The preference engine

This L.A Times article looks at "preference engines track consumers choices online and suggest other things to try. But do they broaden tastes or narrow them?"Further,"We're just being flooded with content," said Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. "And people are increasingly relying on recommenders to help them sort through it all."Preference engines emerged in the earliest days of e-commerce to boost sales — the Internet equivalent of "Would you like a belt to go with that?" — but they have improved with technology and incorporated human feedback to more precisely predict what someone might like.Their spread worries some who fear that preference engines can extract a social price. As consumers are exposed only to the types of things they're interested in, there's a danger that their tastes can narrow and that society may balkanize into groups with obscure interests."As these things get better and better, nobody has to encounter ideas they don't already agree with," said Barry Schwartz, professor of sociology at Swarthmore College and author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less." "We lose that sense of community we had when there were shared cultural experiences, even though we may not have liked them. Now we can create our own cocoon and keep all that unpleasant stuff out......"


[Telling You What You Like]