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.'"

Comments

What nonsense.

[ip_freely_2000]

"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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Davin Brin

[Spazmania]

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.