Curation, Algorithmic 'Caregiving' and Collective Archival Practices. Rethinking the Archival Work of Culture in Streaming Media

This paper is structured around the central themes of archive, network, and algorithmic personalisation, moving from the historical context of digital media and the metaphors of the archive, to the specific case of streaming television. I argue that streaming aggregators such as Netflix are shifting the focus of curatorial or caretaking activity from content to consumers - from criteria of selection, classification, and presentation of content to the effectiveness of automated processes masked as ‘caregiving’ practices. This shift has the potential to significantly change, or even invalidate, the theoretical debate on the work of culture as ‘archival work.’ The paper discusses the hypothesis that algorithmic personalisation in streaming television replaces the collective issue of the formation and circulation of knowledge (seen as the tension between what I define as the ‘archive’ and the ‘network’ models), reducing it to a matter of taste and individual choice to be ‘taken care of.’ In the conclusion, I suggest that the work of culture as archival work is still active in the grey zone of digital ‘piracies’ and informal circulation, and that ‘curatorial’ impulses on the part of viewers emerge as a collective archival activity. I argue that the dialectic between formal and informal practices, and between the archive and network models, represents a vital area of inquiry for the study of streaming media that still deserves to be thoroughly scrutinised.

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