2.5: Culture in Your Feed

Algorithms, Influencers, and the New Global Street Corner

For most of human history, cultural exchange required movement through physical space. People met in ports, markets, religious centers, universities, neighborhoods, borderlands, cafés, and city streets. Now imagine compressing all of that into a screen you check before breakfast. Your feed may contain a Korean skincare routine, a Nigerian song, a Mexican recipe, a Palestinian embroidery tutorial, an American political meme, a Japanese fashion aesthetic, a Brazilian dance, and a creator in Jakarta explaining a trend that started somewhere else entirely. This looks like spontaneous global culture. It is not. What appears in your feed is shaped partly by the people you follow and partly by systems you cannot see: algorithms, advertising markets, recommendation engines, moderation rules, platform business models, creator strategies, national regulations, and enormous quantities of behavioral data. The result is one of the strangest cultural institutions humans have ever built. Billions of people now gather in digital spaces that feel personal but are privately owned, globally networked, commercially optimized, algorithmically organized, and culturally consequential. The street corner has gone global. But someone owns the street.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Culture in the Algorithmic Feed. Social-media platforms allow cultural forms to circulate globally at extraordinary speed, but what becomes visible is not determined by audiences alone. Algorithms, platform design, advertising systems, influencers, and corporate ownership help determine which cultural products are amplified and which remain difficult to find. (Photo by Swello on Unsplash)

That distinction matters. A cultural form can spread because millions of people genuinely enjoy it and because a platform's architecture rewards the kind of content it represents. Both can be true at once. Cultural popularity is real, but visibility is also engineered.

From Mass Media to Personalized Culture

For much of the twentieth century, mass media operated according to a relatively straightforward model. A newspaper printed one edition for thousands or millions of readers. A television network broadcast one schedule to everyone within its reach. A radio station selected a playlist and transmitted it outward. Audiences could choose among channels, publications, or stations, but within each of those spaces, large numbers of people generally encountered the same cultural material at roughly the same time. Media institutions decided what would appear, and audiences decided whether to watch, read, or listen.

Digital platforms changed that relationship dramatically. Instead of asking only, “What should we broadcast to everyone?” platforms increasingly ask, “What should we show you next?” The difference may sound minor, but it represents a major transformation in how culture circulates. Two people can open the same platform at the same moment and encounter almost entirely different cultural worlds. One person may see political commentary, cooking videos, and soccer highlights. Another may see beauty tutorials, K-pop performances, travel clips, and videos explaining obscure historical events. Neither feed is simply a neutral sample of everything available. Each has been assembled through a combination of user behavior, platform design, commercial priorities, social networks, and algorithmic recommendation.

Research on the platformization of cultural production shows that platforms increasingly influence not only distribution but also how cultural products are produced, monetized, measured, and adapted (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Duffy et al., 2019). Every pause, click, replay, share, search, or scroll can potentially become another signal about what might hold your attention. Over time, the platform develops a constantly changing model of what it predicts you will watch next.

This produces a strange feedback loop. You train the algorithm through your behavior. The algorithm then structures what you encounter, which can influence what you become interested in, what you recognize, what you discuss, and eventually what you click on again. You train the algorithm. The algorithm also trains you.

Welcome to the Attention Economy

Human attention has economic value, which means that keeping people engaged has become one of the central goals of the digital platform economy. A platform generally benefits when you stay longer, scroll farther, watch another video, click another recommendation, or return several times during the day. The longer you remain, the more advertisements you may see, the more behavioral information can be gathered, and the more opportunities the platform has to refine predictions about what might keep you engaged in the future.

This creates what is often described as an attention economy: an environment in which companies, creators, advertisers, political organizations, and cultural producers compete for one of the most limited resources human beings possess. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and only so much of that time can be spent watching, reading, listening, clicking, shopping, or reacting. Platforms therefore have strong incentives to identify material that can interrupt whatever you were doing and persuade you to remain.

That incentive matters culturally because the material most likely to circulate is not necessarily the material that is most accurate, thoughtful, beautiful, representative, educational, or socially valuable. It may simply be the material that keeps people watching. Anger can do that. Surprise can do that. Beauty can do it. Conflict, fear, humor, desire, controversy, novelty, and outrage can all become powerful tools for capturing attention. So can a cat falling dramatically off a sofa.

The important point is not that platforms intentionally make everything outrageous or trivial. Many serious, educational, creative, and socially valuable forms of cultural production circulate through digital platforms every day. The deeper issue is structural. When visibility is influenced by engagement, cultural producers learn that certain kinds of material are more likely to travel than others. The cultural logic of a platform therefore emerges partly from its economic logic.

The Algorithm Does Not “Know” What Is Good

People frequently talk about algorithms as though they possess taste. “The algorithm loved this song.” “The algorithm buried my video.” “The algorithm knows me too well.” The language makes algorithms sound almost human, as though a mysterious digital critic were sitting somewhere deciding whether a video is clever, a photograph is beautiful, or a song deserves to become popular.

That is not really what is happening. Algorithms do not listen to music the way humans do, laugh at jokes, experience beauty, understand religious symbolism, or decide that one cultural tradition deserves more recognition than another. They operate according to signals, classifications, predictions, and objectives created within particular technological and commercial systems. A recommendation system may respond to patterns such as whether people click on something, how long they watch it, whether they replay it, whether they share it, and what they do immediately afterward. These signals can become proxies for relevance or engagement even though they are not the same thing as artistic quality, social importance, truth, or cultural significance.

For cultural producers, this creates a new kind of uncertainty. Scholar Kelley Cotter describes influencers as participating in a “visibility game” in which creators attempt to interpret and respond to the rules encoded in platform algorithms (Cotter, 2019). Those rules are rarely completely visible. Creators watch their analytics, compare successful and unsuccessful posts, study changes in audience behavior, listen to other creators, and develop theories about what platforms might currently be rewarding.

Creators once adapted primarily to audiences, editors, producers, publishers, galleries, broadcasters, or other human gatekeepers. Those actors have certainly not disappeared. But cultural producers may now also adapt to the technological systems standing between themselves and their audiences. Visibility becomes something that must be continually negotiated with both people and platforms.

When Culture Learns to Please the Algorithm

Imagine you are a musician. You discover that listeners frequently skip songs with long instrumental introductions, so you begin shortening the introduction. Then you notice that songs containing a memorable fifteen-second segment circulate particularly well through short-form video. Perhaps listeners use that segment for dances, comedy clips, transitions, or memes. When you write your next song, you may begin imagining that future moment of circulation before the song has even been released.

At that point, the platform has entered the creative process.

This influence extends far beyond music. Video creators adjust the opening seconds of their work because they know they have very little time to prevent viewers from scrolling away. Restaurants design visually dramatic dishes partly because photographs and videos circulate online. Cafés create walls, lighting, murals, and décor that photograph well. Tourist destinations build installations or viewing areas that encourage visitors to produce recognizable images. Fashion brands plan launches around influencer exposure and social-media timing. Publishers think about whether books will attract online communities. Political candidates learn to communicate through the formats, rhythms, and emotional styles favored by particular platforms.

None of this means that algorithms have completely taken over human creativity. Artists still experiment. Musicians still write strange songs. Directors still produce difficult films. People still create cultural material because they love it, because they have something to say, because they want to preserve a tradition, because they want to make people laugh, or because they simply enjoy making things. Yet the conditions surrounding cultural production have changed.

Researchers describe this transformation as the platformization of cultural production (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Poell et al., 2021). Platforms have become infrastructures through which cultural products are discovered, distributed, evaluated, monetized, and sometimes even conceived. Culture is still made by humans. Increasingly, however, humans make culture while imagining how machines will sort it.

The Rise of the Influencer

Few figures capture the cultural consequences of digital globalization as clearly as the influencer. Influencers occupy an unusual position somewhere between celebrity, entrepreneur, cultural producer, advertiser, friend, critic, salesperson, entertainer, and tour guide. They may become famous without ever appearing in a traditional film, television program, magazine, or recording contract. Their primary stage is the platform itself.

Crystal Abidin’s research on internet celebrity shows how social media transformed ordinary users into highly visible cultural producers whose fame depends partly on sustained interaction and the strategic presentation of everyday life (Abidin, 2018). This presentation may look casual, but it often requires significant planning. The morning coffee, outfit, vacation, skincare routine, grocery trip, restaurant visit, family moment, or supposedly spontaneous recommendation can all become part of a carefully maintained public identity.

Influencers may specialize in beauty, travel, gaming, politics, books, parenting, food, education, fitness, finance, religion, fashion, comedy, or almost any other aspect of contemporary life. Their influence often comes from a sense of intimacy that traditional celebrity culture struggled to reproduce. Followers may encounter the same creator every day, hear personal stories, watch major life events unfold, exchange comments, and gradually develop the feeling that they know the person behind the account.

That intimacy is economically powerful because it can make commercial recommendations feel different from conventional advertising. Traditional advertisements usually announce themselves as advertising. Influencer culture often blurs recommendation, entertainment, friendship, aspiration, expertise, and marketing. You follow someone because you like their clothes. Then their travel. Then their apartment. Then their skincare. Then perhaps the coffee machine placed conveniently on the counter behind them.

At a certain point, culture and commerce begin to look remarkably similar.

Authenticity, Sponsored by Someone

Influencer culture depends on a difficult paradox. Creators are expected to appear authentic while simultaneously turning that authenticity into something commercially valuable. Followers often want creators to feel genuine, spontaneous, relatable, and personally trustworthy. Brands, meanwhile, value influencers precisely because that trust can be converted into attention, sales, visibility, or cultural prestige.

Duffy and Hund (2019) describe an authenticity bind in which creators face contradictory expectations surrounding visibility, relatability, commercialism, and self-presentation. Become too polished and followers may accuse you of being fake. Become too commercial and they may stop trusting your recommendations. Reveal too little and you may seem distant. Reveal too much and your private life becomes part of the commodity you are selling.

This contradiction becomes particularly important from a Global Studies perspective because influencers increasingly function as informal cultural translators. They introduce audiences to food, clothing, languages, neighborhoods, travel destinations, beauty practices, social movements, religious customs, music, and everyday life in societies that their followers may never visit themselves. A thirty-second video may become someone’s first encounter with a particular city, tradition, community, or country. Sometimes these encounters expand cultural understanding. A creator may explain the historical meaning of a garment, introduce viewers to artists who would otherwise remain unknown outside their region, or challenge stereotypes about a community. At other times, complicated societies may be reduced to beautiful backgrounds, unusual foods, colorful markets, or aesthetically pleasing traditions stripped of their social context. Sometimes both things happen in the same thirty-second video.

The Influencer as Cultural Middleman

Imagine an influencer visits a traditional market while traveling abroad. They film local food, try on clothing, interview a vendor, photograph craftspeople, and post the experience to several million followers. The audience loves it. Viewers share the content, comment enthusiastically, search for the destination, and perhaps begin planning trips of their own. Tourism might increase. Artisans might gain customers. A local business might suddenly receive international orders. Viewers may become genuinely curious about another society and seek out additional information.

Those possibilities are real, and they demonstrate why digital platforms can sometimes provide communities with forms of visibility that would previously have been difficult or impossible to achieve.

But visibility raises another set of questions.

Return to the Cultural Power Test. Who created the cultural practice being shown? Who preserved it? Who filmed it? Who selected the camera angle and narration? Who owns the account where millions of people encountered it? Who gained followers? Who earned advertising or sponsorship revenue? Who became the recognizable face associated with the story? The answers may not all point to the same person or community. This is what makes the influencer such an important cultural middleman. Influencers can connect communities with enormous audiences, but the person facilitating that connection may become more visible than the people whose lives, traditions, labor, or creativity are being represented. An influencer can amplify a community. An influencer can also become the center of a story that did not begin with them. The Global Studies question, therefore, is not simply whether representation is positive or negative. It is who controls the representation, who benefits from it, and what happens when cultural visibility itself becomes a form of economic power.

Viral Does Not Mean Global

The language of digital culture often encourages us to confuse popularity with universality. A video “goes viral.” A song becomes a “global hit.” A meme seems to appear everywhere. Millions or even billions of views can create the impression that everyone on Earth is participating in the same cultural moment. But viral does not necessarily mean global, and global does not mean evenly distributed. A cultural trend can receive millions of views and still represent only a narrow slice of the world’s population. Your feed is not the world. It is a highly selective window into it, assembled through systems that respond to language, geography, social network, platform choice, government regulation, commercial priorities, and individual behavior. Two people sitting beside each other can open the same app and encounter completely different cultural universes. One may be immersed in Korean dramas, Formula One, Indian cooking videos, and American political commentary. The other may see almost none of those things. Someone using the same platform in Jakarta, Lagos, São Paulo, Seoul, Delhi, or rural California may experience yet another digital environment.The internet connects societies, but connection does not produce identical experiences. Digital globalization creates overlapping cultural worlds rather than one universal global feed.

One Internet? Not Really.

It is tempting to speak about “the internet” as though it were a single global space. Technically, networks connect across borders at extraordinary scale, and people separated by thousands of miles can communicate almost instantly. Yet the cultural experience of being online varies enormously depending on where someone lives, what services they can access, what languages they speak, how much connectivity costs, and what governments or corporations regulate their digital environment.

Some governments block particular services or restrict access to certain forms of content. Some platforms dominate national markets while barely existing elsewhere. Some populations rely heavily on messaging applications for communication, commerce, news, and community life. Others spend more time on short-video platforms, social networks, search engines, or locally developed services. Some digital ecosystems operate under extensive state regulation, while others are structured primarily through the power of private corporations.

Infrastructure also matters. Billions of people experience substantial differences in internet affordability, speed, reliability, and access. A student with a high-speed fiber connection and several personal devices inhabits a different digital world from someone sharing one mobile phone among family members while carefully managing expensive data. Even when both technically have “internet access,” their ability to stream video, produce content, participate in online education, run a business, or maintain a constant digital presence may be radically different.

Digital globalization therefore does not eliminate geography. It reorganizes it. Borders did not disappear. They acquired Wi-Fi.

The Global South Is Not Just an Audience

One of the most misleading stories about digital globalization imagines technology flowing in a single direction: technologies are supposedly invented in wealthy countries, cultural trends emerge in major Western cities, and the rest of the world gradually adopts them. This story treats enormous portions of humanity as consumers rather than producers of digital culture.

Actual digital cultures are much more complicated and much more interesting.

People throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and other regions do not simply receive a finished version of “the internet.” They build platforms, invent forms of digital commerce, adapt technologies to local needs, create online humor, produce music, develop political communities, build fan cultures, participate in gaming economies, and transform global platforms through their own languages, aesthetics, and social practices.

Research on China’s Kuaishou platform, for example, demonstrates how algorithmic platforms created new visibility for cultural producers in smaller cities and rural communities often excluded from elite cultural industries (Lin & de Kloet, 2019). The example complicates the assumption that meaningful cultural innovation must originate in global metropolitan centers. Digital platforms can sometimes allow people outside traditional centers of media power to create audiences of their own.

Of course, greater visibility does not automatically eliminate inequality. Platform access, monetization, censorship, infrastructure, language hierarchies, and algorithmic visibility still shape whose voices travel furthest. But digital globalization should not be imagined as the technological center broadcasting outward to a passive periphery.

It is a network of cultural production in which people everywhere modify the technologies, styles, and meanings that pass through their societies. Digital globalization does not simply bring “the internet” to peripheral places. People in those places build their own digital cultures.

Aesthetic Globalization

Spend enough time moving through social media and something strange begins to happen. A café in Los Angeles, Seoul, Bangkok, Mexico City, Nairobi, or Copenhagen may look surprisingly familiar. The furniture changes slightly. The menu changes. The language on the wall changes. Yet the carefully arranged lighting, minimalist décor, dramatically plated food, photogenic corner, and strategically placed plants can begin to resemble one another.

Platforms accelerate what we might call aesthetic globalization: the rapid international circulation of visual styles that become recognizable across enormous geographic distances. Minimalist cafés, carefully arranged food, neutral-toned interiors, luxury travel photography, makeup tutorials, sneaker culture, unboxing videos, and “day in my life” videos all appear in locally distinctive forms, yet they often share visual conventions that make them instantly understandable to audiences elsewhere.

These aesthetics do not necessarily erase cultural difference. In many cases, global visual languages are combined with highly local materials, traditions, foods, fashions, or architectural styles. But the ways those differences are presented can become increasingly standardized. The camera angle is familiar. The editing rhythm is familiar. The lighting is familiar. The sequence of the travel video is familiar. Even the supposedly spontaneous moment may follow a visual grammar audiences already know how to read.

This produces an interesting contradiction. Digital platforms make it possible for people to encounter extraordinary cultural diversity, but they may also encourage that diversity to be presented through increasingly recognizable formats.

Even cultural difference can acquire a global visual grammar. The unfamiliar becomes globally legible by looking strangely familiar.

When the Global Gaze Comes Home

Cultural globalization is often described as a process in which images of places travel outward to distant audiences. Digital platforms add another step to that process: the circulating image can return home and begin changing the place it originally represented.

Consider a café that becomes popular because influencers photograph it. At first, the photographs simply document the space. Then the owners notice which corners appear most frequently online. Perhaps they redesign the lighting, repaint a wall, add a mural, introduce a visually dramatic drink, or rearrange furniture so customers can photograph themselves more easily. More influencers arrive. The images circulate farther. The café becomes increasingly organized around its online representation.

The same process can happen at the scale of neighborhoods, restaurants, beaches, markets, museums, hotels, and tourist destinations. A place develops a recognizable digital identity, visitors arrive seeking the version they have seen online, and businesses begin adjusting to meet those expectations. New shops appear. Prices change. Architecture is renovated. Particular foods, crafts, or experiences receive more attention because they photograph well. Residents discover that outsiders possess surprisingly specific expectations about what their neighborhood is supposed to look like.

Culture is therefore no longer simply represented online. Online representation can reshape physical culture.

The global gaze does not only look outward. Eventually, the places being watched may begin looking back at the screen and changing themselves in response.

Virality and Cultural Context Collapse

Global circulation can make culture visible at extraordinary speed, but speed carries a cost. Cultural objects, images, practices, and symbols can travel much faster than the histories and explanations that originally gave them meaning.

A joke travels without its context. A religious symbol becomes decorative. A political slogan becomes merchandise. A dance becomes a trend. A traditional recipe becomes a “hack.” A ceremonial garment becomes an aesthetic. A gesture that means one thing in one community may be interpreted completely differently somewhere else. This is one form of cultural context collapse: material created within one social setting suddenly circulates among audiences who do not share the assumptions, histories, relationships, or cultural knowledge that made the original meaning understandable.

Context collapse is not always harmful. Cultural forms have always traveled, changed, and acquired new meanings. People borrow from one another, reinterpret ideas, mix traditions, and create new cultural forms. That is part of how culture works. The problem emerges when circulation creates the illusion that cultural practices can be fully understood without the histories attached to them.

A dance may have an identifiable creator. A textile pattern may belong to a long artistic tradition. A religious symbol may carry sacred meaning. A recipe may reflect histories of migration, colonialism, poverty, celebration, adaptation, or survival. When the cultural object circulates without those histories, audiences may encounter only the most visually appealing or easily reproducible portion of the story.

The faster something travels, the less explanation may travel with it.

Translation...and the Things That Do Not Translate

Digital globalization creates extraordinary possibilities for communication across linguistic boundaries. Fans subtitle television programs that have not yet received official translations. Diaspora communities explain traditions and expressions to audiences living thousands of miles away. Creators translate jokes, interviews, political speeches, recipes, songs, and cultural debates. Automated translation tools increasingly allow people who do not share a language to communicate almost instantly.

These technologies dramatically expand the range of cultural material people can encounter. A viewer no longer necessarily needs to speak Korean to watch a Korean drama, Spanish to follow a creator in Colombia, Arabic to encounter commentary from Cairo, or Japanese to participate in a fan community centered on Japanese media.

Yet translation is never simply the mechanical replacement of one word with another. Languages encode histories, relationships, social hierarchies, humor, emotion, and cultural assumptions. A joke may depend on wordplay that disappears when translated. A religious concept may not have an exact equivalent in another language. A term of respect may communicate a social relationship that English grammar does not easily capture. Slang may sound completely different once translated into formal language.

Even excellent translation therefore involves interpretation. Someone must decide which meaning to emphasize, which explanation to add, which cultural reference requires clarification, and which ambiguity cannot be fully preserved. Something always changes when meaning crosses a linguistic boundary. That does not make translation a failure. It makes translation one of the central creative processes of globalization. Global culture emerges not because meaning travels perfectly, but because people continually negotiate these imperfect translations.

The Power to Be Seen

Digital platforms are often celebrated for democratizing cultural production. Anyone with a connected device can potentially write, photograph, record, upload, comment, remix, or publish. Compared with an earlier media system in which a relatively small number of publishers, television networks, record companies, newspapers, studios, and galleries controlled access to enormous audiences, this change is significant.

But the ability to publish is not the same as the ability to be seen.

Millions of pieces of content may be uploaded while only a tiny fraction receive widespread attention. Some creators already possess large audiences. Some can afford professional equipment, advertising, staff, or promotion. Some operate in languages that reach enormous global markets. Others depend on recommendation systems whose workings they cannot fully observe. Platform moderation, advertising rules, monetization systems, copyright policies, and algorithmic ranking can all influence who becomes visible.

Siciliano (2022) argues that platformized cultural production can create new infrastructural forms of gatekeeping even as older barriers to participation decline. In other words, digital platforms may remove one gatekeeper while creating another. A creator may no longer need to persuade a television executive or magazine editor to publish their work, but they may still need to navigate recommendation systems, platform rules, monetization thresholds, and changing standards of visibility.

The door is open. The spotlight is not equally distributed.

From a Global Studies perspective, this distinction is crucial. Asking whether people have access to digital platforms tells us only part of the story. We must also ask whose voices become visible, whose remain difficult to find, who controls the infrastructure of discovery, and how those patterns intersect with older inequalities involving wealth, language, geography, race, gender, citizenship, and political power.

Cultural Labor Behind the Screen

The glamorous image of digital creativity can make it easy to forget that online creativity is labor. A successful photograph may have required hours of planning. A short video may involve research, scripting, filming, lighting, editing, music selection, captioning, translation, and several failed versions before the final thirty seconds appear on a viewer’s screen. Creators also perform forms of labor that audiences rarely see. They research trends, negotiate sponsorships, answer emails, manage contracts, respond to followers, moderate comments, deal with harassment, monitor analytics, learn changing algorithms, maintain relationships with brands, track income, and continuously generate new material in order to remain visible.

The pressure can be relentless because platform visibility is rarely permanent. A creator who stops producing may quickly disappear from followers’ feeds. A format that worked last year may suddenly receive little attention. A platform may change its recommendation system, moderation rules, monetization policies, or preferred content format with little warning.

This means platform labor can create extraordinary opportunities while remaining economically precarious. Some creators build businesses, reach global audiences, support themselves through work they enjoy, or gain forms of cultural influence that would have been almost unimaginable in an earlier media system. Others invest enormous amounts of unpaid labor while receiving little income or visibility. A creator can spend years building an audience. Then the rules change. Visibility falls. Income disappears.

The cultural economy suddenly looks less like fame and more like work.

Global Studies Lens: Follow the Infrastructure

Digital culture becomes easier to analyze once we stop treating viral content as though it simply appears. Every cultural object moving through a platform has a history and an infrastructure behind it. When analyzing a digital cultural trend, begin with the obvious question: Who made it? Then keep going. Where did it circulate? Which platform made it visible? How did people encounter it? Who owned that platform? Who earned money from its circulation? Which advertising systems, recommendation algorithms, or sponsorship arrangements helped it travel? What regulations shaped where it could appear? Who interpreted, translated, copied, criticized, or remixed it? Then look beneath the content itself. Who possessed the devices necessary to participate? Who had affordable connectivity? Who had enough bandwidth to upload or stream video? Which languages were supported? Who had access to digital payment systems? Who had the time, training, safety, and resources necessary to become a creator rather than simply a viewer? These questions transform a viral video from a piece of entertainment into a Global Studies problem because they reveal the larger structures hidden behind the screen. The internet may make cultural circulation feel almost weightless. A video appears. A trend spreads. A song travels. A style becomes fashionable. Yet underneath that apparent simplicity are data centers, communication networks, smartphones, labor, corporate ownership, advertising markets, national regulations, language hierarchies, payment systems, algorithms, and profound inequalities in access and visibility. Following the infrastructure allows us to see all of them.

Think about it!

Look at the first twenty pieces of content recommended to you on a platform. Which countries, languages, communities, and cultural forms appear? What is absent? Then ask: Why did you see these twenty things instead of twenty others?