Entertainment Platforms and Algorithmic Ideology: Shaping Values, Identities, and Social Power
Abstract
Contemporary entertainment platform is highly developed, online entertainment platforms have become an important infrastructure that influences public values, and the structure of social consciousness. With the algorithmic recommendation mechanism and data driven business logic is fully integrated into the entertainment production system, based on that, entertainment is no longer merely cultural consumption but has gradually evolved into an ideological mechanism that shapes standards of success, lifestyles, and individual identities. This article takes platforms such as IQIYI and Douyin as examples, combining platform studies, data colonialism theory and cultural ideology critique. Through text analysis and theoretical synthesis, it explores how entertainment content and algorithms jointly construct mainstream ideology and influences on users’ cognitive and emotional structures. The research finds that platforms, through predictable content structures and algorithmic incentive mechanisms, facilitate the normalization of idealized lifestyles, the normalization of idealized lifestyles, reshaping of users’ cognitive-emotional frameworks, and the formation of algorithmic subjectivity aimed at “visibility”. At the social level, platforms exacerbate cultural homogenization, promote the entertainment of public discourse and commodify “happiness” as a consumable emotion. The article ultimately points out that digital entertainment platforms have become ideological devices that implicitly discipline individuals and serve platform capital, and there is an urgent need for a more in-depth critical examination of their cultural and social impacts.
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