{"id":171416,"date":"2026-09-09T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/?p=171416"},"modified":"2026-09-09T11:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T15:10:15","slug":"wtf-is-personal-taste-in-the-algorithmic-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wtf-is-personal-taste-in-the-algorithmic-era\/","title":{"rendered":"WTF Is Personal Taste in the Algorithmic Era?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cover image: iPhones out at Prada’s SS27 men’s collection at Milan Fashion Week (Photo by Stefano RELLANDINI \/ AFP)<\/em><\/p>\n

Summertime appeared to be the perfect time to take a break from social media. Why? To reclaim my time and touch grass, but also because my digital timelines had begun to feel repetitive, increasingly random yet somehow predictable. I needed to actually refresh my feeds. Once I reactivated my accounts, I tried to recalibrate what the algo thinks of me and how it understands me, by unfollowing accounts, engaging with the type of content I am eager to see, searching for specific topics, and avoiding or simply reporting irrelevant recommendations. That ultimately meant reshaping what the algorithm thinks my taste is and exiting the echo chamber \u2013 cultural and political \u2013 to challenge my own perceptions and to discover newness.<\/p>\n

Algorithms are the sacrosanct tools of social media companies. They are built to know what will keep us scrolling ad vitam aeternam. Yet, they often fail to relieve me of sudden quakes of boredom, the universal human feeling Pascal knew we perpetually evade through distraction to avoid facing ourselves and our discomfort.<\/p>\n

The feed supposedly learns what we like by being fed what it thinks we like through our interactions, but how sure are we that our own taste has not learned from the feed? Or is it being ruled by the feed? Realistically, building and maintaining one\u2019s personal taste today requires managing the algorithm, especially considering the amount of time people spend online \u2013 about 2 hours and 20 minutes daily, according to GWI.<\/p>\n

Algorithms don\u2019t just spread culture. They form it. In the past, cultural gatekeepers were relatively identifiable. They were the editors of magazines and newspaper journalists telling people what is cool and who is relevant, the buyers deciding what is covetable, the gallerists picking whose art carried value, the producers greenlighting what dreams got to become reality. They are not gone, but alongside them exists an invisible force: the recommendation engine. The latter determines what reaches us often enough to become culturally significant.<\/p>\n

Then there are the attention algorithms \u2013 think Instagram, TikTok, YouTube \u2013 focusing on user retention by predicting content that one will watch next, engage with, and share via DMs. They analyse behaviours, and they are good at creating extremely addictive rabbit holes to keep users glued to their screens. For instance, Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri explained that \u201cthe top three signals that matter most for ranking are watch time, likes and sends. So when looking at your insights, pay close attention to average watch time, likes per reach, and sends per reach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Algorithms don\u2019t just spread culture. They form it. In the past, cultural gatekeepers were relatively identifiable. They were the editors of magazines and newspaper journalists telling people what is cool and who is relevant, the buyers deciding what is covetable, the gallerists picking whose art carried value, the producers greenlighting what dreams got to become reality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reaction algorithms of platforms such as X and Threads amplify conversation-heavy posts and current events, respectively. They zero in on interactions such as reposts and replies to devise hot topics likely to drive high engagement. And the intent algorithms, like Pinterest\u2019s and Spotify\u2019s, will focus on searches and saves to decipher a user\u2019s taste and push familiar content, often hindering artistic diversity.<\/p>\n

Today, our cultural capital increasingly relies on ubiquity rather than quality. It\u2019s all about being seen.<\/p>\n

Online, desire can easily become a set of numbers. I kept thinking about what happens when everything we see online is optimised \u2013 feeds are supposedly personalized, all while feeling incredibly homogeneous. It seems most of culture is stuck in a closed loop of references. In short, everything looks and sounds the same: archival fashion from John Galliano<\/a>\u2019s Dior<\/a>, Tom Ford<\/a>\u2019s Gucci<\/a>, 1990s Prada<\/a>, and the Y2K era; micro-trends like old money, tradwife, or clean girl; quasi-identical interiors with Togo sofas, buttery yellow walls, burgundy tiles, and chrome accents, all wrapped in Mid-Century Modern; pervasive video content formats from hot takes, things being \u201ckinda chic\u201d, \u201chear me out\u201d, tier lists and rankings, and green-screen commentary.<\/p>\n

That sameness provided by algorithms is a barrier to taste as an individual, idiosyncratic endeavour. I thought of Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cuniformity of sensations\u201d, or the idea that standardisation leads to conformity, precipitating the fall of individuality and the rise of \u201cnormal taste\u201d, something flat and uniform. So, taste becomes a way for people to break from the herd, to think freely, and to judge and desire differently.
\nSimilarly, Jerrold Levinson states in Artistic Worth and Personal Taste (published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism<\/em>) that true personal taste helps us preserve our \u201cdistinctness as aesthetic agents\u201d by elevating authenticity, instead of succumbing to a \u201cready-made profile adopted from others or from the surrounding culture\u201d \u2013 which today can be delivered by algorithms.<\/p>\n

Taste involves searching, stumbling across something strange or questionable, borrowing an intriguing book, venturing into obscure places, or being introduced to something by someone whose taste we appreciated or trusted. Algorithms have made that process increasingly frictionless. While they technically promise countless possibilities, they mostly steer herds of people in the same direction, towards the same conclusions, convincing us that what we are seeing is presented just for us. Here lies the paradox: personalisation manufactures uniformity.<\/p>\n

For creative people, algorithms have not just changed how culture is spread, but how it is created. Photographers, stylists, designers, models, and artists increasingly understand which images travel fast and well online. They play the game as their work is photographed, cropped, edited, and captioned. Sometimes, the work is even conceived keeping in mind how it may circulate online. This creates both pressure to follow certain codes and standards, and fatigue when said pressure means relinquishing one\u2019s own taste as visibility trumps authenticity. And visibility compounds. When a creative\u2019s work is known and shared widely, it becomes logical (easier, or lazier, really) for algorithms, editors, journalists, buyers, gallerists, and producers to push more of it, regardless of talent or vision. So, the danger is not that algorithms amplify what is already popular; it is that they reduce the chances for those creating outside that feedback loop to be seen or discovered. Funnily enough, in an industry obsessed with the hot new thing, the logic of the algorithm sort of makes sense, even if it presents a very real predicament.<\/p>\n

Taste involves searching, stumbling across something strange or questionable, borrowing an intriguing book, venturing into obscure places, or being introduced to something by someone whose taste we appreciated or trusted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To me, it is ultimately about changing what the algorithm thinks my taste is, by bringing a more analogue mindset to my use of social media. It is about actively looking again, and with intent. As platitudinous as it sounds, it is about following unfamiliar people online; buying magazines; going to exhibitions; asking friends what they are looking at; tapping beyond what is immediately presented. It is about allowing myself to dislike or question something bizarre before eventually understanding it. So, it is about refusing to adhere to whatever is put in front of us. Recommendation engines should not be responsible for my sense of taste. But algorithms are not going anywhere. They are not even the enemy; convenience is. Taste requires cogitation and friction as well as curiosity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The feed supposedly learns what we like by being fed what it thinks we like through our interactions, but how sure are we that our own taste has not learned from the feed? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":455,"featured_media":171427,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,15361],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/455"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171416"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171435,"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171416\/revisions\/171435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/models.com\/oftheminute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}