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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.'"
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.
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.
Somehow people often seem to assume that only catastrophic events can have any real impact on the social order. Not true. The Internet began as nothing more than a technical experiment at three academic sites involving only a few people. The World Wide Web was initially just an obscure application written by an academic geek and shared with a few other academic geeks.
Listen to the places that you named. The store. The bar. How do you decide where to go to the store? To the bar? Most people I know these days decide where to shop, where to play, where to drink, and where to stay at least in part (if not entirely) based on websites and website reviews.
Website A caters to a younger crowd. It reviews Bar X and calls is rotten.
Website B caters to an older crowd. It reviews Bar X and calls it lovely.
Yes, Bar X may have been older-friendly already, but if the site(s) are popular enough, this orientation will, as a result of the website reviews, gradually become more acute.
The same occurs with preference engines, only even more egregiously; you don't read a bad review on your favorite site, the business, location, party, or event never even appears on your favorite site, and thus you and anyone like you never knows about them, never attends them. Your social circle loses any participation in, or marketplace influence on, said business, location, party, or event. And as a result, it offers less and less for your "sort," since your "sort" never turns up. Eventually it loses sight of your "sort" altogether.
In effect, you are segregated from it (or it from you). Repeat for every population living in a given urban space and you have populations that simultaneously occupy the same city but lead completely separate, distinct, and radically different lives.
And, as a corollary, the diversity of each of them is drastically reduced.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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
With (ahem) a little preference-engine background myself, let me note that, except for extreme instances, /.'s moderation seems not at all "cohesion"-prone. This is because its critique is primarily positive, and usually about eloquence as much as content. I.e., an upward mod demands merely that you say something engaging and coherent. If you do, chances are fair that you'll ring someone's chimes. And, in turn, you'll read comments thus chosen, if only to see what caught someone else's fancy. It's hardly the same as a selective, self-reinforcing community... and may even have the unintended side-effect of expanding perspectives...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly