in her lecturer’s house. Au analogises the lecturer’s home as a museum in which the presence of ‘foreign’ iconography and artefacts forms a ‘smooth and fluid’ sense of taste. Conversely, the ‘post-modern jumble’ of the narrator’s own home seems void of the same class. At the lecturer’s house, the narrator has entered a world that she previously did not have access to – a world in which there are such things as good ideas and where she can escape what she views as the banality of her immigrant home. 

The great success of the internet is that it has (partly) democratised taste-making by providing a space for tastes of all diversities to be cultivated. In light of this, arguments about how taste used to be curated feel like the classic ‘back in my day’ cry that isn’t tonally dissimilar to that expressed by the critics of skyscrapers and train lines.  

ALGORITHMS UNDENIABLY INFLUENCE how we construct our own taste and the cultural trends of the moment (and I haven’t even begun to touch on AI and the implicit biases that such technology might pedal). It’s clear we need a more conscious and measured approach to social media consumption and an awareness of how the algorithm influences taste for commercial gain. 

Yet, while there’s value in trying to understand what art or music speaks to you and why, taste itself is arbitrary. It is much less a coherent view on your aesthetic life than a steady accumulation of small beauties. Perhaps you should relinquish the idea that it ought to be anything and, in the words of the poet Mary Oliver, simply ‘let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’.  

_{Image credit: Keghan Crossland from Unsplash}