For this week’s blog post, I thought that I’d revisit my exploration of Netflix as a creative archive because Ernst has complicated my first attempt to characterize its “archive”.

 

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In my first blog post I discussed the many varieties of genres available on Netflix, how movies/TV shows are selected for display on their streaming site, and the process of collecting subscriber data to create original TV shows. I characterized the Netflix “archive” as if it were a material collection, an archive created by the marketplace. I had not considered the possibility that “net archives are a function of their software and transmission protocols rather than of content […]” (Ernst, 84). The actual organization and ordering of Netflix is not, at its most fundamental levels, dictated by its genres or movies, but by the source codes and algorithms that compose Netflix’s website.

 

“On the one hand, the Internet extends the classical space of the archive, library, and museum by an extra dimension. On the other, its technological organization and more (graphical) mathematical than classificatory topology undermine this tripartite division, because digital code renders commensurate texts, images, and sounds. Through physical modeling it can even resolve physical objects into numbers and then re synthesize them.

The archival infrastructure in the case of the Internet is only ever temporary, in response to its permanent dynamic rewriting. Ultimate knowledge (the old encyclopedia model) gives way to the principle of permanent rewriting or addition (Wikipedia)” (Ernst, 85).

 

Netflix, at its core, does not contain movies and television: it contains different bits and processes that are only reintegrated into audiovisual entertainment by the click of the mouse or a strike of the “enter” key. There is plenty of “memory” for this audiovisual entertainment, but what is actually being stored is not audio or the visual, but the processes that create them.

 

There are two layers of creation here. 1) Every movie or TV show be created millions of times by the processes of its algorithms and 2) new TV shows are created by human beings according to the data that is collected by these creative algorithms.

 

This makes for an interesting complication in translation. Let’s start at the beginning. In order for Netflix to even exist, programmers must have a goal in mind. That goal is formed in an alphabetic language. This language is then translated into the programming code that displays a collection of movies.

There must also be an alphabetic language describing the process of data collection which is then translated into an algorithm. When enough data has been collected from Netflix subscribers, the algorithm outputs a statistical value. This statistical value must be translated again into an alphabetic language when deciding to create a new show based upon those values. Then the show is created by human beings.

 

What we have in this incredibly dynamic “archive” then, is collaboration between humans and algorithms to create entertainment. Algorithms are not only constantly rewritten to determine the content, organization, and data collection of a website, but it outputs popular genres that are taken seriously into consideration when creating a new show.

 

What does this mean? I’m not sure. It’s either an unsettling dependence on machines for creativity, or a Utopian cooperative project between humans and computers. Either way, it’s fascinating that entertainment that is creatively conceived is under-girded by algorithms, both in its presentation and in its initial creation (genres/subgenres/qualities/themes).