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Tarleton Gillespie Quotes

Total quotes: 3
“One of the things I found really interesting about Twitter Trends is that they'll weight tweets or hashtags that appear across different clusters of people that aren't connected to each other on Twitter higher than a lot of activity that happens in a densely connected cluster of people. You can imagine the opposite choice, where something that happens in a cluster of people really intensely, but isn't escaping — maybe that's exactly what should be revealed. Something like: You may not know anything about this, but somewhere, there's a lot of discussion about this, and you may want to know what that is. That's fulfills a very different public or journalistic thing. Yes, there are things that seem to be talked about on a wide basis, and we want to reflect those back, but we also want to say, over here in the world, in a place you don't have access to, there's something going on.”
— Tarleton Gillespie, Q&A: Tarleton Gillespie says algorithms may be new, but editorial calculations aren’t
Tagged: Algorithms, Facebook, The internet, Twitter
“The funny thing about clickbait as an idea is it's basically shorthand for: People really wanted to read this. Writing a really juicy headline to get people to read it, whether you got the substance or not, is not new to BuzzFeed and Upworthy. Is that gaming the algorithm? Was the algorithm of the penny newspaper — 'You can see the front page on the shelf, and you can't see the content in it, so those words better be big and gripping and delicious'? Is that gaming the algorithm for how newspapers were sold? Or is that just trying to get people to read your paper?”
— Tarleton Gillespie, Q&A: Tarleton Gillespie says algorithms may be new, but editorial calculations aren’t
Tagged: Algorithms, Buzzfeed, Clickbait, Insights, The internet
“It's in some ways a very old problem. NBC has to decide what's acceptable at 8 p.m. And they do that within some guidance of what the FCC says, but mostly they're working within those barriers, and deciding what they think their audience will accept, what they think their moral compass is, what their advertisers will blanch at.
Now you've got Facebook and Apple and YouTube being in a similar situation, but I think the game is different. You can do classic stuff, like setting rules and deciding where the line is, but the other thing you can do now is you can design the platform so that you manage where those things go. It's not like there's no precedent for that either — you can build a video rental store and put all the porn in the back room, and have rules about how gets in there and who doesn't. That's using the material architecture and the rules to keep the right stuff in front of the right people and vice versa. But you can do that with such sophistication when you think about how to design a social media platform. You know much more about people, you know much more about what their preferences are, about where they're coming from, about the content. You can use the algorithm — the very same algorithm that's designed to deliver what you searched for — to also keep away what they think you don't want to see.”
— Tarleton Gillespie, Q&A: Tarleton Gillespie says algorithms may be new, but editorial calculations aren’t
Tagged: Algorithms, Facebook, The internet
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