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

Old Media vs. Internet

[putko]

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.