Today I received an email from Amazon.com with new recommendations based upon ten items I purchased or told Amazon I own. I don’t recall giving Amazon any information on my private library, but they may have received that information via secret NSA wiretaps. So what were Amazon’s top three recommendations?
- Rough Weather Ahead for Walter the Farting Dog
- Mastering APA Style: Student’s Workbook and Training Guide
- Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis
I initially dismissed their suggestions, but as I was moving the cursor towards the delete button, I began wondering how Amazon’s recommender system identified these three books. The first book was easy. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a book based on canine flatulence?
Last summer, I made a deal with my kids. I’d buy them a book, and if they read it and gave me a brief oral report, I’d buy them another. Madi and Sam were easy. They read the Hatchet series by Gary Paulsen, and most of the Lemony Snicket books. Haley was the tough one. She couldn’t find a book to get started. Then we found “Walter, the Farting Dog”. Thanks to Walter and his irritable bowel, Haley was able to improve her reading skills over the summer.
I’ve had the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th Edition since I started graduate school. But how did Amazon know that I really haven’t mastered APA style? Was it a lucky guess, or did they know that I’ve been using the same Mike Thompson authored, APA formatted paper as my guide for the past three years? After all, Thompson is the Dr. William Strong UCTE/LA English Teacher of the Year. I figure he knows how to format a paper.
The logic in Amazon's recommender system must have determined that anyone who would be willing to shell out serious coin on dry research texts is probably a doctoral student, hence the final recommendation. I won’t hold my breath for “Statistical Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Introduction to Univariate and Multivariate Methods” to make the Oprah Book Club list. The title alone gives most people a slight migraine. I bet the author would sell more books if he put a farting dog in the title.
The issue with any recommender system is does it broaden or narrow the exposure to relevant content? In other words, is there more to me than gaseous dogs and doctoral research? Sadly not, but there should be.
In the article,
“The latest info – tailor made for you", the author talks about how
RSS feeds will become the one of the primary ways people access information. While many Internet users have never heard of RSS, XML formats, or aggregators, new versions of web browsers, including Microsoft’s Windows Vista, will have RSS capabilities “baked in”. The use of RSS feeds will be as simple as book marking a Web page. Most users won’t even know they are using RSS. While RSS provides a real-time, generative method of collecting and sorting information, a question posed in this article, is similar to the one I posed about Amazon’s recommender system. Does the extent to which someone tailors their information environment reinforce their own views at the expense of exposing them to a more diverse perspective? In the search for more information, do we really just end up with farting dogs and dissertations?
