Musicians nowadays need to be careful of how they name themselves—not because of how it’ll sound to audiences, but how it’ll read to computers.
As Jake Tuck writes in The Awl, “A musician’s name used to function as part of a fairly simple brand… Now artist names have an additional function: they serve as metadata to be used in sorting music online. Sure, before the rise of streaming apps, some artists may have worried some about SEO (it’s not a great idea to name a band ‘The The’ or ‘Yes’ or ‘Search Engine Optimization Tips’ anymore); but now that Spotify et al offers access to most of the music in the world, all in one place, there’s a more acute problem: if an artist doesn’t pick a name that no one else in the world has ever used, dumb computers are going to throw them into the same bucket as other artists.”
The need to bend our imaginations into computer-friendly shapes extends beyond band names to the browsing experience in general. As the locus of most of our inquiries, Google’s search bar encourages us to word our questions in the most common, leveled down way in order to find what we’re looking for.
More worrisome still, we take the sentence-finishing mystique of the search bar—powered by a real-time, predictive autocomplete tool called Google Instant—as a sort of digital revelation, a commandment about the cultural zeitgeist. But as Tom Chatfield notes for the BBC, our idea about what “everybody” is thinking and talking about is much more skewed, and much more provincial, than we are inclined to believe:
“Knowing what ‘everyone’ thinks about any particular issue or question simply means starting to type, and watching the answer write itself ahead of our tapping fingers. Yet, like any other search algorithm, autocomplete blends a secret sauce of data points beneath its effortless interface. Your language, location and timing are all major factors in results, as are measures of impact and engagement—not to mention your own browsing history and the ‘freshness’ of any topic. In other words, what autocomplete feeds you is not the full picture, but what Google anticipates you want. It’s not about mere truth; it’s about ‘relevance.’”
Ultimately, the credence we give to Google’s autocomplete function has a distressingly iterative effect over time:
“The greatest danger, in fact, is the degree to which an instantaneous answer-generator has the power not only to reflect but also to remould what the world believes—and to do so beneath the level of conscious debate. Autocomplete is coming to be seen as a form of prophecy, complete with a self-fulfilling invitation to click and agree. Yet by letting an algorithm finish our thoughts, we contribute to a feedback loop that potentially reinforces untruths and misconceptions for future searchers.”
As we increasingly operate according to the algorithms and information architecture of the internet, we learn not only to write like computers, but think like them too.