Recommendations

My prize in the poster comp last week was an Amazon gift certificate, so I browsed over to look for something worthwhile on which to spend it. I often find myself, on these occasions, drawn into a compulsive cycle of interaction with their recommendation engine, which is absolutely maddening but somehow irresistible at the same time.

I seem to remember this feature being widely touted at one point as both instrumental in the site's success and also a prime example of the possibilities of emergent software and the wisdom of crowds; much of which meretricious nonsense lives on in our brave new Web 2.0 age with only the barest change of livery.

The most striking thing about the Amazon engine is how unbelievably fucking stupid it is, how mechanical, how dumbfoundingly literal. The gears tick over with such creaking obviousness and the connections are so banal that it's almost painful to watch.

Say you foolishly admit to owning and liking Northern Lights. Suddenly the recommendations list includes every single book Phillip Pullmann has in print -- wow, really? I never would have thought of reading other works by the same author! -- including, naturally, sixteen other editions of the one you just said you owned.

Of course, crowds are notoriously stupid too, so this probably captures their wisdom exactly. But honestly, you'd think someone would've thought to put in some rudimentary filtering for at least the most egregious duplications.

What keeps one going, clicking the little stars and checkboxes and refreshing to see the changes propagate, is partly that morbid fascination with the system's dimwittedness -- but that wouldn't have much longevity on its own. The thing is, very occasionally things come through that are so out of the blue that you think someone must be having a laugh.

One case in point is Jeff Noon's Vurt, a psychedelic 90s Mancunian sci fi about feathers that are either videogames or drugs or both and lead to something of a reality breakdown. (The sequel, after which I could be said to have named a screensaver although I don't think that was uppermost in my mind at the time, is much better.) Whenever some non-sequitur like a medieval French verse saga turns up in Amazon's list, it's invariably tagged "Recommended because you said you owned Vurt." I can only infer that Noon's readers have very interesting bookshelves.

What really prompted me to post, though, was this:

Say what? I mean, Susan Cooper's Arthurian children's fantasy sequence does have a strong female character, but it's hardly a lesbian classic...
Posted by matt at June 18, 2007 08:24 PM