Scary Genius
Kicked out of my office (we’re moving), I spent more time working –and procrastinating –at home. I updated my ITunes program on my home computer (which controls the loading of ipods, for those who don’t know). And ITunes invited me to add the “genius bar” to the program, and I did.
The genius bar is basically an interior decorator for your music. It tells you what songs you have go well together, and it suggests new songs –which you can purchase at the ITunes store– to make your collection more aesthetically complete. (Well, not quite–it doesn’t tell you to junk your music collection altogether and develop some better taste. If you like the musical equivalent of orange and purple plaid, it will give you more orange and purple–and maybe add a dash of pink.)
In order to access the genius bar, you need to let Apple rummage around in your ITunes folder. I don’t care that Apple knows that I have two songs by Five for Fighting on my ipod. At the same time, the whole thing makes me vaguely uneasy–not only the privacy thing, but the idea that they know what I like before I do. It’s individually targeted advertising.
Anybody else have the same reaction?
Netflix and Amazon do the same thing. I don’t find it scary; actually, I’ve found some good movies and books as a result.
Advertisers are always looking for ways to “break through the clutter” and target their marketing, and that’s good for you and them–you get more useful advertising, they get more sales.
There are concerns that consumers will get “trapped” in consumer niches and their purchases (and thus tastes and aesthetics) such that we never try anything new. I suppose that could happen to people who live in an utter vacuum, but I think it’s a little far-fetched.
A bit more troubling, in my view, are the companies that compile huge databases that profile and sort people along various lines based on online transactions, consumer surveys and credit-card purchases (Axiom Corp collects a lot of this stuff) and sells it to political parties or other governmental agencies. That makes tracking and profiling people a lot easier.
I turned down the “genius bar” option, partly for the reasons you cite, Cathy, and partly because I just don’t use iTunes enough for the results to be useful. (And I thought it might slow the whole thing down even more.) But I do love Pandora.com for finding new music based on what I already like.
The Amazon suggestions are sometimes helpful and sometimes humorously off-the-mark. One of the first things I bought from Amazon after they added that feature was a bunch of assigned texts for a course I took on the Civil War. It took me years to shake their assumption that I am obsessed with that topic. Now the recommendations change faster, but they still make silly guesses, especially if I’m buying gifts. I’m not automatically interested in cookbooks just because someone I know wanted one!
Mollie, yes, the underlying flaw in the system is that it’s simply automated; books or movies are hooked together by genre, theme, author, director, cast, etc., and you get a lot of corkers with the good stuff.
I purchased a Philip K. Dick anthology from Amazon after Fr. Garvey’s article in Commonweal awhile back, and I keep getting rec’s for Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” a novel I despise even more than “Lord of the Rings,” (William Collier, take note!).
However, had I not Netflixed “Millions,” I would never have seen “Dear Frankie.”
I think consumer generated recommendation sites are growing up alongside the commercial ones, which is a good thing. I hear a lot about Twitter, but have yet to actually figure out how it works.
I must say that I have not used the Genius Bar functionality for the same reason. For someone as connected to people via social networking, blogging and more as I am, I still find some vague discomfort at having Apple make these suggestions.
Now Jean does make a good point about how Amazon and Netflix use this type of technology and that does not bother me as much; perhaps it just does not feel so invasive… Not sure.
And Google’s Blogger.com does something similar if you have blogs set up in a feed reader through them, recommending new things you might like to read. Which I more often than not ignore, but which has led me to some really good blogs.
Ultimately there is something that still makes me feel a bit off about the whole thing – some kind of boundary or privacy issue that I cannot quite articulate.
As for Twitter – I have yet to figure out how to make that work, so Jean if you find out, let me know!