Netflix Recommendation Systems: A Systematic Review of the Literature About the Effects on Culture and Audio-visual Market

Abstract

This paper aims to identify how Netflix devices, based on data collection and algorithmic analysis, is influencing the culture of audio-visual production and consumption. Using a systematic review of literature (SRL), this research identified how the academic field of Communication studies and its correlated areas have studied, from 2012 to 2022, the phenomenon of algorithms and their effects. This paper is relevant for offering a summary of the knowledge around this subject, serving as a starting point to future researches. The surveyed data are summarized in three discussion axes: the algorithm engineering, the impacts on culture and the effects over the market. In conclusion, the SRL showed an intensification of concerns as of the second half of the analysed period, with greater weight to denunciations about surveillance of user’s actions and the creation of filters that condition both people’s choices and productions aesthetics – now oriented to a global market. Consequently, limits are imposed to diversity of productions as well as identitarian discussions, since production formats aligned with the global interests of the American company are put forward.