Just for You: Inside the Personalisation Algorithms that Curate Our Image of the World

Every day, invisible algorithms decide what news reaches us, what stories fade from view, and, quietly, how we come to understand the world. To uncover how these systems work, Jannie Møller Hartley spent years inside the machinery of personalisation, following journalists, editors, and data scientists as they grapple with what it means when machines take on something as deeply human as judgment.
Running through this story is the extraordinary life of Ada Lovelace, whose nineteenth-century vision of algorithms offers a powerful and historic lens on today’s debates about artificial intelligence, creativity, and human agency.
Blending storytelling, the history of algorithms, and original research, this book reveals how the technologies shaping our information environment influence what we know, what we notice, and how democratic life unfolds. It shows that algorithms carry human values, ambitions, and blind spots.
Written for researchers, journalists, students, technologists, policymakers, and anyone curious about life in an AI-powered information ecosystem, this book invites readers to imagine how these systems could be built differently.