Week 2
Questions this week
Does the algorithm create a beauty standard, or find one and narrow the room around it?
Research discoveries
What came out of this week was a definition more than a finding, which is that the loop isn't social connection but repeated engagement with a system, and the self takes shape through that repetition. Having that sentence changed where I look. I've been treating beauty as the clearest case, since the standard arrives through a system tuned to me specifically, and I can't tell anymore whether the algorithm produced the standard or just found one already there and narrowed the room around it. Spotify and AI are still unresolved but sharper, since Spotify recommends off what I already did while AI takes instruction and lets me talk back, and I can't tell whether that's more agency or just a tighter attachment. The thing that actually surprised me is smaller than all of this. I went looking for people caught in loops and almost nobody describes themselves that way, they like what they get, so if the position is thriving without disappearing then most people already believe they're thriving and the word I'm on the hook to define is disappearing. I don't have it yet, which is why the next step is the phenomenon and not the application.
Other work
The piece that named the convergence. Tolentino traces how filters, FaceTune, and cosmetic procedures produced one homogenized face, described to her as young, poreless, cat-eyed, and distinctly white but ethnically ambiguous. This is the closest thing I have to a case study of my own question about whether the system creates a standard or amplifies one that already existed. Her answer leans toward creation, since people started bringing filtered images of themselves to plastic surgeons as the target.
Other questions or notes
Having trouble progressing more so stuck
