After completing the reading, I initially found Madrigal’s Netflix quest to be daunting and failed to see the significance behind her efforts. Simply put, Alexis Madrigal, with the aid of others, discovered that Netflix possessed 76,897 unique genres on their website. As a result, this indicated how precise and descriptive the teams of taggers at Netflix truly were. This high level of specificity has allowed Netflix to accurately provide suggestions to subscribers of what to watch based on their history.
I soon realized just how remarkable this complex and interrelated system was by comparing it to the densely-packed world wide web. Michael Stevens from Vsauce goes into detail about the origins of the web and how it connects various sources through a nonlinear fashion. This relates to the Netflix article in some sense because all of the tags that are created are linked to one another in some level. As Madrigal describes, “every movie gets a romance rating, not just the ones labeled ‘romantic’ in the personalized genres.” Furthermore, every movie’s plot is tagged, as well as the job of the actors and the locations. Thus, all of the movies have a degree of similarity that they share and continue to make the system evermore complex.
During the beginning of the internet, information was organized illogically through a hierarchical method. As explained by Michael, it was not until Tim Berners-Lee sought to change how information was connected to one another by writing a proposal. In his Information Management: A Proposal, Tim desired a structure that would allow information to develop and evolve and reduce information loss. He continued to argue that by having “web” of notes with links between information would be far more efficient than the fixed hierarchical system that was present at that time. In other words, documents would be connected to one another through nonlinear ways, known as hypertexts, which would ultimately allow unification between the web and the internet.
The way this all ties into the article regarding Netflix is by acknowledging how intricate the system or organization has become. What started as simple relationships between information, or in Netflix’s case, tags, has developed into vast webs that have evolved through continual ingestion of new data and algorithms. In the Netflix article, Todd Yellin, VP of product management, discusses the way in which these instances of unexplainable occurrences makes life interesting by serendipity. He even states, “The more complexity you add to a machine world, you’re adding serendipity that you couldn’t imagine.” To think that in a digital world of 1’s and 0’s there can still be surprising elements that cannot be entirely foreseen is in a sense quite beautiful. Whether a bug or a feature, as both Todd and Madrigal described, these imperfections contribute to an intricately dense system, thus producing an element of surprise and excitement to an often-perceived realm of rigid analytics.
Work Citied:
1. Alexis C. Madrigal, “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood,” The Atlantic, January 2, 2014
2. http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
3. Video Provided in Post