and behaviour. The context offered by the user, namely the knowledge they produce about their personhood through wish lists and personalisation, is secondary to the knowledge produced by algorithms.” This isn’t something that the company shies away from talking about either. “[Most] of our personalisation right now is based on what [users] actually watch, and not what they say they like,” said Todd Yellin, the company’s vice-president of product innovation in a 2015 interview with The Verge. “[You] can give five stars to An Inconvenient Truth because it’s changing the world, but you might watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 three times in a few years… so what you actually want and what [you] say you want are very different.” To Netflix, this is an essentially benevolent system, with datafication removing commissioning power from the subjective tastes of television executives,18 and instead rendering it responsive to the viewing habits of its audience. For the first time, television audiences are getting exactly what they want, rather than what they’re told they want – or so the argument runs. There is also a shift in the intended subject of television viewing. Whereas traditional television targeted audiences – amorphous groups made up of bands of characteristics, attributes and identities – streaming promises to target the individual. When a platform has more than 10,000 shows on offer, it no longer needs to commission content that will hold a broad appeal for as large an audience as possible, but can instead target individual viewers with niche productions that respond specifically to their tastes. “Traditional television audience measurement was[…] somewhat speculative, ‘desperately seeking the audience’ but unable to locate or identify those outside of sample groups,” writes Arnold. “These new forms of measurement use data gleaned from online user interactions as a way of profiling and controlling the behaviour of every individual.” Hastings argues that such changes fundamentally alter the viewing experience. “Think of it as entertainment that’s more like books,” he notes, his analogy tying in with broader cultural efforts to liken streaming platforms to the breadth of choice offered by a library, as opposed to the linear functionality of network television. “You get to control and watch, and you 18 A group for which data seems to be curiously incomplete, but which anecdotal evidence suggests is about as lacking in diversity as you would imagine.
get to do all the chapters of a book at the same time, because you have all the episodes.” It’s a flattering comparison, and one with which media studies researcher Sudeep Sharma has rightly taken issue. “The service functions more like a newsstand [than a library, and] Netflix plays the role of ‘surrogate consumer’ for exhibitors,” he notes in ‘Netflix and the Documentary Boom’. “Rather than just simply providing access to texts, they
“These new forms of measurement use data gleaned from online user interactions as a way of profiling and controlling the behaviour of every individual.” —Sarah Arnold are engaged [in] an effort to ‘push certain texts on consumers, rather than letting us pull what we want’.” That’s not how Netflix would like you to speak about it, though. “Netflix posits the use of data mining systems as beneficial for the consumer and suggests that such systems allow the company to better understand and respond to audience tastes through its recommendation system,” writes Arnold. “This represents a shift in audience measurement and interpretation from the notion of the depersonalised mass to the personalised, the individuated, and the autonomous.” Speaking in 2009, Yellin had a folksier way of making the same point: “We are rolling out several features to delight our members with a more personalised website.” Were any of you a bit weirded out earlier when I mentioned that Netflix’s House of Cards advertising campaign targeted viewers who liked programmes with “strong female leads”? Because, how could Netflix know it was the “strong female lead” that made you watch a show? And, how does Netflix know that you actually liked that show, even if you watched it all the way through to the end? People watch things they hate all the time. I finished Sherlock Gnomes, but that doesn’t mean I liked it. It doesn’t necessarily mean I like “strong gnome leads”.19 19 Although I do.
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