Following up on our recent post from The New York Times about apps that infiltrate your social media feeds to get your out of your “bubble,” this new app from the New Yorker steps into your social feed to insert poetry. 

It seems interesting that while the name for these technologies, Social Media, implies social interaction, increasingly tools such as the apps we’re discussing this week and last are decidedly antisocial. They’re lines of code that have little to do with our friends or our social sphere. These algorithmic incursions, like Netflix’s suggestions which embody their own biases, are thought to be neutral (although to be fair, this poetry bot uses poetry collected by The New Yorker‘s Poetry Editor, so it’s not an algorithm in the same way as Amazon’s suggestions are). 

It is interesting to think about how we cultivate our social media “feeds” and what each of them represent as we engage, sometimes socially, with these lines of communication, often on our own, alone. — Social Mediums