This book feels as if it's mismarketed to a general audience. I love reading about the history of science and the role of mathematics and computation in our lives, so I thought this would be exactly to my taste. But it seems to be aimed at a more academic audience than the general readership. That's the only way I can explain the presence of an exhaustive discussion of the meaning of the specific word 'culture' that consumes the first chapter. Perhaps academics may care about this kind of definition of terms, but I bounced off it so hard my head is still spinning.

To be honest, I did not finish this book, so I would avoid giving it a star rating if I could. I can't evaluate all of its content. But I think I'm a pretty good example of a reader who should be deeply interested in the subject, and I couldn't get through it, which is not a good sign. Discipline-specialist peer reviewers might think it's terrific. But if I want to learn about algorithmic culture before the internet (which I do), this book is not giving me what I'm looking for.

As a fan of history with an interest in technology, this book caught my eye.
Very interesting themes!
A 'downside' of this book is that I noticed that it's been a while since I read something like this, so sometimes it was a bit hard to get through (mind you, English is not my first language so maybe that didn't help either).

Not necessarily the kind of book I thought I’d be getting. Starts with the idea of using “keywords,” the social science concept, as already implicated in technologies of knowledge. Uses that as a jumping-off point to discuss, for example, how the history of “algorithm” and what Westerners say about the scholar for whom it is named preserves some elements of the past while erasing others. I didn’t know how much mathematical writing changed over time—apparently the early Indian scholars wrote verse explaining their theorems, and worked through examples about who’d inherit how many slaves in ways that made clear that calculation was only part of the problem they were thinking about. Notation also changed a lot, sometimes to accommodate printing technologies. Florentine traders rejected switching to Indo-Arabic numerals because they thought they were too easily altered compared to Roman numerals.

And, in a reminder of how technologies are always tested on marginalized people first, he notes that Cambridge Analytica tested its ability to manipulate politics in Trinidad and Tobago before it brought the same tools to the West. “Aimé Césaire identified this vicious, narcissistic circle back in 1955, powerfully connecting Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity to the brutalities that had been and continued to be exacted in Europe’s colonies: ‘What he [Westerners] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man ….’” As you can tell, there are a lot of riffs here.

I have been trying for MONTHS to get into this book. The intro is so dense and full of overly verbose flourishes (like - how many times must you start paragraphs with "Indeed" and "Tellingly" and so on?). As a reader - I am LOST without context. Most of the introduction delves into the importance of historian and cultural commentator Raymond Williams' seminal works on culture and technology. So much that I am left wondering whether I should go read Williams FIRST to be able to understand Striphas' book.

Despite having a MA in sociology - I never heard of Williams. So, naturally - I skip to the end of the book to try to figure out what Striphas is getting at. I think that he's trying to prove that technology is not destroying culture (ie, replacing it with algorithms) and that culture is simply transforming as it meets the next new thing whether it be books, television or search engines. And - maybe, we should be able to somehow better get ahead of the way algorithms are utilized -- that's to say, the most inflammatory content is utilized to generate the most revenue -- and to pay better attention to methods to manipulate popular perceptions in support of particular causes (ie, Gamergate, anti-democratic conspiracies, etc).

There's a LOT of rambling in this book - or maybe I'm just not brilliant enough to understand it. This feels like an overly pompous and redundant PhD thesis. If Striphas is trying to make a point -- I'd love to see it more clearly delineated.

First off, shout-out to this book for no subtitle! That’s rare for a work of nonfiction—not that I have any great hatred of subtitles, but the absence of one here is notable. Anyway. Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet caught my eye because the history of computing, intertwined as it is with the history of mathematics and the history of feminism, interests me a lot. Ted Striphas discusses how we conceptualized both the word algorithm and the word culture prior to “algorithmic culture” emerging as a more recent phenomenon from the past few decades. This book is really not what I expected from the description, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad time. Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the eARC!

Striphas takes a very intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to answering the question of, What was algorithmic culture like before we had the internet? These chapters span centuries, languages, and draw on everything from philosophy to computer science to linguistics and semiotics. It’s truly impressive how Striphas synthesizes writings and ideas from these various fields into his presentation. He references entire areas of study and scholars I had no idea existed (and I have degrees in math and education as well as minors in English and philosophy!).

In particular, Striphas grounds his approach through his own expansion of Raymond Williams’s Keywords publication/theory. Look, I’m not going to pretend I have enough background to evaluate this approach. Readers more familiar with this angle of attack and Williams might be better poised to critique Striphas’ strategy. As it is, I liked the emphasis on looking at language as something constructed by and responsive to changes in our society—along with the potent reminder that even a concept like culture, whose meaning we might assume is to be taken for granted, shifts over time. So Striphas definitely exposed me to a lot of new (old) ideas, got me thinking, and that alone is something I appreciate in a nonfiction book like this!

On the other hand, this means that Striphas often gets bogged down in the weeds of theory. So much so that I’m not sure each chapter actually accomplishes its mission of supporting his overall thesis. Striphas attempts to trace the history of the word algorithm, then culture, and finally algorithmic culture, but along the way he gets lost in discussing, say, the historical context of the Cold War, suspicion and oppression of gay people in civil service and academia, etc. I’m not dismissing that these could be relevant threads to his argument, but the amount of digression feels, if not boring, then distracting enough to divert me from the overall point he’s trying to make.

As a mathematician, I really liked the chapter about the origins of algorithm, algebra, and al-Khwarizmi. I learned a lot I didn’t know. Striphas carefully questions the “official,” simplified narrative we often learn (if we are lucky) in our math classes. He makes it clear that he isn’t trying to downplay al-Khwarizmi’s role, or the wider role of Islamic mathematicians, when it comes to their influence on European mathematics. At the same time, he points out that a reductive approach—tracing algorithm back to al-Kwharizmi’s name, algebra back to a book he wrote (on a method that he probably did not originate)—actually does an injustice, flattening and erasing the complexities of that time period and al-Khwarizmi’s life.

I really appreciate how Striphas clearly acknowledges the power dynamics at play, both in contemporary writings of each period along with modern views, the roles of racism and sexism, etc., influencing our perception of algorithmic culture. He references many luminary scholars whose names I’ve heard of (Ruha Benjamin) or work I’ve read (Safiya Umoja Noble). In this sense, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet continues the intertextual conversation, not just engaging with it but building it and then throwing the ball forward, into the future, hoping that someone will pick it up and engage with Striphas later down the line.

This book is very specifically targeted towards an audience with more knowledge of this field than me. I think some people might pick it up (as I did) because of its title and description, expecting a more straightforward history (as I did) of computer science prior to the computer and the intersections with culture. But this is an academic book, not a pop history book, and it shows. If you’re willing to wade into deeper intellectual waters, then you will find parts of this book rewarding—challenging but rewarding. If you’re not wanting that workout right now, then you should skip this one.

The book's title will attract nonfiction readers interested in history and culture. Even if you are not technically equipped with the inner functioning of algorithms, I expected this had much to do with how the word was devised especially in the context of the Golden Age of Islamic Science. I went into this book with expectations but unfortunately, they fell short. The chapters are indeed detailed and infused with cultural elements to bring together the nature and rise of the current algorithmic culture. But it lost me halfway through when the text tries to string together the importance of keywords. Maybe I will give this another try with much patience to trundle through the lack of coherence. On the positive side, I learned a lot about "culture" and "technology" from a sociological aspect with copious references. And generous coverage is provided on the polymath al-Khwarizmi.

4.5 stars.
I was really curious when I saw the title because I wondered how algorithmic culture could exist before computers. I'm not sure what I was really expecting, but this surprised me. This had a very slow start, like it took fifty percent of the book to get to when and how the word "algorithm" developed. I thought the first part of the book was overly explained, but when talking to my friends about the subject, many of them did not understand the use of algorithms and culture in this way, so the in-depth discussion at the beginning of the definitions was helpful.
A lot of this book seems tangential and irrelevant at first, until you get to a point where the author ties it into the main point. In this book, many things are discusses, like the inception of algebra and the algorithm, how technology has been influencing and affecting our lives throughout history, the meaning of "culture" and how it has changed, the tumultuous beginnings of the science of sociology, how the government uses culture to manipulate us and some of the ways they've done so throughout history, etc. The text was heavily cited and some of the reference materials intrigued me enough to get added to my "to read" list. It's definitely targeted to sociologists and may be inaccessible to many, style and diction-wise. I don't know much about sociology but I still learned a lot from this book. If it was more condensed and focused, I would've enjoyed this more.