A popular approach is to take a look at what someone enjoys or collects or obsesses over, and then take a step to the side. I may own every book Stephen King has ever put out, but I certainly don’t own every book written about Stephen King, or about horror in general, or many other novels written by other authors who tread similar terrain as SK. I heartily endorse this approach, for what it’s worth. People’s relationships with their collections are often weirdly territorial, so rather than try to find someone a Gundam Warrior toy that they don’t already own and that fits in with their overall vision for their collection, you’re much better off giving them a Gundam Warrior calendar (practical!) or a CD by an underground band inspired by the series (wacky!).
I enjoy broadening my horizons and will certainly check out a new author recommended because of my known love for another author – assuming the recommendation comes from a human being. I’m a lot more skeptical of computer recommendations. I probably spend way too much time thinking about this (SHOCKER) but the ability for a website like Netflix or Amazon to make recommendations is a phenomenon that occurs right at the intersection of my voracious pop-culture appetites and what I allegedly do for a living. There was also a recent story in the Post about how those sites are constantly trying to improve those functionalities, including Netflix’s million dollar prize for an improved algorithm. And, cynic that I am, I take for granted the extent to which website recommendations work and focus on how they don’t work.
Part of it is that personal taste is something we don’t even understand ourselves. Saying you like comedies is meaningless, since that covers movies from fluffy rom-coms to pitch-black satires, just like sci-fi covers everything from Frankenstein to The Matrix. Saying you like a specific movie doesn’t really narrow it down enough, either. Saying you give The Matrix four stars doesn’t get at why you liked it, which could be anything from a deep abiding love of slow-motion gun fights to an intellectual fascination with post-apocalyptic scenarios to a deep abiding love for Joe Pantoliano. And even if Joey Pants is what does it for you in The Matrix, is it the actor alone, or the material he was working with? Because I doubt very much that Joe saved the movie Daredevil for anybody.
So, it’s slippery, but computers don’t do slippery real well. Computers do discrete data points and math. And, granted, if you built a database of all the movies I really love, and you assign them category points, you might conclude that an R-rated sci-fi/comedy starring Jack Black directed by Quentin Tarantino would be worth recommending to me. (Assuming I could hear you over the choir of heralding angels.) But recommendations for the latest turd of an Eddie Murphy vehicle based on my love of Trading Places will be summarily ignored.
Here’s the thing that really grinds my geek-gears, though: I don’t work at Amazon, but it’s pretty clear that they recommend things based on fairly broad categories. And, you know what? I can’t fault them for that. It’s the low-effort approach, and it casts a wide net, but their goal as a company is to sell as much stuff as possible. If I buy a Ramones album and they recommend 100 other punk albums, they’re playing a numbers game that at least some of those recommendations will appeal to me, even if a lot of them are from wildly different corners of “punk” as a musical category. It’s weak, but it’s logic. Every album and book and movie in the Amazon database belongs to a category, and you might as well leverage that data. Fine. What KILLS me is that one of the data categories is “New Releases.” And believe me, I get why they need that category, given the way that the website works and how they push new releases on the front page. It’s practically Paleolithic interwebs strategy, mimicking the brick and mortar approach. When you walk into Borders, the table right in front of you is the latest releases. Same deal at Amazon, virtually. Amazon just takes it a little too far. If I go to Amazon.com and order the Stephen King novel that came out this week, why in the world would the website suggest that I might also like “Hating Others Makes Me Better Than You” by Ann Coulter just because her book also came out this week? Not an implicit association in having them on the same table, but an actual explicit “You may also like …” message. It’s automated, it’s zero-effort, and I guess it might work on a certain type of customer, but sweet crucified Odin does it annoy me. And the real reason it annoys me is because I know that from a computer-programming perspective it would be SO EASY to exclude “New Releases” as a category used to make recommendations. If Amazon.com hired me I could fix it on my first day, and that’s after doing human resources paperwork all morning and getting taken out for lunch by my new boss. I’m not going to stop using Amazon, I just want them to try a little harder. But you can’t always get what you want.
But speaking of always getting what you want (and not about birthday gifts this time), Monday night was just about everything that a homebody tv-loving geek like me could hope for. First and foremost, Monday Night Football. Even if I didn’t participate in various football-driven gaming groups, I would have been looking forward to the Brett-Favre-versus-Green-Bay showdown. The game itself did not disappoint and kept me up and into it through to the end. But as far as my vested interests, they were many, and in some ways, self-contradictory. I had picked the Vikings in the pick’em pool, and by Monday night I was too far behind to win the week against everybody, so I needed to be right only to finish the week with a better record than my wife (whom I love and adore, but we do enjoy a little friendly competition). So the Vikes needed to win for me and cover the spread, but the Pack needed to do well too, because although I had faith in the Brett factor, my fantasy football team is QB’ed by Aaron Rodgers and I was behind in my matchup going into MNF. Improbable as it seems, I got exactly the game I wanted. The Vikings won by 7, but playing from behind all night forced Aaron Rodgers to put the ball in the air a lot and he passed for over 350 yards in the losing effort, which combined with a couple touchdowns gave me my fantasy football win. I’m now in the top twelve of the pick’em pool on the year (which puts me ahead of about twenty-seven other people but still well-behind my wife and my grandmother) and my fantasy team has improved to 2-2.
Now the tv geeking out came as the Monday Night Football game was finishing up, which featured the desperation drives by Green Bay which earned my fantasy win. This was the 11 o’clock hour, when The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are on. Jon Stewart’s guest? Sarah Vowell, who is my favorite author-This-American-Life-correspondent-voice-of-one-of-the-Incredibles. Colbert’s feature subject? A crazy amateur competitive eater who was trying to defeat a fifteen pound 40K calorie burger at a Pennsylvania pub. Did I burn out the A/B button on my remote flipping back and forth between ESPN and Comedy Central between 11:15 and 11:45 on Monday? I came close, my friends. I came close.
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