It also removes the social context around the production of taste. Taste, in addition to being a set of personal preferences, is also a conscious and unconscious way of both signaling social status and creating empathy between people. This is largely absent in algorithm-facilitated media consumption. Facebook/spotify/whatever else is an intercessor between you and your group of friends and peers, removing the patterns of social interactions surrounding our formation of likes and dislikes and replacing them with an anonymized distillation of what other people enjoy. I don't think that's a good thing. There's a huge chunk of human interaction that's being elided here.
That's a great angle, actually. I'm not sure that I am sad about the status games being elided, but you're unquestionably right that taste is a product of social context and that - social context - is something incredibly important to being human. To remove it, is to take an important cog out of the system.
It also removes the social context around the production of taste. Taste, in addition to being a set of personal preferences, is also a conscious and unconscious way of both signaling social status and creating empathy between people. This is largely absent in algorithm-facilitated media consumption. Facebook/spotify/whatever else is an intercessor between you and your group of friends and peers, removing the patterns of social interactions surrounding our formation of likes and dislikes and replacing them with an anonymized distillation of what other people enjoy. I don't think that's a good thing. There's a huge chunk of human interaction that's being elided here.