This morning @Suw made me smile by posting this tweet:
So nice of you to recommend my own book to me, Amazon. Hope you’re also recommending it to others. Cos, y’know, I’ve read it.
— Suw(@Suw) November 21, 2012
But she also set me thinking. It’s widely agreed that the limitations of online browsing is the strongest card traditional bookshops have in their (weak) hand. Personalisation of recommendation is something that online customers seem to want most, and yet are most irritated by when it doesn’t quite work (which is often). So much of this process is subliminal. If a recommendation hits the mark perfectly we accept and absorb it without demur. If it’s even slightly wide of the mark, though, it jars. Horribly.
When we stop and think about it – it’s spooky (as @ajkeen repeatedly points out in his book #DigitalVertigo) that algorithms can hit the bulls eye even some of the time. What fingerprints disclosing our likes and interests and our transactional histories are we leaving all over the web for corporations to gobble up and utilise? When we pause, we realise we want the Web to simultaneously know us – and not know us.
Compare @Suw’s wry irritation with an author walking into a bricks and mortar bookstore on any high street. Unless it is the author’s local store there would be no expectation at all that a bookseller would know that this customer is an author of any book at all, let alone one on the display table. In that real-life-but-anonymous situation the author would probably be delighted to have their own book thrust into their hands with an “I think this could be what you’re looking for”. The set of expectations brought to a real life visit to a bookshop is subtly different to those brought to an online bookstore where we expect our identity to be known – and not to be recommended our own products.
There’s a lot of talk about how our online and offline lives are blurring. But I don’t agree. My online and my offline lives inform and enrich each other, but they’re distinct aspects of my existence to which I (increasingly) apply different approaches and from which I have different requirements. My own hunch is that in the coming months and years we’re going to become clearer and more self (and socially) aware about these as we begin to stake down some fences and make some laws for life out on the virtual prairies. And in doing so we might just prevent our offline landscape from becoming a dust bowl.
Meanwhile when I arrived in the office an hour or so later, I chuckled when Jenny exclaimed “Amazon’s just recommended one of my own books to me.” I see a trend developing. Ironically it’s one that gives me hope.