Big Brother

I received an email yesterday from amazon.com.

Devra Hall, Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on 169 items you purchased or told us you own.

I don’t keep track of how many books and CDs I buy from amazon, let alone which titles, but they do. Still, unless they read DevraDoWrite (which I doubt), they have no idea what “items” I own beyond those that I purchase from them. And I don’t even own all of those — many were bought as gifts. They don’t seem to differentiate between books that were shipped to me and books shipped elsewhere. Nor, I suspect, do they weigh when the purchase was made. A topic of interest to me few years ago may no longer be on my mind.
Here are a few of the titles that they recommended for me:

  • Writing for a Good Cause: The Complete Guide to Crafting Proposals and Other Persuasive Pieces for Nonprofit
  • Fall Down, Laughing : How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn’t Tell Nobody
  • Love and Its Place in Nature : A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis
  • Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)
  • Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
  • The Cornish Trilogy
  • Fat Pig : A Play
  • The First Year-Multiple Sclerosis: An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed (The First Year Series)
  • Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill?
  • Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer: How to Win Top Writing Assignments
  • Doubt (a play)
  • The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency As a Freelance Writer in Six Months or Less
  • The Pillowman: A Play
  • Lives of Extraordinary Women: Rulers, Rebels (and What the Neighbors Thought)
  • Demystifying Grant Seeking: What You REALLY Need to Do to Get Grants
  • Bartok: The Piano Concertos ~ Pierre Boulez
  • The Kite Runner

    • While many of their suggestions were obvious — I recently bought a book on grant writing, hence suggestion #1, and I’m sure I bought a book about MS when I was first diagnosed back in 1999 — the basis for other suggestions mystified me. I finally figured out that the play recommendations stemmed from a purchase I made for someone else — I bought a copy of Frozen for a friend and apparently other people who bought that play also bought Fat Pig and The Pillowman, or maybe they just figure a play is a play is a play.

    Today I got another amazon email with a recommendation that makes no sense to me:

    We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon also purchased books by Patrick McMullan.

    I had purchased Zafon’s book last summer at the recommendation of Rifftides and enjoyed it very much, but what that novel about the son of a widowed bookstore owner in 1950s Barcelona has in common with Patrick McMullan’s “collection of more than 1000 photographs of the quintessential human act—the kiss…” I cannot fathom. I guess I’ll just have to take it at face value — a couple of people happened to buy both titles.

    Why am I boring you with all of this? So we can all think about the double-edged swords also known as technological innovations. Is it a lovely convenience to have someone (something?) keep track of your tastes and sift through the onslaught of incoming information, or not?