Wasser WASSER

Jayson Jarmon
WASSER Managing Director

When you encounter an online preference engine or recommendation system in your daily Internet travels, you may be inclined to scoff. “There’s no way,” you might say, “the splendid complexity of my rich, multifaceted personality can be parsed by this generic demographic-profiling software.” This is, of course, in some measure true: How can we say we truly know anyone? How can we hope to ever have a complete understanding of ourselves and others, without veering into the philosophical or the metaphysical? Human personalities are a complex pastiche of biology and experience—so much like snowflakes, we are told, that no two are alike.

Enter the preference engine. You know the kind: the Amazon.com book-recommendation system, the iTunes “Genius” system, et al. Engines like these and hundreds of others casually suggest product choices to you, based on the preferences and buying habits of others who have chosen this or that product in the past. As the user makes more and more choices, the system hones its recommendations until its insight seems downright eerie in its predictive abilities.

Let’s take William Shatner, for instance. The other day, while I proudly hovered over my extensive collection of Shatner MP3s in iTunes (I believe my cursor was on Shatner’s stirring spoken-word version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by The Beatles), the iTunes preference engine leapt into action and presented me with the following recommendations:

Yes: That’s a version of Tommy Tutone’s 1982 hit, “867-5309/Jenny,” as rendered by bodybuilder/actor/California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger!

I was staggered. From the millions of needs that I might have at that particular time, how could this simple online system deduce that, more than anything else in the world, I absolutely had to have Arnold singing “867-5309/Jenny”? More than food, more than drink… It was more than a mere physical need: The recommendation would fill the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Tommy Tutone–size hole in my heart!

Was this an insipid shelf-clearing scheme writ large on the Internet? A crass marketing tool that was designed to separate the suggestible from their money? A brilliant piece of software that simply reminds us that we are indeed part of a demographic, however obscure and pathetic? The preference engine is all of these things and, ultimately, a mirror into our very souls. Now, leave me alone, so I can get back to downloading the Battlestar Galactica outtakes that I need right now (and so badly that it hurts).