What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it's all About???

How do we evolve preferences?

So, a few weeks ago Suraj and I decided we wanted to do a comprehensive search for the best Christmas music. We used his music downloader, where he orders single MP3s for mere pennies - the best part, to me, was that we got to preview each song before deciding to order it!

As we created our personalized album, I realized that just 10 years ago, this sorting process never would have been possible. You had to basically choose your album based on songs you heard on the radio, from friends, or on TV, which involved lots of hits and misses.

The general assumption, of course, is that the situation today is preferable because it is more efficient - why waste time on songs you don't like (I'm reminded of endless Mariah Carey tracks which ALL sounded the same, hehe) when you can choose just the ones that best suit your fancy? However, as I sat there listening to Boyz 2 Men's "Silent Night," I wondered whether we'd lost something in the process.

It seems as specialized technological devices continue to dominate our lives, the exposure process is more under each individual's control. I wondered how this could be a bad thing - for example, one might make an initial judgement on something like musical preferences, given whatever stiumuli one happens to be exposed to, and then continue to expose oneself to those things one originally found interesting.

I asked myself, shouldn't recognizing what you want involve a process of taking a chance on new things, which may unveil unpredictable preferences? For example, I love certain Mariah Carey songs, but don't love that particular genre as a whole; I basically like certain songs across genres for some inexplicable germ of "goodness" I perceive within them (whether they're from Tim McGraw, Louis Armstrong, George Winston, Elton John, Tom Waits, Ray Lamontagne, Beethoven, or Britney Spears).

However, like so many other technological questions, I also realized it could be a very good thing - instead of having to try, for example, book after book in order to decide upon a favored author, we can now use "Amazon.com's" function which says, "If you like (x), you may also like (x)." The book example brings up another hole in my former thought: this phenomena isn't something "new" to our era, but rather is an extension of a basic part of being human: self-selecting, or making personalized choices based on past experiences.

Like so many debates about technology and computers, I concluded that the technology wasn't inherently negative or positive; the value is evident in how one uses it.

I thought more about it and realized that perhaps what occasionally makes me uneasy the technology of our times is that it can take this process out of our hands; for example, I don't control the ads that come up when I check my gmail or search on Google.com - they are tailored to my past searches. Again, this isn't always a bad thing at all - in the aforementioned example of "Amazon.com," I can benefit greatly from this phenomenon.

The other problem I can see is when the automated tailoring technology becomes the SOLE way one determines preference. The cool and crazy thing about humans is that we can be SO unpredictable - I can LOVE one John Grisham novel and hate another, or hate another book written very similarly about a similar topic, or hate a book which a fellow lover of Grisham's particular book loves!

I suppose there isn't really much to worry about, because no matter how much we or Google or anyone else try to control our exposure to, well, everything, there will always be an element of randomness, as well as human to human influence. I'm not writing to make some sort of clear conclusions or statements, but rather I'm sort of free-associating my feelings on this topic in general. | posted by Cheryl, 12/30/2005 05:40:00 PM