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During the months-long worldwide lockdowns in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, not only our economies but also our public sphere decisively and irreversibly shifted into a digital realm. The omnipresence of algorithms in our increasingly digitalised public sphere has had a significant impact on the public discourse and agenda. At the same time, we cannot see what is happening inside the ‘black boxes’ where algorithms operate. Are such algorithms-based personalised recommendations upholding our individual freedom of choice or do they represent a threat to that choicet? Considering the ubiquity of these ‘guiding’ algorithmic mechanisms in online media and culture-related platforms, it is worth understanding how dependent we are on them and how this dependency may affect our future and culture – and how we can use them to strengthen our values and societies. In this article, we reflect on the correlation between algorithms and individual freedom in the increasingly digitalised European cultural domain, taking the quickly growing video-on-demand (VOD) sector as a case in point.
