Something that Jill Walker mentions in her essay about Online Caroline reminded me of a flash video that I'd seen recently. I briefly touched on the Big Brother issue at the end of my last post, but then I remembered this really relevant video.

Walker talks briefly about the Big Brother aspect of sites like Online Caroline, and then she alludes to the similar "adjustment to user's behavior [that] is used a lot in marketing." (304) For example, "Epinions.com arranges articles so the ones I see first are ones similar to others I've liked, or are highly rated by people whose writing I've rated highly." (304) And, as we all know, Amazon.com does the same thing, which I find extremely useful, except for the fact that the database is managed and processed by a computer rather than a human, so every now and then my amazon.com will think that I absolutely love emotology books about Latin roots and send me millions of such recs just because I ordered that one emotology book five years ago when I was studying for the SAT Verbal section. I'm sure we've all run into this problem before, and it reminds us that indeed computers are still just computers and not humans.