I received an email yesterday from amazon.com. <\/p>\n
Devra Hall, Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on 169 items you purchased or told us you own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.
\nHere are a few of the titles that they recommended for me:<\/p>\nWriting for a Good Cause: The Complete Guide to Crafting Proposals and Other Persuasive Pieces for Nonprofit<\/li>\n Fall Down, Laughing : How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn’t Tell Nobody<\/li>\n Love and Its Place in Nature : A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis<\/li>\n \nHappiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)<\/li>\n Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)<\/li>\n \nThe Cornish Trilogy<\/li>\n Fat Pig : A Play<\/li>\n The First Year-Multiple Sclerosis: An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed (The First Year Series)<\/li>\n Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill?<\/li>\n Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer: How to Win Top Writing Assignments <\/li>\n \nDoubt (a play)<\/li>\n The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency As a Freelance Writer in Six Months or Less <\/li>\n The Pillowman: A Play<\/li>\n Lives of Extraordinary Women: Rulers, Rebels (and What the Neighbors Thought) <\/li>\n Demystifying Grant Seeking: What You REALLY Need to Do to Get Grants <\/li>\n Bartok: The Piano Concertos ~ Pierre Boulez<\/li>\n The Kite Runner <\/li>\n 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 <\/em>for a friend and apparently other people who bought that play also bought Fat Pig<\/em> and The Pillowman<\/em>, or maybe they just figure a play is a play is a play. <\/p>\n
Today I got another amazon email with a recommendation that makes no sense to me:<\/p>\n
We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon also purchased books by Patrick McMullan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s “collection of more than 1000 photographs of the quintessential human act\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe 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.<\/p>\n
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? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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), … Continue reading “Big Brother”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hmmm","category-this-n-that"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}