Not Recommended

For class on Thursday, we read the introduction and first chapter of “Emergence” by Steven Johnson. Johnson introduces the emergence through the example of slime mold. Slime mold is an organism that usually lives as a single cell, moving about independently of other slime molds. However, when resources in the environment are scarce, all of the cells will self-organize into what looks like one single organism, without the direction of any one cell, or pacemaker. In one sentence, emergence is “the movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication” (Johnson 18). Johnson points out how this theory can be applied to ant colonies, cities, and even “simple-pattern recognition software” such as amazon.com’s recommendation feature that recommends products based on your wish-list or past purchases.

Amazon.com is basically one of my favorite websites ever, mainly because of the wish-list feature. I have been buying stuff off of Amazon and maintaining a wishlist ever since middle school. I mainly started one so that I my family would get some clue as to what to buy me for Christmas (yea, I was that greedy). But now I basically use it to remind myself of books and movies that I heard were good and want to check out at the library or video store. Despite the fact that I have been using the site for so long, I had never looked at the recommendation feature. When we checked out the site in class, I became very skeptical of whether or not emergence was at work there. In middle school I must have bought a Backstreet Boys album from Amazon.com because the first 7 products recommended to me were related to my former favorite boy band. After checking the not-interested box for all of those (my inner 7^th grader is crushed), about half of the new products were either related to Nsync (gross!) or ballet documentaries, which is what I bought my mom for Christmas this year. After continually refreshing the list, it finally stopped recommending me boy band products, but it still hasn’t gotten over the whole ballet thing and now keeps on recommending poker books, which is what I got my dad for Christmas, and every single Jack Johnson CD, because I said I liked the one I own.

Johnson suggests that a feature of emergent systems is, “the distinctive quality of growing smarter over time” (Johnson 20). Perhaps my tastes are too complex or I’ve messed up the system because of the gifts I have bought for other people, but I’m failing to see emergent behavior in Amazon.com. I have made many purchases for myself since that Backstreet Boy CD, but the recommendation feature has not “grown smarter” and realized that my tastes have changed a bit.