Are algorithms flattening taste levels?
Is creativity and individuality under threat from algorithms? Marie Kelly speaks with three experts who take care to find inspiration in the real world, not only on their social media feeds.
I almost bought a pair of Adidas Sambas recently after months of noticing the retro shoe was a common denominator among all of the tanned, toned, effortlessly cool women saturating my Instagram feed. Although I’ve never bought into trainer trends in the past – not Vejas, Canada Goose or Converse – after months of seeing little else on the feet of every social media style tribe, I felt compelled to buy a pair. That is until Rishi Sunak popped up wearing them.
The British Prime Minister’s trendy-trainer-clad appearance online was a welcome wake-up call from my sartorial sleepwalking. If I was so easily dissuaded from buying the Sambas, had I really liked them enough to begin with? Or had I just robotically accepted what my social media feed had served up to me, blithely consuming it with the same passive enjoyment I might a bottomless bucket of salty, buttery popcorn at the cinema?
We buy what we see on our social media feeds for the same reason we purchase popcorn in a movie theatre – because it’s simple and uncomplicated, and because it’s there. More often than not, our online content inspires the same neither-love-it-or-hate-it reaction as the puffed up kernels of corn. But a predictably palatable feed can result in an aesthetic echo chamber with no novelty, no chance, no expectation of the unexpected.
Viewing this kind of consistently unremarkable content leads to what UK retail expert Mary Portas has described as “visual averageness” and “visual exhaustion” and it’s threatening our powers of discernment, while dumbing down our individuality, our creativity and our decision-making ability. Portas argues that “a memorable aesthetic”, in contrast, is powerful “not just because it captures people’s attention, [but because] it helps people to stop, think, enjoy, consider.”
Yet these are the faculties algorithms are designed to impede in order to keep us captive and endlessly scrolling. Fashion and interiors expert Joanne Mooney has become very aware of how social media perpetuates a kind of visual status quo, and how this can erode our agency and creative identities. “If I search for a pair of leopard-print jeans on Instagram, the algorithm just keeps feeding me leopard print,” she explains wearily. A lifelong DIYer and an enthusiastic teacher of craft workshops with a colourful and eclectic sense of style, Mooney says she often feels suffocated by this constant digital matching to past preferences or previous interests.
We buy what we see on our social media feeds for the same reason we purchase popcorn in a movie theatre – because it’s simple and uncomplicated, and because it’s there.
Portas believes we need to consciously cultivate and exercise an “aesthetic intelligence”. For Mooney, this involves quite simply putting down her phone and getting outside because, unlike algorithms, the world around us does not necessarily conform to our tastes. It regularly challenges them. “I’m someone who’s very affected by my surroundings,” she explains, “I make a point of going to different places, so even though I live in Swords, I will often stay in hotels in Dublin just to experience their interior spaces. I was at The Leinster on Mount Street last week, for instance, and I took away plenty of inspiration. And I’m always visiting coffee shops and absorbing their design ideas, both good and bad.”
Mooney confesses that from time to time she’s as much a victim of her social media feed as anyone – she laughs when I mention the Adidas phenomenon on Instagram, confessing she’s wearing a pair as we speak. “But I’m very aware of this pitfall,” she adds “and I’m also very confident in what I like and don’t like outside of what I see online. I live a very creative life and my aesthetic is not for everyone, but my whole ethos is to keep individuality and creativity alive in myself and in others,” says the 50-year-old.
Galway–based psychotherapist Mary Lynn believes this heightened awareness of how algorithms are pushing each of us towards the same content is something we all need to become wise to, so that we can be resolute about making different choices. Social media platforms encourage what she calls a “groupthink” phenomenon with their subduing stream of sameness. “We’re social beings and each of us wants to fit in,” she explains, “and most of us like being part of a group, so we accept what we see on social media and stop thinking for ourselves. But,” she adds: “We need a bit of friction in our lives because friction pushes us to make conscious choices and encourages critical thinking.”
Interiors stylist Mia Parsons is more than comfortable with a bit of visual discord. She describes her own style as 1970s with a punk/bohemian influence, and her eclectic County Wicklow lifestyle emporium, Distrikt By Mia, is the bricks-and-mortar antithesis of our homogeneous online worlds. It’s an abundance of energising and stimulating colours, textures, shapes and prints, and she says customers have a very primal reaction to it when they enter.
“I think this is because it’s so different from the formulaic interiors presented on Instagram,” she explains. “It has a cocooning warmth, but an energy too which people respond to.” Many of the homes Parsons is commissioned to style are “greige” when she first sees them, reflecting one of the dominant trends on social media. “A lot of people who adopt this aesthetic don’t have any strong feelings about it, yet they’ve gone with the look anyway,” she reveals. Parsons has encountered numerous customers and clients who have lost confidence in their own ideas and are nervous of stepping away from what they see online. “I watch them second-guessing their own likes and dislikes because they’re stuck in the aesthetic loop algorithms feed them. It’s a rabbit hole we all have to consciously pull ourselves out of,” she agrees.
Lynn believes this fear of being different is an enormous concern. “Algorithms try to fit each of us into a box, or in social media terms, a tribe. But their calculations are overly simplistic. We are each a rainbow of personalities,” she says. Online, it’s too easy to fall prey to what she terms “confirmation bias”, or in other words, the filter bubble that isolates us from diverse ideas and aesthetics. But the end result is that not one of us will stand out by trying to fit in. Lynn herself has joined a book club to counterbalance this online culture. She explains the group made a deliberate decision to explore different genres and to side step the titles recommended on their feeds. “There’s plenty of friction and robust discussion every time we meet,” she says. “Nobody is afraid to have a different opinion.”
Parsons, too, is all for getting offline, especially into fields, forests and parks, which she says are ripe with colour inspiration for our homes – what works in nature will work in your living room, she explains. But she also suggests broadening your reference points when you are online. “I don’t only follow interior design accounts on Instagram and Pinterest,” she explains. Architecture, sculpture and Moorish culture are just some of the varied visual cues that inform her aesthetic and keep her feed fresh and provocative. She’s also reading Martha Beck’s Follow Your North Star, a book about finding your “internal compass”, or as Parsons explains it: “Learning to trust yourself and your own judgement.”
It’s this internal barometer that has been broken by the pressures of social media. Parsons believes we need to give more credence to our gut feelings, because it’s these internal whisperings that help us to make choices aligned with our own unique and creative selves, not a mysterious black box curator.
This article was originally published in The Sunday Times Ireland, June 2024