The Burden of Choice

Recommendations, Subversion, and Algorithmic Culture

By Jonathan Cohn

Rutgers University Press

The Burden of Choice examines how recommendations for products, media, news, romantic partners, and even cosmetic surgery operations are produced and experienced online. Fundamentally concerned with how the recommendation has come to serve as a form of control that frames a contemporary American as heteronormative, white, and well off, this book asserts that the industries that use these automated recommendations tend to ignore and obscure all other identities in the service of making the type of affluence they are selling appear commonplace. Focusing on the period from the mid-1990s to approximately 2010 (while this technology was still novel), Jonathan Cohn argues that automated recommendations and algorithms are far from natural, neutral, or benevolent. Instead, they shape and are shaped by changing conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. With its cultural studies and humanities-driven methodologies focused on close readings, historical research, and qualitative analysis, The Burden of Choice models a promising avenue for the study of algorithms and culture.

Suffused with nuance and aplomb, Jonathan Cohn’s The Burden of Choice details the asymmetries of power and disputed logics of contemporary algorithmic culture—an outstanding contribution to digital studies. John Cheney-Lippold, author of We Are Data: Algorithms and The Making of Our Digital Selves

Algorithmic recommendations aren’t politically neutral. But, as Cohn details in this illuminating book, nor is their power absolute. The Burden of Choice is a primer on algorithmic dissidence, couched in a history of computational decision making. Ted Striphas, author of The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control

Fascinating and timely, this exciting book explores the history of algorithms, recommendations, and suggestions. Chuck Tryon, author of On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies

Google’s algorithms discriminate against women and people of colour,' by Jonathan Cohn The Conversation

Tired of Those Netflix and Amazon ‘Recommendations’? Outwit the Algorithm,' by Rebecca Dolan
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tired-of-those-netflix-and-amazon-recommendations-outwit-the-algorithm-11562776566?mod=searchresultspage=1pos=1 Wall Street Journal

In navigating the terrain of user agency and its subversive potential, this book adds another dimension to the literature on critical information studies. Television and New Media

JONATHAN COHN is an assistant professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Contents
Introduction: Data Fields of Dreams
1          A Brief History of Good Choices
2          Female Labor and Digital Media: Pattie Maes and the Birth of Recommendation Systems and Social Networking Technologies
3          Mapping the Stars: TiVo, Netflix, and Digg’s Digital Media Distribution and Talking Back to Algorithms
4          Love’s Labor’s Logged: The Weird Science of Matchmaking Systems and Its Parodies
5          The Mirror Phased: Virtual Cosmetic Surgeries, Beautification Engines, and the Embodied Recommendation
Conclusion: On Handling Toddlers and Structuring the Limits of Knowledge
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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