The findings highlight the material and axiological affordances of judgement devices and show how they provide opportunities for consumers whose intentions affect the actions of judgement devices. More-than-human (n)ethnography supported by depth interviews and secondary data analysis is used to provide new insights into the persistent function of judgement devices in digitalised markets. Drawing on Karpik’s (2010) economics of singularities, it aims to understand how digital technologies have transformed cultural intermediaries in the context of the independent music market. This study explores the evolution of the music industry in the digital age by focusing on market intermediation. In this way, commonality contributes to a growing body of scholarship developing 'public good' rationales for digital media and ML systems. Our results demonstrate that commonality captures a property of system behavior complementary to existing metrics and suggest the need for alternative, non-personalized interventions in recommender systems oriented to strengthening cultural citizenship across populations of users. Taking diversity in movie recommendation as a case study in enhancing pluralistic cultural experience, we empirically compare systems' performance using commonality and existing utility, diversity, and fairness metrics. With reference to principles underpinning non-profit, public service media systems in democratic societies, we identify universality of address and content diversity in the service of strengthening cultural citizenship as particularly relevant goals for recommender systems delivering cultural content.

Our proposed commonality metric responds to a set of arguments developed through an interdisciplinary dialogue between researchers in computer science and the social sciences and humanities.

In this work, we introduce commonality as a new measure that reflects the degree to which recommendations familiarize a given user population with specified categories of cultural content. Although existing novelty, diversity, and fairness studies probe how systems relate to the broader social role of cultural content, they do not adequately center culture as a core concept and challenge. While the majority of research on recommender systems optimizes for personalized user experience, this paradigm does not capture the ways that recommender systems impact cultural experience in the aggregate, across populations of users. Recommender systems have become the dominant means of curating cultural content, significantly influencing the nature of individual cultural experience.

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