Tag: algorithmic culture

• Like No One Is Watching

  April 8, 2026

  

  I’ve kicked off a month’s research sabbatical in France, hitting the ground running…

  My first invited presentation was today at Université Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, as part of the journée d’étude “L’intelligence et l’éthique de la télévision à l’ère des algorithms”. Today’s talks looked at de-ageing as a quest for immortality and fracturing of the present, televisuality and intelligence, and teaching LLMs about humans by making them watch a lot of TV; the seminar concludes tomorrow.

  My own piece, “Like No One Is Watching: The Form of Television in the Algorithmic Moment”, examined how episodic storytelling navigates the constraints of the platform and attention economies. I looked at the chaotic inconsistency of The Bear and the aggressive tedium of The Pitt as shows pushing formal boundaries to reassert a direct relationship with their audience.

  The talk had three key moves.

  Firstly, I re-establish television as the ‘miscreant medium’, drawing from John Fiske and John Hartley’s seminal work. On the one hand, television has always served as a scapegoat or delivery channel for whatever moral panic is current at the time; alongside this, it is a medium perennially torn between the strictures of institutions and technology, and the creativity of its artists.

  Secondly, I argue that platform logic holds two contradictory assumptions about audiences. On one hand, there is an assumption that audiences are passive and distracted. This assumption leads to baked-in redundancies, including explicit exposition and constant re-explanation (a phenomenon that Will Tavlin explores in his piece ‘Casual Viewing’). On the other hand, platform capitalism is contingent on metrics of retention; active, engaged viewing, then, is assumed.

  In the third section, I spoke to sample clips from The Bear and The Pitt, both shows that embody and embrace this presumptive schizophrenia. From The Bear I played part of the seventh episode of the first season, which includes a 17-minute unbroken take. I also shared a couple of mundane conversation scenes from the premiere episode of The Pitt. I used formal analysis here as a diagnostic tool, to observe how creatives push against (or acquiesce to) the algorithmic frame of their distribution. In the case of both shows, I offered that formal experimentation — whether at a dialogue, scene, episode, or series level — demonstrates friction as an exercise in meaning-making: a conversation and negotiation between creator and audience quite apart from questions of data, platform, capital.

  What close formal analysis reveals is that television is not a medium in decline, but one still jovially misbehaving; always exceeding what the discourse says it’s capable of, and still worth watching.

  This talk was a return to formal analysis for me, and it felt great to be home. I’ve been very lucky to be taught by or to work with a bunch of academics who really value close textual analysis, and I think it’s such an incisive and enjoyable means of understanding texts and their contexts.

  It’s highly likely an edited collection will result from this gathering, so fingers crossed that this work will be in print soon!

  

  I now have a little breathing room before my second presentation, so I’ll be using this time to actually get out and wander around Paris a little, but also to feed and tend to a few items moving through the publication pipeline.

• Critics and creation

  January 22, 2024

  

  I started reading this interview this morning, between Anne Helen Peterson and Betsy Gaines Quammen. I still haven’t finished reading, despite being utterly fascinated, but even before I got to the guts of the interview, I was struck by a thought:

  In the algorithmised world, the creator is the critic.

  This thought is not necessarily happening in isolation; I’ve been thinking about ‘algorithmic culture’ for a couple of years, trying to order these thoughts into academic writing, or even creative writing. But this thought feels like a step in the right direction, even if I’ve no idea what the final output should or will be. Let’s scribble out some notes…

  If there’s someone whose work we enjoy, they’ll probably have an online presence — a blog or social media feed we can follow — where they’ll share what they like.

  It’s an organic kind of culture — but it’s one where the art and vocation of the critic continues to be minimised.

  This — and associated phenomena — is the subject of a whole bunch of recent and upcoming books (including this one, which is at the top of my to-read pile for the next month): a kind of culture where the all-powerful algorithm becomes the sole arbiter of taste, but I also think there is pressure on creatives to be their own kind of critical and cultural hub.

  On the inverse, what we may traditionally have called critics — so modern-day social media commentators, influencers, your Booktubers or Booktokkers, your video essayists and their ilk — now also feel pressure to create. This pressure will come from their followers and acolytes, but also from random people who encounter them online, who will say something like “if you know so much why don’t you just do it yourself” etc etc…

  Some critics will leap at the opportunity and they absolutely should — we are hearing from diverse voices that wouldn’t otherwise have thought to try.

  But some should leave the creation to others — not because they’re not worth hearing from, they absolutely are — but because their value, their creativity, their strength, lies in how they shape language, images, metaphor, around the work of others. They don’t realise — as I didn’t for a long time — that being a critic is a vocation, a life’s work, a real skill. Look at any longer-form piece in the London Review of Books or The New Inquiry and it becomes very clear how valuable this work is.

  I’ve always loved the term critic, particularly cultural critic, or commentator, or essayist… they always seemed like wonderful archaic terms that don’t belong in the modern, fragmented, divided, confused world. But to call oneself a critic or essayist, to own that, and only that, is to defy the norms of culture; to refuse the ‘pillars’ of novel, film, press/journalism, and to stand to one side, giving much-needed perspective to how these archaic forms define, reflect, and challenge society.