http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/5/
https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/advertising
The digital world is a unique place other than any other subject in society. It is unique because technology can and is being streamed into every subject or interest that we know of. Whether it be exercising, education, social interaction, studying, examining interests; everything is and will be turning digital. This can sound overwhelming and scary at times to think all the information in the world is floating around in a digital abyss. However, it is also very comforting at times to know that it can not be burnt in a fire, lost in paperwork, or at the bottom of the Indian Ocean ruined and never recorded.
The digital world is becoming so advanced that not only are we not losing information that will never be published, we are recording everything we do. A lot of us try to do this ourselves, including myself, where I try to save websites on my desktop. Eventually these websites of shopping, funny videos, articles i want to read later; becomes a blur of words and safari icons that I must organize one Sunday afternoon for hours and probably never see again.
Luckily for me and anyone else out there with an ego for wanting to organize interests all on our own, there are more sophisticated softwares and personnel doing this very same job for me in a more organized and personalized manor. Among these crafty institutes are Netflix and Facebook two amazing companies that make a huge portion of the population’s lives a whole lot easier.
Generations prior have said that this new Tech Age is making our generation and anyone else after more attention deficit. Our heads are being filled with clutter and over-load of information from the Internet. What those people do not know is that the new age is teaching us new ways to filter that over-capacity of knowledge. For example, the innovators at Netflix created a way to do this by using underlying tagging data to personalize our movie interests. Todd Yellin the VP of Product and creator of Netflix’s system has used underlying tagging data to create 76,897 genres to categorize the movies on Netflix.
What interested me the most was how this system personalizes every individual subscriber specific interests based on what her/she has watched and rated a movie. Netflix goes beyond just machine intelligence of recommending movies this way and uses a hybrid of human intelligence as well by looking at how much of romance, comedy or action based on a 1-5 rating scale is in each movie. They won’t tell you what that is, but will recommend it based on what they know about your preferences.
When I started thinking of personalization in movies I thought of Facebook, which uses this hybrid intelligence for advertisements. Facebook ads have gotten very political because people are afraid their personal information is being exposed or they will be spammed if they click on an ad with a virus. I understand this fear, however, Facebook assures us in their, “Data Use Policy” that they do not release any of our personal information, but work the opposite way by choosing ads who they have partnered with and recommend for individuals. They use the information we provide and links we have clicked on throughout Facebook to show more things that interest us. For me, I have found my favorite clothing websites, news articles, and restaurants through their personalized system. Now instead of spending time procrastinating on Facebook, I am led to 100s of other websites that can give me more substance and increase my interests rather than clicking through pictures of myself on the book.