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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.
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...
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.
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)
Talk about narrow tastes!
Seastead this.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.)