And I, I had a feeling that I belonged
Filterworld, continued
This will likely be shorter than my first post about Filterworld, because it’s really just a couple of observations. If you’ve been following my work here for a while, you’ll know that I write a lot about metonymy and synecdoche—it’s one of the primary features of my book project.
As I was reading through some of the reviews for Chayka’s book, one of the things that really perked my interest was the relatively prominent role that metonymy played in some of the critique. For example, here’s Max Read:
In general while reading this book I had trouble understanding precisely where stuff like globalization, paid marketing, cultural exchange, and vicissitudes of style--all of which seem like important phenomena in accounting for cultural “homogenization”--ended, and where the pernicious effects of “algorithms”--understood throughout the book and here as a metonym for the handful of platform conglomerates that mediate internet commerce and sociality--began.
In Filterworld, Chayka relies on the metonymic algorithm to step in on behalf of deeper explorations into the myriad actors, motivations and incentives that contribute to the oh-so-offensive Generic Coffee Shop and Airbnb Tourism – products whose offerings and aesthetic are streamlined and shaped by algorithms.
and Kevin Munger, whose review I discussed briefly:
“The Algorithm” is a metonym for The Apparatus. And it’s not an innocuous metonym, if there’s such a thing. This is the kind of linguistic sloppiness which enables analytical mistakes to propagate.
Anna Schechtman, in her review, even drops in a reference to synecdoche:
Of course, there is no such thing as “The Algorithm” or even “the Facebook algorithm”—nor “the TikTok algorithm,” which is said to be better. It’s both a synecdoche and a hypostatization, like if I called my car “my wheels” and then insisted they were reinventing everything.
So, which is it, metonymy or synecdoche? The answer is “both,” which is the problem. Chayka’s book primes the metonymy discussion by quoting Nick Weaver, who tells him that “The algorithm is metonymic for companies as a whole,” but the book proceeds as though this association (which is pretty common in everyday conversation) is synecdochic, as though there’s a broader category of “The Algorithm” for which all of these different examples are mere symptoms.
As I’ve written before, there’s no bright line separating the two tropes, but they do represent two different types of thinking. They’re both integral tools for making sense of the world around us, and part of our maturation as thinkers is learning how to distinguish between them. Stereotypes (misguided overgeneralizations based upon limited (or skewed) evidence) are one example of how we fail at that from time to time. And Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking Fast and Slow shares a number of studies where our ability to keep them separate can be fooled or sabotaged. Keeping them distinct is one of the ways that we learn how to think contextually1, which, as Yair Rosenberg observed in The Atlantic recently, is vital “if you are trying to understand reality.” I differ a bit with Munger’s characterization of metonyms—there are plenty of circumstances where they’re innocuous; the analytic mistakes they propagate come when they’re used as alibis (“just joking,” e.g.)
I’ve got one more example of what the confusion between metonymy and synecdoche looks like, drawn from one of Chayka’s examples. In Chapter 4, Chayka introduces us to the “ruggedly handsome” Patrick Janelle, one of the “pioneers” of the Instagram aesthetic he’s discussing;
Janelle started an Instagram hashtag, #dailycortado, referring to the short cappucino that was a favorite of coffee aficionados at the time. Every day, he would take a photo of his latte-art-topped coffee resting on a marble or wood table—artisanal surfaces that also happened to contrast nicely with a smooth porcelain cup—and post it on Instagram.
Which is perfectly fine—it’s no different from how millions of other customers use the platform. If you listen closely, though, you can almost hear the soft, orchestral music crescendo…
If we look back at the photos, they have a paradoxical quality. Janelle was capturing a moment of slowing down and paying attention: when you set down your coffee cup, sit down, and appreciate it for a split second before drinking. It’s a restful moment in bustling city life; you stay still while everyone else on the street careens by. And yet each Instagram post feeds the beast of the feed, which sends as much content as possible by your eyes as fast as possible—the opposite of slowing down. Instead, the photo is a vector for acceleration, both for content consumption and the expansion of Janelle’s online footprint, the audience that makes him money as an influencer. Janelle can slow down, but only to take the perfectly composed photo, and his viewers can perhaps vicariously slow down for a moment before the feed sweeps their attention on to yet more stimulation.
It’s less a paradox than a promotional fantasy: I don’t doubt that, on occasion, Janelle did slow down for a moment from time to time. We can all identify with that moment where we first smell a cup of coffee or appreciate the plating of the food before us. Moments like this are associative (and occasional), it’s true; however, an Instagram post is a purposeful representation of that moment, to say nothing of the fact that it’s labeled with a hashtag (one that, “a decade later,” Chayka writes, “is still active, part of the bedrock of the platform.), announcing itself as part of a series that will, presumably, continue.
For a while, there were a lot of stories of “social media quitting,” from influencers who had burnt out from the constant demands of production, and one thing that nearly all those stories had in common was the fact that they would take dozens (if not hundreds) of shots to find the one that appeared the most authentic, natural, appealing, etc. If “The Algorithm” is a metonym being deployed synecdochally, this is the reverse: a calculated, strategic process for producing representations of authenticity/metonymy.
[In my field, there’s a long tradition of the “rhetoric of no rhetoric,” the idea that the most effective rhetorical strategy to conceal one’s strategy entirely.]
I’m not saying that there’s anything particularly wrong with Janelle’s efforts, or the success that he’s managed to achieve as a result of those efforts. (As I’ll talk about my next post, I’m mostly not jealous of those who’re able to reap the fruits of the apparatus.) But to invoke Munger’s phrasing a final time, when this sort of tropic slipperiness is allowed to enter higher-stakes discourse, it can lead to all sorts of analytical mistakes. Social media did not invent this problem, but it sure as heck hasn’t made it any easier to address.
I think I have one more post in me, so stay tuned to see which line from “Fast Car” will allow me to finish the series.
One of the things I neglected to mention in my first post was the fact that, among Chayka’s “theori[sts] of flatness,” Friedman is the only one whose book appears on an episode of If Books Could Kill, where the hosts describe it as brain-meltingly awful. So if you’d like an example of what happens when we ignore context, treating Friedman’s book with the same seriousness as the others in that section is as good an example as any of how flattening works, and why it’s bad.
Ehm, wow. You and Sacasas both w line-drives over third in the same morning. It's sitting like a double shot out of my little Moka pot, straight, before lunch.