Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche

  By

Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to “niche culture”. Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.

Whenever I make these claims someone says “Well I use Netflix and it’s shown me all kinds of films I didn’t know about before. It’s broadened my experience, so that’s an increase in diversity.” And someone else points to the latest viral home video on YouTube as evidence of niche success.

So this post explains why your gut feel is wrong.

The argument comes from a paper by Daniel M. Fleder and Kartik Hosanagar called Blockbuster Culture’s Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity. They simulate a number of different kinds of recommender system and look … Continue reading

Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop: The French Lieutenant’s Bookshop?

  By

[This would be the thirteenth episode of Mr. Amazon's Bookshop, if it were an episode. The previous episode is here. A list of all episodes is here. In the previous episode, Kylie and Edmund vanished from Whimsley Hall after finding out that Mr. Amazon's recommendations were doing nothing to help sell Kylie's story The Adventures of Wazzock. Whimsley sunk into a brief depression before being roused by Jennie the one-legged housekeeper, who sent him into the village just in time to see Kylie and a pack of teenagers heading towards Mr. Amazon's Bookshop with trouble on their minds.]

I wrote the first ten episodes of this story in a couple of weeks around Christmas, when I had some time off work and the story seemed fresh and interesting. The two most recent episodes have been written on weekends in and around cooking, cleaning and so on. And now we have all the principals with the exception of Jennie the one-legged housekeeper – Whimsley, Google, Kylie, Edmund (who is in the crowd, near the back, though you might not have noticed him), Mr. Amazon -  in one place, and something dramatic is obviously about to happen. But what?

… Continue reading

Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop: Where is Kylie?

  By

[This is the twelfth episode of Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop. The previous episode is here. A list of all episodes is here. In the previous episode, Kylie and Edmund spent a morning running Whimsley’s differ and made some disturbing findings about the Mr. Amazon’s recommendations. Then Kylie left without warning to go and steal some lunch, leaving Whimsley even more bemused than usual.]

After the excitement and confusion of Kylie and Edmund’s investigation, evening found me tired and emotional. My head was spinning with all the numbers they had collected and what Kylie seemed to make of them. You may not believe this, but I was feeling a little out of my depth. At sea even. We gentry typically have little use for numbers bigger than a dozen or so; anything more and we have hired help to deal with them. And though my interest in the differ had got me more familiar with numerology than most of my class, I had always been more enthusiastic about building the device than actually using it.

I had written Kylie off as riff-raff when I first met her, but I was beginning to realize that some of these youngsters may actually … Continue reading

Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop: Recommending the Big Sellers

  By

[This is the eleventh episode of Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop. A list of all episodes is here; the previous episode is here. In the previous episode Kylie began to think that Mr. Amazon might be “just like the bastard publishers”, pushing big sellers at customers rather than promoting books like her own novel The Adventures of Wazzock. Meanwhile, Whimsley was becoming increasingly befuddled by the swirl of activity around him. His befuddlement even interfered with his sleep….]

I had trouble sleeping that night. It wasn’t just the heat mixing with the cat-urine-induced damp of the carpets to produce the acidic tang that so characterizes Whimsley Hall in the summer; I find that odour reminds me of my own childhood and is surprisingly comforting. No, Kylie’s virulence had quite upset me and my usual tonics did not seem to relax me as they usually do. But finally I slept fitfully, only to dream…

I looked out of my bedroom window to see a book lying in the middle of the vegetable garden. As I watched, the book opened and a vine grew from its spine, each page … Continue reading

The Brilliant Bechdel/Wallace Movie Test

  By

I had not heard of this amazing test until seeing a mention in the morning paper, but it has been around since 1985. That was when Liz Wallace told it to her friend Alison Bechdel who put it in the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. See here for the comic and here for discussion.

For others who have been in the dark, here is their devastatingly simple rule.

To be worth watching, a movie must

  • Have at least two women in it,
  • who talk to each other, 
  • about something besides a man. 

    • This morning's paper went through the Time Magazine top ten movies of all time list. Classics like The Godfather and 2001 A Space Odyssey fail. I have a feeling both TV programs I watched this evening fail. And I'm half way through reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I think is likely to fail as well. Continue reading

    Review: The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

      By

    The New York Times recently asked: Do We Need a New Internet?: At Stanford, where the software protocols for original Internet were designed, researchers are creating a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today’s Internet. By the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country.

    The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users.

    The Stanford Clean Slate project won’t by itself solve all the main security issues of the Internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace.

    Ed Felten of Princeton University responds with an orthodox hacker-purist line: [The first misconception] is the notion that today's security problems are caused by weaknesses in the network itself. In fact, the vast majority … Continue reading

    Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop: Another Conversation with Google

      By

    [This is the tenth episode of Mr. Amazon’s Bookshop. There will probably be another five or six before I’m done. A list of all episodes is here; the previous episode is here.]

    I rang for Google who, as so often, appeared quicker than seemed reasonable, with his usual false air of subservience. 

    “How the hell do you get here so quickly Google?” I demanded, slightly taken aback by the speed with which he materialized at my shoulder. 

    “Oh, nothing special sir – I just keep a copy of myself close by in case you need anything. It may seem a little unusual, but it’s entirely neutral. Any other butler could do the same. Certainly no one is leveraging their unilateral control over your bell to hamper user choice, competition, and innovation.”

    I often regret asking too many questions of Google. I never know when he is being funny and when he’s not. Usually I decide to treat his remarks as humour because life is just easier that way, but he has an excellent poker face so it’s hard to tell.

    … Continue reading