“Algorithmic Culture” examines how cultural work has increasingly been delegated to computational processes. Ted Striphas argues that activities once associated with human judgment — sorting, ranking, classifying, recommending and hierarchising books, films, people, ideas or tastes — are now performed through algorithms, databases and platforms. The essay is not simply about technology; it is about the transformation of culture itself. Culture becomes less a shared public field of debate and more an automated system of prediction, filtering and management. Striphas traces this shift through the terms information, crowd and algorithm, showing how each has altered the meaning of cultural authority. The text is especially valuable because it avoids both technological panic and technological celebration. Its concern is subtler: when algorithms take over the labour of cultural ordering, publics may be replaced by markets, collectivity by metrics, and judgment by opaque procedures. What is at stake is not only what culture contains, but who or what is allowed to organise it.
