On Numbers & Experiences
Feb. 14, 17
There’s this idea that anything can be represented by an equation that produces a number. The newsworthiness of random information. The love between two people. The strength of a familial bond. A specific person’s curiosity, the very boundaries of their imagination. Nothing is off limits, nothing out of reach. It’s dedication to the precision and accuracy of those numbers that has had a critical role in recent mega-IPOs like Facebook and Google. Acting in concert, those numbers drive the companies that in turn have defined the very interface of the consumer internet itself: An algorithmically ordered list. That list may be of stories or search results or friend suggestions or ads, it doesn’t matter.
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