Recommendation Engines And How They Are Changing Our Culture

Grossman, Lev. “How Computers Know What We Want - Before We Do.” Time. Time, Inc., 27 May 2010. Web. 27 Jan. 2011.

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In the article, “How Computers Know What We Want - Before We Do”, Lev Grossman fears that recommendation engines may be changing our social world. He believes that recommendation engines are doing this through a concept called collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering is the principle that the behavior of a large group of people can be used to make an “educated guess” about the behavior of a single individual. The web recently has changed the way we shop, and Grossman believes it is now transforming our social lives too and recommendation engines are coming along for the ride. Grossman states “The risk you run with recommendation engines is that they’ll keep you in a rut” (par. 21). He says they do this because ruts are “comfy” places and so they aim to keep you them. Eventually Grossman believes that this would cause people’s social and cultural world to narrow down into what he called a “cozy, contended, claustrophobic little dot of total personalization” (par. 28). Everyday more and more recommendation engines are gathering up information about us and shaping our reality in a form that hopefully will be to our liking. In sense, Grossman believes it is creating a customized world for each of us that he says is slightly “childproof” and ever so slightly stifling.

Grossman’s point of view is culturally significant because he believes that recommendation engines may be changing the way our culture works. This is important because it makes you think about whether or not Grossman belief is true. For example, Grossman states that dating sites are making predictions about love. These sites put human behavior into data, which in turn they use to look for patterns in order to pair up people. This makes you think that if they are doing it to “match” soul mates then it wont be long until recommendation engines will be controlling all aspects of our cultural world. In the second to last paragraph, Grossman challenges the audience by asking a couple of questions. He asks, “How far will it go?” and “ Will we eventually surf a web that displays only blogs that conform to our political leanings?” These are tough questions to examine because the audience must dig deep in order to understand and answer these questions. Grossman leaves you with the idea that people were not built to play it safe all the time. It is good for us to be disappointed or offended from time to time, because Grossman believe that is what forces us to evolve.