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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.'"
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.
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)
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
I share your opinion. In fact, I've heard similar complaints about the slashdot friend/foe system and the ability to "moderate" (affect the score) of messages posted by your friends and foes. Some claim this is just a way "to avoid reading alternative viewpoints."
But in my experience, it's a good way to avoid reading over and over again the same stupid shit that I've given ample consideration to and rejected as stupid shit. I don't have time to keep re-considering it every time someone posts it. Being able to avoid that is a Good Thing.
I guess it's possible that one of the morons I've chosen to ignore would suddenly one day, 1000-monkeys-on-1000-typewriters style, present some cogent insightful bit of info to make me reconsider my already-carefully-considered viewpoint. But, I'm pretty sure I'd run into that novel info eventually anyway, and the ability to avoid it (or at least focus on the new info from those who have already proven themselves to be less moronic) is valuable to me.
Same with amazon's "people who bought that also like this . . " and other preference engines. They're preferences for a reason.
everything in moderation