The Recommended Experience: Engaging Networked Media Platforms with Intermediality

Recommendation algorithms play an important role in our reception of digital media products. Whether we listen, watch, or read online, the content we receive is often pre-filtered based on calculated relevance or on the similar taste of others. As such, our reading of a thriller or watching of the newest romantic comedy contributes to a network of previous experiences supplying media producers with valuable data for an even more optimized future product. Engaging the aesthetics of networked media, this trend is important to consider, as it plays a vital role in the communication situation. From the spatiotemporal and sensorial affordances of Spotify’s musical advice to the complex semiotic modalities of the Popular Highlights in the Kindle interface, the recommended experience of online media content calls for an intermedial vocabulary to be adequately described and understood. This chapter offers a general discussion of the concepts of intermediality and multimodality focusing on their relevance for engaging with networked media experience. The chapter is divided into two parts: the first part presents a broader introduction to existing intermedial scholarship as it relates to networked media, while the second part exemplifies ways to approach this topic through two illustrative analyses of the interfaces of Spotify and Kindle.