Slashdot Mirror
Preference Engines Side-Effects in Online Retail
jasonla writes "The Los Angeles Times ran a Column One article about the impact preference engines have on consumer buying habits. From the article: 'In the physical world, I bump into all kinds of people by chance. But online, if recommenders were perfect, I can have the option of talking to only people who are just like me. There's a danger that if we don't have some level of shared interaction, it can be destructive to our social cohesion.'"
"I can have the option of talking to only people who are just like me. "
Welcome to slashdot.
It increases sales! Who gives a damn about society!!!
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
"But online, if recommenders were perfect, I can have the option of talking to only people who are just like me."
Does that mean you are perfect?
Humanity is going to disperse as a social construct because Amazon wants you to buy some additional shit?
I don't get this... are we going to have preference engines in our daily lives? at the store? at the bar? How is this affecting more than 2% of your waking lifetime?
WAH WAH WAH they don't work anyway. Next post.
In my opinion, at least at present, this is not the case - the opposite is true. Whereas normally upon hearing about, say, the newest Harry Potter book from a friend, you would only check out that one book and maybe the rest of the series, you can now find a huge range of similar novels (most of which suck). Your tastes are widened (as you don't lose interest in old tastes) and significantly deepened (duh).
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
This is a very valid point. As people start to only interact with similar minds online, they will confront a sort of system shock when they have to deal with people who have a radically different view on life in real life. It would probably take a few generations for this effect to happen though...
Uhmmm... why not just talk to yourself.
... that most people prefer people like themselves anyway. So is this really different from society in general?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The problem of preferences engines is less scary to me than the problem of centeralized media. Not that centeralized media really hampers the average slashdotter, but look at how many people watch big 3 TV, read the daily paper, and listen to top 40 radio. If preference engines give me a constantly updated list of things I will probably like than what big media tells me to like, I'm all for it. I have the maturity to branch beyond that, and those who don't like to branch already have there sources which tell them what to like.
There's a danger that if we don't have some level of shared interaction, it can be destructive to our social cohesion.
Sure, and we can all die tomorrow. But that doesn't mean it is likely to happen.
Way back when, people would live in small villages and were limited to interaction with those in the village (and those travellers who happened to be passing through). Small communities tend to result in people having the same opinion on most things. Society was able to survive in this mode for quite a long time. It's only been recently that the idea of exposing yourself to differing opinions and seeing other people's side of things has gained wide-acceptance.
The internet encouraging people to only interact with those who share their opinion will not be the end of society as we know it.
This is a switch. When is the last time you heard of somebody worried about "perfect" software?
Online recommendation engines are not going to get perfect anytime soon.
(Oooh, lots of delicious troll lines come to mind. But I will restrain myself.)
In a way, Slashdot is a pioneer in this area. Posts which are unacceptable to the mainstream are moderated down, effectively "disappearing" them to most viewers.
What the preference engine does is to tailor this to the individual viewer. Thus groupthink can operate at very refined levels. Provided that there is sufficient clustering of opinions, isolated communities-of-opinion form.
Indeed, even if the clustering of opinion is slight, over the long term it may be reinforced by the effects of the preference engine, thus causing a sort of condensation of parochialism.
Of course, the same thing can happen in meatspace. But there it takes longer, and there always the uncomfortable chance that you may happen by chance to talk to someone outside your community (a homeless person, a Bush voter, an atheist, etc.), and your assumptions could be challenged.
Whereas online, it seems that these isolated communities are ever more cohesive, and venture into foreign territory only to engage in virtual pogroms. (E.g., in the context of political weblogs, the occasional 'invasions' of redstate.org by partisans from dailykos.com)
Is this at all like Slashdot-manufactured consensus? Where we mod up anti-Microsoft, anti-patent, anti-**AA, anti-SCO, pro-F/OSS, pro-Apple, and "Linux is difficult" posts, and mod down anti-Java and anti-USA posts?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I use AmaroK with the Last.fm Audioscrobbler plugin turned on, when I listen to a track it submits it to a database and compares that database to other user's database. It suggests a pretty diverse selection of music, everything from Iron Maiden to :Wumpscut:. So I would hardly say that ALL preference engines create a homogeneous selection, just the bad ones.
I'm agneglectic, too lazy to care if there is a God.
Postmodernism has hit Slashdot... yet another milestone in its downhill march.
Here a couple of good books on the subject:
Fashionable Nonsense : Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
Higher Superstition : The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science
"There's a danger that if we don't have some level of shared interaction, it can be destructive to our social cohesion"
What garbage. It's not like everyone in the entire world is on-line 24 hours a day. Some of us still like to get sunshine.
Newsflash.....there are actually some people in the world who can go an entire day without shopping on the internet. Apparently, they still go into those store things to buy things with paper money.
Believe it, or not!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Talk about narrow tastes!
Seastead this.
No, that's not "danger", it's prospect.
It is a very good thing to keep away from me, if someone annoys me, and I will do the same for those whom I annoy.
I suggest you read Slashdot
``Oh, something I learned last night... Don't try to reseat RAM while drunk. :/''
If you find that out every night, why do you keep doing it?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Listening to other people's point of view is all well and good. But no-one should feel like they have to listen to the hatred and bile that are chick tracts. And while that takes things to an extreme, that disregard for other people's opinions and that propaganda is extremely common on the internet. Just stay here at slashdot for a while.
Having said that, I have managed to find a message board with mixed people, and they are fairly nice and keep the propaganda to a minimum. But these places on the internet are rare and few. I don't blame people for wanting to avoid people like Chick. Why are people so much more extreme on the internet? Well they're extreme in real life, but Penny arcade made a good point with a comic that said "Anonymity + opinion = fuckwad." People who might be nice and able to take differing opinions in real life, don't NEED to do so on the internet because they don't care about the people they interact with. They act nice in real life, because they care about people's opinions who they interact with. On the internet, this is no longer the case. They can act one way on one message board, another way on another message board, and no-one will ever know.
I think on average the answer is yes we are but so many things are in the equation for judging what makes someone chose A. over B. and if we find we allow ourselves to be approached with items that meet a formula built on estimation then we are likely selling ourselves short. Issac Asimov spoke to this in the Foundation series when speaking of Psychohistory and the ability to predict humans actions in large groups. It is evident to me that there is a great deal of truth in this for large groups of people but I do believe this is very controversial with regards to individuals and believing you can predict their like and dislikes over time.
"I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Preference Engine ."
--Steve Ballmer on Steve Ballmer
David Brin's book "Earth" predicted it in 1990. It has a wacky plot (the characters use gravitational lasers to try to eject a micro-black hole from the center of the earth), but the world in which the story is set becomes more like our own world with each passing year.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Not as often as I used to. In the morning I see other people on the campus shuttle, as I fire up my Nintendo DS/PSP/GP2X handheld. The bus ride ends, but I've gotten good at switching my headphones to my MP3 player for the walk to class. Should I ask the cute girl in front of me to borrow her notes from yesterday? Nah, the slides from yesterday are on the professor's webpage.
Class is over, so I plug my headphones in again and head for some lunch. There's a really nice sit-down Thai restaurant, but I've got a paper due, so I'll just jump into the line at the fast-food shop; food in under three minutes, what could be better? Fed and caffinated, I mp3 my way back to my next class. Occasionally my other class has really good class discussions, but this prof just powerpoints an hour and a half of my life away. My doodling's improved, though.
That's all of my classes today! I thought about seeing if some of the guys in this class wanted to study for the test on Monday, but my guild has a raid planned for tonight, so I'm headed back to the bus.
-----
That's not me. That is, however, what I see of some of the undergrads here, a bit exaggerated, but still relatively accurate. My point is that if you're interested in vilifying technology, blaming online retail for a lack of social interaction in modern youth and young adults is like blaming Joe's Taco Stand in Tuscaloosa, AL for the rise in methane's contribution to the global greenhouse effect.
Really, there is no such "social cohesion" in the first place, so why bother about destroying it?
Don't mind modding this troll/flamebait/whatever, my karma has been "bad" for so long I don't care anymore, and since I don't care, I am free to speak my mind.
Jack Chick predates the internet, just FYI. He's been making tracts since the late 1960's; and they've been "popular"(meaning commonly seen) since at least the early 1980's. If you're (morbidly) curious, you can read about him on Wikipedia.
As far as the topic at hand goes, it's been known for years that people look for others who are like them and who reinforce their viewpoints. I don't see anything particularly wrong with this and, in fact, I think in cases where you're not in the mainstream, it's a Good Thing.
The concern about needing the input of a variety of viewpoints is blown out of proportion, IMHO. We're never going to be able to avoid people in real like who hold divergent viewpoints from our own.
I think online retail is a pretty stupid thing to be worried about bringing an end to social interaction. A healthy adult interacts with people in many cases besides buying stuff at stores. Teenagers don't hang out at the mall to buy stuff, they hang out there to be with their friends. Sure, a few people might start purchasing everything from the internet and never leave their house, but the world would be boring without at least a few weirdos.
Beyond commerce, you can make a bit of a better argument. For example, there are a lot of people who read political blogs. Many of the blogs are divided pretty evenly along political ideologies/party lines, and basically consist of them patting each other on the back for supporting their side or bashing the others. It's easy to build up a collection of links of a bunch of blogs that all link each other and pretty much agree. You'll be told pretty much the same thing by all of them, and so it's easy to ignore other viewpoints. I think a situation like that is far more damaging than online shopping recommendations directing me towards buying stuff that I probably like.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Rather than thinking about word of mouth versus preference engines, think about it as preference engines vs any type of advertising.
Preference engines are just a way of introducing a product to a person. Traditional advertising does it by targeting demographics that they think the product will appeal to. A preference engine is an expert system that correlates other people's tastes and your's, and then can recommend something you will probably like. Sounds to me like more product will get sold, and the customer will be more likely to walk away with music they will enjoy. Everybody's happy.
Given a choice between "one-size fits all" mass media where everyone sees the same ad and this, I'd much rather have semi-intelligent software point me to a song that I might like.
BTW, Amazon does this too, and in my experience they are right more than they are wrong about my tastes.
I don't want to sound like the cold-hearted typical hardliner or something, but this is simply not true. When I use some sort of online recommendation system (for example Amazon's recommendations or things like Music Map), I am not trying to shelter myself from everyone else in the world, I am just trying to explore some area of interest of mine further. And one way to explore these areas is to see what areas other people in the same area (same part of the music map, for example) are checking out.
I prefer to call it guided exploration rather than recluse-like sheltering or a dismantling of social cohesion.
And, it actually often is better than the real world. One of the quotes in the article from Brynjolfsson is that in the real world you bump into random people but is that so true? Most people meet people that work with them, or parents of kids at the same school as one's own kids, or people who populate the same college campus, etc. It isn't really that random. There is also another issue: Would it be OK to talk about music (or whatever else) with all these 'random' people I bump into? Of course not - the conversation has to lead into a topic like music, the person has to be the kind that has some sort of music interest, etc. While Brynjolfsson suggests that people are (wrongly) turning to automated preference engines to sort the massive amounts of content we are faced with, the opposite is true - humans are incapable of providing much use to each other at this level where our society is quite defined by having an incredible amount of knowledge floating about. It is thus appropriate to turn to alternate methods to help us then, in making good use of all this information?
Finding help in choosing != sheltering one's self from society
This study assumes that everyone who is a member of a given narrow interest group is also a member of the same set of other groups. A Republican who is Jewish, gay, an educator, and interested in gardening (yes, I actually do know someone who fits this description) would be a member of a rather diverse set of groups. Or, on Amazon, a given person might enjoy books on renaissance Europe, enterprise software, global travel, and women's issues (another friend). And I, who like technology and frequent /., know both of these people.
Although the internet may let like-minded people become very interconnected and absorbed by their own group's mindset, it doesn't stop people from belonging to diverse groups and being exposed to multiple mindsets.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You mean it would be better to continue letting companies/pyschopaths/sociopaths/marketing steer my wants and needs, socialize me, and monopolize my communications (mostly one-way) vs. a bunch of hand-selected people and ideas I wish to congregate with?
I welcome the day my group (whatever group) of people create a mini-Utopia, at least for themselves, *ignoring* those who want to dominate and exploit.
Let the designer mini-society begin, and let the best win.
With the industrial revolution the urban population exploded - in only a short generation and a war or two, society had transformed from an agrarian rural lifestyle to urban industrial specialists. Machinery was the enabler, when one person could produce an amount of food that it previously took maybe a hundred people to produce then it provided the ability for a small machine-augmented rural population to feed larger city populations. Now in North America urban population far outweighs the rural population. Only a brief hundred years or so ago things were completely different.
Shh.
If we communicate with only those people we shop like, of course it creates a feedback loop that not only alienates us from a diverse group of people, it also has us all wearing big buckles on our hats and shoes, or polyester leisure suits. That's why people like to ramble. Our social groups should include shopping preference engines. Not just shopping engines with sterile corporate chatrooms.
--
make install -not war
The slashdot community has a certain group-think to it, exemplified by my recent post.
An article was posted where the headline had little to do with the article. There was post after post of based on an erroneous headline. I pointed this out, and got modded flamebait.
I'm not upset by this; I knew pretty much that's what would happen going in. But, it's an example of a preference engine (the moderation system on Slashdot) acting to squelch any ideas that don't conform to the group-think so prevalent here.
Thus, you say what slashbots think you should say, and you get modded up. Question them, or provide meaningful data in opposition to any of the core mantras around here, and your voice is quickly trampled in mods of "flamebait" and "off topic", or perhaps "overrated" to avoid any karma consequences in metamoderation.
Microsoft=bad. Linux=perfection. Sun=irrelevant. Everybody here's a single male between 14 and 35, living in momma's cellar. ??? profit!
These are all Slashdot mantras, ideas so firmly entrenched into the moderation culture that to really oppose these ideas means moderation oblivion and a loss of karma. (voice)
It's entertaining, and as a Linux user, I mostly fit in, but it's definitely an ideological monoculture. Sometimes, I just get pissed. (and modded to the wasteland that is -1)
PS: I have some mod points now, and will be using them soon...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It seems to me that implicit in the article is the suggestion that we are defined by what we buy. That's absurd. What does it matter if I only listen to Techno and my neighbour only listens to Jazz? He still lives next door, we breathe the same air, drive on the same roads and have the same elected representatives. That's what creates social cohesion, not all listening to the only radio station in town and being brainwashed into buying Britney albums as a result.
Even in the activities we have total choice over we are all members of a number of different groups. I'm a robotics geek, a physicist, a cricket fan, an electronica fan, a motorsports fan, and I fit in a dozen other categories too. Within each category recommendation engines work well enough. But through being a cricket fan I meet people who aren't robotics geeks and who aren't physicists and who don't like electronica. Through these people I get to hear about jazz and soccer and knitting and all the other things they don't have in common with me.
If there's ever a a service which recommends every aspect of your life, from what to eat for breakfast to where to live and what job to have I might worry. Till then I can be pretty sure all the people I'll meet are multi-facted individuals and will have something new to teach me - even if our record collections are identical.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Are Preference Engines are truly unbiased?
How would people feel if, in a theoretical universe just like our own, there was the liklihood that Preference Engines could be tweaked by donations from manufacturers and suppliers? To continue the music example from the article, "Like Coldplay? How about trying [some obscure music clogging-up our warehouses because we haven't been able to sell it, but we threw $10,000 at the Preference Engine vendor because it's cheaper than the cost of destruction]?"
maybe if everybody in the united states were tethered to their computer by a fuse that when triggered destroys their face. people will actually buy into this, and that makes me a sad panda.
Or not? =8-0
This is...
O
U
T
R
A
G
E
O
U
S
!
randomize... *mumble* optimal brain damage algorithm... *snore* markov chaining on similarity matrices...
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Online merchants should add random items to customer orders to preserve social cohesion.
What's social interaction?
Television and TV commercials have already done this. Now ISPs are the middlemen now, but nothing else has changed. Certainly in suburban America, everyone seems increasingly isolated. I assume that's true elsewhere, but I don't know, 'cause I don't go anywhere anymore. (Note to mods: I'm dead serious)
One thing that's being totally ignored is that there are many types of people, and some of them don't like hanging out with people like themselves.
My friend Max loves to argue. He can't stand sticking around people who share his opinions for too long. (sound like anybody you know?)
My friend Addie is really girly, but can't stand hanging out around too many girls, because she likes being the "most girly" one in the group.
The point is that some people very much like diversity in their social circles. Some don't, but if the preference engines are perfect, many people will not be pidgeon-holed into interacting with people like themselves, which might even mean that some people who would be auto-segregated won't be.
Of course, this might not show up as a result now, because there's still a lot of work that needs to be done on the preference engines, so they don't necessarily detect that kind of thing. But we shouldn't ignore it.
Come on, some people could find something bad about anything. Preference engines, suggestive selling tools, whatever you want to call them. They're awesome. And it doesn't take away anybody's ability to see things that don't match their interests.... all the have to do is browse. I can go to Wikipedia, for example, and click "Random Page" or take a look at the home page, and get presented with something I never would have thought to look for. But the desire to do that doesn't mean that they shouldn't also have "See Also" links in the story I'm reading, with the assumption that my interest in one story suggests a potential interest in other stories.
Poor, poor, 21st century consumers... surrounded by so much technology that we can't even go looking for new stuff anymore? Hogwash!
RP
My daughther likes "Harry Potter", but hates "Narnia". She also likes Nintendo games.
My wife is has an atheist's interest in theology and history of Christianity, plus she was a literature major, so she gets some serious lit books (like anonotated "Ulyses").
My son got bunch of D&D books, plus some programming books on Flash. He also likes political humor (eg. John Stewart or Bill Mahr).
I get some computer books, lots of guitar books and some non-fiction science books (eg. Richard Dawkins). I also by jazz CDs.
You should see the recomendations I get... :-)
...richie - It is a good day to code.
"social cohesion"
n .mmmf
Wake up sonny boy. The Internet, darling of social re-constructivists, has instead led to unheard of levels of balkinisation.
Only the internet can give you alt.binaries.blondes.republican.bornagainchristia
What's worse is that it would have subscribers.
The internet is nothing more than a mirror of who and what we are: There lies in it no answers, no direction, no comfort. It is merely a tool we don't deserve.
"Note to mods: I'm being sarcastic"
I tried to make sense of what you said as sarcasm, and my brain exploded.
I'm going to get recommendations from lawyers on the 'net and see if I have grounds to sue for emotional distress.
Step 1. Steal Underpants Step 2. Preference Engines Step 3. PROFIT!
"There's a danger that if we don't have some level of shared interaction, it can be destructive to our social cohesion.'" ---- I cry BS on that. People have been meeting with those like minded for eons. They are called lodges, clubs, etc... but just because this is on the 'net it must be different and "destructive". Same kind of stupid arguements people make about how "video games are dangerous". Nevermind the far greater number of fights or laziness that comes from Monday Night Football or ABC soap operas. "oooo they're different than us, bad, evil," gimme a break crap like this doesn't even belong on slashdot.
I've noticed that those with a vested interest in old media (newspapers/tv) -- the opinion-making industry -- complain the most loudly and lucidly about online phenomena. This includes:
* newspapers/TV vs. blogs
* online books vs. dead-tree books
* online, non-peer-reveiwed journals vs. old style journals
* online movie reviews vs. what some newspaper/tv guy thinks.
I've also noticed that often the charge is that internet leads to people forming their own echo chanmber, or other groups that believe the same thing -- they aren't listening to what the talking head on TV says. Or that online journalism is beholden to no standards (like old media). Or that you don't really know movies, anyway. In essence: online bad, old media good.
This makes sense: old media is getting killed by this stuff.
I've also noticed that most of the loudest and best complainers of this stuff are Jews. From the article there are several folks that might be in the tribe: Schwartz, Goldberg, Hofman, Resnick. I don't really know if they do the mitzvah every week, but there's more likely than not a few Jews in there -- at least, more than you'd expect from a random sampling of the American people. As an experiment, re-read the article, but substitute, "Wang", "Chen", "Ho" and "Ping", and see if it seems a little odd.
This comment, of course, is entirely in keeping with this: old media isn't going to write an article or have a TV show about the preponderence of Jews in the opinion-making industry in America. That's simply not done -- but you'll see it on the internet.
OK -- you can mod me flamebait now.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
"In the physical world, I bump into all kinds of people by chance."
But you don't talk to them.
This is merely another step in social evolution - it may be happening much faster than anyone thought it would, but it would happen (or something like it, or perhaps something different would happen) eventually. Things change - we live in a time of great social upheaval and changes in our lifestyles and social connections will be happening now throughout the rest of our lives.
I don't see this as a problem, but rather a change that we either adapt to and survive, or fail to adapt to and don't.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
This is nothing new - God knows that if their goofy filtering thingy WORKS, I'll give them large dollars to use it across the board. I grow more bored than I would have thought possible by the rehashing over the years since the Internet became ubiquitous about how "personalized web pages" and filtered news was going to make us all more narrow-minded. IMHO, quite the opposite has happened as the vistas of exploration have opened even further.
But when I've made a decision about some piece of nonsense that I've already filtered from my world, like, say, neo-Nazi propaganda, I can safely say that never seeing it again in no way limits my social health or narrows my views in detrimental ways.
So whether or not focused shopping choices is a hot-button issue for you (in which case you require a calmer environment, some soothing music and a talky-doctor), the fact remains that all of animal development is a constant screen of environmental factors for the few that are useful, interesting or attractive or good to eat.
Filter away, please - that's why I read slashdot and the Wall Street Journal, but not Moveon.org - I've already filtered and will continue to do so to improve what is in front of me and eschew all that sucks.
I think you mean "John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theorem"
- 19
"Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad"
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2004-03
"His 2001 book, Republic.com, argued that the Internet threatens democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon often known by the term cyberbalkanization."
Sunstein is a deep and careful academic, so don't be turned off by this snippet from delving deeper into his writing.
I've worked in the "preference engine" industry for seven years now for two different companies. This story is total FUD.
People get what they want. If they want diversity, they will get it, thats the whole "preference" part of "preference engine."
This sounds just like a rehash of Cass Sunstein's article "The Daily We"
I agree absolutely. We really need some more accurate definitions of liberal, and Fast!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Not only has this happened, but it is in fact the way all modern religions deal with the world. If you create an environment to interact with people who are of like mind then conflict is created whenever you randomly stray out of that secure space. All religions act with blinders on refusing to accept alternate views of the world. I personally know people who refuse to listen to anything but religious radio and TV. Then, when congress passes some law they don't like they dont understand how people can think that way. Sheesh. It's called an "open mind" for a reason people!
Are you sure? Movie critics have not really thrown society over the cliff or dissolved the cohesion like a giant bottle of Billy May's newest wonder solvent. Many of us probably have a couple of movie or book critics we might pay particular attention to, and if they give a movie or book a good review, we'd be more likely to see the movie or buy the book...
And then there's NPR, Top-40 & New Country radio stations. Lots of groupies with those, yet even in the stark commercial desert that is Clear Channel/Infinity Broadcasting, other formats still work, too.
For every "affinity buyer", there is a non-null set of people who exist that will do just the opposite, more or less, on purpose or with intent. People who buy at Wal-Mart as much as possible vs those who go out of their way to NEVER shop at Wal-Mart (or Nordstroms, Suxs 5th Avenue, Whole Paycheck, etc).
Until Wal-Mart decides it can actually do high-end sales with the volume advantages it has with its cheap-at-all-costs super stores, then I think the commerical world is still probably safe.
Man, you need to meet new people.
"Hey, buddies, let's go out for a burger!"
"Where to?"
"Hold on, let's check burgers.com and see what's the pick-of-the-week."
Did you mean clique?
Looks like today isn't your day.
Take, for instance, my ex-girlfriend (no really, take her! Ha.Yeah. Anyway...): she considered herself to be a huge environmental activist, and we were constantly arguing about the legitimacy of human behavior. She would, in essence, go to the library or online source, find a bunch of books by people who agreed with her opinions, read them, and use that as legitimacy of her thought process. Ya know, because a "Dr." prefix makes them right, automatically. There are plenty of intelligent people on all sides of most issues, and reading only the research by those who've come to the same conclusion of you is not only short-sighted - it's counter-productive to the learning process. The truth is almost always somewhere between the extremes of those who you agree with and those you don't.
Being in a cynical period for my feelings about people in general, this self-applauding tendency worries me. In a recent class on governmental comparison, our teacher used a chart to refute the idea that computers would someday irrevocably separate people from one another. It was a study of Brits, who were asked (gotta love those self-reporting studies) whether they felt effective in and informed about their government. The study compared their feelings to internet usage, and found that people who used the internet for long periods of time felt more efficacy when it came to their control over national government. In my opinion, this is a fallicy. Sure, it's easy to be better-informed because of access to online news, both national and international, but when it comes to efficacy itself, I find it hard to believe that people in newsgroups are (necessarily) more politically active than those that aren't.
Without going into the feelings of self-importance and pseudo-intellectualism that distant interaction allows people, my main fear is that so much energy is going into agreeing with one another that (this sounds Marxist, I know) the energy required to engage the government in a revolutionary sense may never build up! Will the anger and dissapointment ever reach critical mass when we're so busy applauding eachother's homogenous opinions? After all, in the case of environmentalism, how many oil tycoons are reading 'open letters to the industry?' Probably not a whole hulluva lot. So isn't that, in some sense, completely wasted energy? As another example, isn't the allowance of peaceful protest (which is a very important right, I agree) just a way to legitimize the current regime? When I see a group of teenagers playing guitar and bongo drums to get a political point across, I can't help but think that they're playing right into the WASP's hands. "There. You played yer guitar, you smoked yer reefer, now go home and feel like you can sleep easy because you've 'done something about it.'" In other words, I fear that small bursts of political energy may take away from the potency of what would, eventually, be a mass outcry.
While I agree that the 'net is a perfect social vehicle, I also think that way too much time is spent patting eachother's backs and accumulating whuffie, under the impression that it's actually making a difference to anyone but ourselves. The people that we intend to sting with our barbs have no idea we exist. Why? Because they're all busy on their own forums, agreeing with one another.
(By the way, I think that peaceful protest and the right to share and build upon one-another's opinions are very important things; I just also happen to think that we're too easy on ourselves and avoid exploring the benefits/costs of things that we've already made up our minds against because we don't get the same social/neurochemical kickback when people don't agree with us.)
Well for me, i's not that Wal-Mart doesn't do high-end sales.
It's that I think their competitive practice stink and that their company already has gotten too large. (Large companies wield too much power in a free market.)
Therefore, I choose to shop anywhere *but* Wal-Mart.
(I used to shop at Wal-Mart a lot. Until I started thinking about whether I preferred shopping at large stores or small businesses. Low prices aren't worth being treated like cattle in a store where you can never be recognized as a regular customer. It's well worth the price premium to go someplace smaller where repeat business is encouraged and you get treated like a customer rather then a consumer.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I have never come across sites like that except through discussions about extreme sites elsewhere in the net. On the other and plenty of sites carry diverse but mostly noraml views (slashdot, BBC users' comments etc.).
Actually Chick is so extreme that I initally thought it was a spoof.
And your can use collaborate filtering to find a girlfriend too.
Take a look at this site http://www.thelovesearch.com/
You seem to assume (but maybe I'm just mis-reading it) that being forced into some uninformed unfiltered choices of social groups will result in more diversity. I'd say, on the contrary, it reduces diversity on the whole.
See, if you did go (alone) to Bar X and tried to fit in and have some "shared experience", the result isn't that there'd just be some people (older or not) who could use some more diversity. Chances are there'd be a clique of regulars who already have One True Way (TM) of seeing the world. They already have their favourite football team, their right way to dress, their right(eous) set of prejudices and biases in how they see the world, etc. And are quite content to pat each other on the back and circularly reinforce the view that that's the One True Way (TM) and it's everyone else who's anywhere between wrong and a menace to society.
Will they welcome diversity and a wildly different, sometimes even opposite, point of view? Well, no, groups generally don't. Chances are they go there precisely to hear it from each other about how they're the right and upstanding ones, and feel like in one big like-minded family.
That's not meant as an insult or anything. It's just the way human groups work, and how humans look for social acceptance. Chances are you want to be in a group who thinks you're right, not in a group where you're the odd freak.
If you go in there with spiky green hair, a "Work Sucks" t-shirt and a few piercings won't remind them that the world is more diverse and we all could be more open minded. It will just be a disturbance in the Forc... err... in that comfy illusion that the world isn't diverse, and that a closed mind is the right kind of mind. If anything, it will just result in a round of talks (either right now or, rarely, politely waiting for you to leave first) about how hooligans like you are what's wrong with society today, and how back in our day the grass was greener, the sun brighter, and everyone not only walked 5 miles through snow to school, uphill both ways, but they _liked_ it.
(And to not only pick on older people -- hey, I'm no longer myself either -- the same would happen in reverse if you went in a gentleman outfit, complete with vest, pocket watch and bowtie, to a punk bar. You'd just be their own version of what's wrong with society today, and how nostalgic lemmings like you are what keeps us all in the middle ages.)
If you want to fit in that existing crowd, you have to dress like them, talk like them, cheer for the same football team (even if you don't even like football), have the same prejudices, and generally be on the "us" side of the whole "us vs them" theme. And there'll be a _lot_ of "us vs them".
Such a group exerts a pressure towards conformism and uniformity. Adding one more member won't make it more diverse, it will just add one more guy or gal who ends up assimilated in it, and ultimately becomes yet another clone of any other group member. Maybe an imperfect clone, but nevertheless a clone.
So on the whole of society that kind of homogenizing actually reduces diversity.
Is it that much worse if I go looking for a group that fits me as I am instead? I'd say not at all. Even if it results in largely separated groups, it does a hell of a lot more to preserve diversity on the whole.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I.e., we're all nerds, we all like to think that the world is about eloquently building an ivory tower and having something _logical_ (if only by virtue of using enough fallacies) to say about anything. We're the kids who got praised (if only by our parents) when we could rant for hours about how the rainbow is like that because of refraction and difraction on water droplets, instead of saying some platitude like "dunno what it is, but it's as beautiful as your eyes". We're the ones who when asked something like "why do you like music?" would actually _expect_ someone to launch into a whole philosophical disertation about the effects on the psyche and the evolutionary advantage of having a brain that detects patterns, e.g., the beat in a song. And would actually look down upon someone who just gives the human answer "uh, I never thought about that". (See the recent "How I Failed the Turing Test" story on Slashdot, and some of the comments to it.) We're the kind who actually _has_ to have something smart (sounding) to say on a topic, and would feel naked and stupid to admit just for once that we have no bloody clue.
(And if someone wants to point out that my own message is an example of that: yes. It is. I'm a nerd too. I'm good at talking out the ass too. I can speak fluently out the ass in three languages and a variety of topics.;)
So we mod up those who are just like us.
It's just one personal bias on top of the others, and we mod up those who fit that bias. And we exert a conformity pressure towards that point.
It's not meant to be a critique or anything. All I'm saying is that in the end we're just another group of humans.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But that is exactly the point. Increasingly we self select our way into groups that think the same as us, to the exclusion of those who don't.
If you watch a mainstream news channel or read a mainstream newspaper, then even if there is a bias (that does contribute to polarising people in the sam way this article is about, but to a much lower degree) we are still exposed to some level of variation.
If you pick your newspaper because of a specific movie critic you'll likely see information not tailored to you in other sections, and the othe way around. You see a filtered view of the world, but not all of it filtered the same way all the time.
But if my only source of information are sites that show me information from people exactly like me, and only read news sources that show me information preferred by people exactly like me, and so on, then I would be increasingly isolating myself from other ideas.
Whether or not this will turn into an actual problem, or just cause the growth of more niche subcultures (because the "recruitment" is now instantly world wide) is an open question.
The idea is sold to us as a way to simplify our lives. The snag is it also helps disenfranchise sections of the population, and if abused allow gov'ts to control the flow of news by simply ensuring it gets marked as irrelevant. People could also then decide to never hear bad news, and could cause even greater polarisation in society between rich and poor, healthy and unhealthy. Imagine if 60% of the US population never knew about Hurricane Katrina?
About 8 or 9 years ago my boss at the time did a lecture on "The Daily Me".. the idea has been kicking around for years... e.g. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1017779142.php
Is it inevitable? Can society decide to control the viewing habits of everyone, i.e. a reverse censorship to make people NOT turn off? That's a big question!
Paul
From TFA: "there's a danger that their tastes can narrow and that society may balkanize into groups with obscure interests."
Would this outcome be bad for society on a whole, or is it just bad for mass market manufacturers? I really doubt that this will be allowed to happen. How long before marketers start going to the sellers and giving them incentives to have their preference engines suggest specific products, brands, titles, artists, albums, etc.? This sort of marketing is already a common occurance in brick and mortar stores, the difference is that in brick and mortar stores, it is shelf position, displays, and salesperson spiffs that are sought rather than preference engine suggestions.
Civilization, the death of dreams.
Hey Guys, after reading this article I figured I would let you all know... Best Buy has its Reward Zone program which not only tracks your buying habits but labels each customer depending on whether or not you purchase their service plans, accessories, services (deliever Geek Squad) etc. When I was still working there I thought it was a good program, give money back to the customers for allowing us to track their buying... But now... Labeling customers and offering them things BASED on that.... Whatever happened to sales that attract all customers not ones who only purchase what you want them to?
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
Different views doesn't always mean annoyance. I consider myself a moderate conservative (I like fiscal responsibility, dislike sanctity of marriage, and hate the Shrub). I know this one girl who's a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, just like her parents.
I'm marrying her, so you could surmise that she doesn't annoy me.
Another example: many of my friends love country music. I hate it with a passion. They're still my friends.
Sounds like a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon to me.
"The fabric of social cohesion has vanished! People no longer feel constrained by their societal roles! Calvin no longer has the desire to throw water baloons at Susie Derkins! Hobbes has wandered off into the forest on a gastronomic quest!"
"Calvin, stop that aimless wandering and get in here and eat your dinner!"
I'd rather be exposed to the types of stuff other people like me are interested in than only be exposed to the stuff some big company wants me to be interested in. The result of course is lots of smaller markets. A company that wants to survive will have to deal with a wider range of products with not very many blockbusters. People will actually be exposed to more variety as they will see and hear what their friends bought - friends who are in a different nich. I imagine this is also good for small businesses. Big companys can't deal with "obscure interests" but small ones thrive on it.
TFA is just spreading FUD.
> it can be destructive to our social cohesion
Oh, FSM/IPU help us when our society starts to lose its tightly-knit, loving structure that we enjoy every day, giving us peace, fairness, which also causes everyone to love everyone else. Thankfully that hasn't happened yet and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that we're all so happy... yeah... destructive to the nonexistent cohesion?
Utter bullshit: I hate advertising, corporations, and all the other knee-jerk crap that I'm supposed to hate because I'm young; don't tell me that we're going to become what we already freaking are!
They missed "if you like Star Wars, you'll love Lord of the Rings." I wish Amazon and Netflix would tell me something I don't know. I put probably an hour into training both their engines, and I still get LOTR half the time on both sites. Today I got "William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle (Re/Search #4/5)" and "UML Distilled" on Amazon's front page, so it's doing a little better. I stick to the lists, (ListMANIA ... MANIA ... MANIA) and they're geniunely useful.
Here's another one from the article:
I remember my mom doing that kind of thing so that she could talk to other engineers at Motorola. It just doesn't work. The true believer can easily sniff out the infidel. It just lets you waste your time listening to people talk about things you geniunely don't care about. My level of commonality is being the guy who gives you a blank stare if you talk about televised sports. Someone has to be the one wearing Converse in every sitcom.
I'm not a believer in revolutionary consumerism or non-consumerism, but this article really makes it out like it threatens the system if you don't buy into all of it 100%, all the time. If you don't know the results of the SuperBowl, the whole world will "balkanize" into a state of "tribalism". I suppose that means we'd all learn Bosnian, get Maori tattoos, and play drums in the park. I can accept that risk.
So, to buy into this hysteria you have to accept two postulates:
1. All our real life efforts to put ourselves into chosen situations and circumstances, the effective methods of preference expression that we choose or fall into, are so ineffective as to be negligible. The evolution of our various cultures & subcultures, received or chosen, is trivial.
2. "If recommenders online were perfect..." Perfect software. The phrase defies mockery. That may be the biggest handwave ever.
So this isn't a social problem, it's a premise for a sci-fi story, in the same vein as grey goo. The real problem is that we gladly confuse our hubris with an actual ability to create perfection, while we trivialize the vast complexity of the real world.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
While, theoretically, those things could be gamed too (and probably occasionally are), people aren't likely to long continue to use a system that doesn't work for them. I use Amazon's preference system because it (mostly) works for me, and I hardly just blindly take its recommendations. Anyone that did that would quickly figure out that it was stupid.
So, could it happen? Sure... occasionally. But I don't think it would be very effective if used on a large scale, and I think the online retailers by-and-large understand that.
A bunch of people on Slashdot arguing over the dangers of group-think?
Aiiieeeeeee!!!!!!!
I see this sort of happening in the world of news, especially online. I read a certain type of news, and sometimes the only exposure I have to "the other side" of the debate is the indignant responses to points I didn't even know were made. This is most pronounced in blogs, but I think it's happening more and more with mainstream news, too - you can only find out about certain things if you read the Bay Guardian, or watch Fox News.
I wonder if this polarization has anything to do with the "Equal time" rule being done away with, or if it's just a reflection of the overall polarization of our society.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
These types of stories remind me of a quote from the estimed Professor Frank [Simpsons]. The thought that the computers will insulate us this much seems a little ludicrous.
---- Quote -----
Apu remembers his computer training course.
Apu: I enrolled in Springfield Heights Institute of Technology
under the tutelage of the brilliant Professor John Frink...
Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch
it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will
be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive
that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Frink: Well, theoretically, yes. But the computer matches would
be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic
conquest. Mw-hurgn-whey.
---- End Quote ----
And since online dating has become perfect now we can wave the rest of our personal lives goodbye.