Increasingly algorithms are working out our tastes and targeting us with honed marketing based on the histories of what we have watched, listened to, bought previously.  

The algorithms send us more of what we already know.  Algorithms don't tend to show us something new.  Algorithms don't tend to challenge us or surprise us.  Algorithms keep us stuck in our ways inside online 'communities' of like minded 'friends.'

Increasingly algorithms are working out our fears, anxieties, hopes based on our online activity and targeting political information and propaganda straight to our social media feeds and inboxes.  Cambridge Analytica was a sobering wake up call.

We don't even know what is going into the private feeds of those around us and our own social feeds and group of 'friends' are, increasingly, an echo chamber of similar opinions and views.

The great thing about TV is that we sit on the sofa, with friends (real ones), with family and we see programming that is outside our experience.  Especially if the channel we're watching is Channel 4.

Channel 4s remit is to be diverse - to create platform for different voices, different experiences, different lives.  It takes us outside our own lives -  confronts us, challenges us and broadens our understanding.

Its remit is to be bold, risk taking and to support programming that wouldn't see the light of day if profit was the guiding principle.

If we just look at the role beloved soap operas have played over previous decades... Race, gender, sexuality have all come up in storylines and, over time, our capacity to empathise with what was previously alien to us, unknown, unsettling, not understood has had the chance to grow.  TV has changed us, continues to change us.

How are we supposed to develop the capacity for caring about one another if that capacity is infantilised by algorithms controlling how we experience the world? It's no wonder the last few years have been characterised by increased conflict. We're losing the capacity to be around difference, to be open, to be interested in lives other than our own. 

Gogglebox - what a brilliant programme - families and friends from a whole spectrum of lives, across generations sitting on their sofas together.  Sitting watching together programmes, films, news that provokes a vast range of response.  Not sitting huddled, on their own, in private, in front of a screen digesting content that's being honed by algorithms.. algorithms designed to generate control and profit.

And there is regularly a similarity with the responses from all the families and friends in their sitting rooms - they know, for example, when someone on the TV is clearly lying or trying to pull a fast one; they all leap out of their skin at a shocking moment in a thriller; they are all upset when someone on TV is suffering or in pain.  It's a brilliant, funny, moving and quietly subversive programme..  It's classic Channel 4

Please continue to sign and share. We need to protect Gogglebox and watching TV together on the sofa - TV that changes us