The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture

In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became a major form of online business. Wirecutter, which sold the Times in 2016, made money by driving its visitors to sites like Amazon or Best Buy, taking a small cut from any purchase of the items it recommended. In 2017, New York has relaunched its shopping guide division, The Strategist, as an independent site. In its advertisements, journalists and celebrities described their favorite toothbrushes, suitcases or beds; revenue from such product placements was part of why Vox Media acquired New York in 2019. Since then, online recommendations have become even more embedded in the media ecosystem. Platforms want to tell us what to buy, where to eat, and, in general, how to live a better consumer life. TikTok shopping videos are constantly increasing with real estate sales in users’ food, with shilling beauty products, cooking tools, or sports equipment that they have their advantages with the power of QVC people . Letterboxd, a social networking site focused on movie reviews, promises to solve the dilemma of what to watch by letting users rate what they’ve seen so others can follow: “Tell your friends what’s good,” is the local motto. Beli, another app, helps you “track and share your favorite restaurants.” Email newsletters encourage a certain kind of indifference: in order to fill readers’ inboxes, writers choose to share the latest books they’ve read, albums they’ve listened to and podcasts they’ve listened to. who received them.

This recent increase in human-edited guides is a reaction against the proliferation of algorithmic recommendation tyranny, which over the past decade has taken over our digital platforms. Today’s social media feeds offer abstract content that is sometimes powered by artificial intelligence; in the face of this onslaught, we are eager to be satisfied with proof that a real person stands behind the products or activities being promoted. Since the late 2010s, publications have run “clickbaity” guides in the form of “Ten Things You Need to Watch on Netflix Right Now,” but the nature of personal recommendations has sunk during the pandemic. , when the problem is great without avoiding. COVID-19 was deciding what to watch behind the TV. At the same time, social media was entering another multimedia phase, with the sound of podcasts and TikTok videos highlighting voices and faces, building a new generation of small groups of people. If you follow someone’s life voyeuristically on the Internet, you may want to know if they recommend eating breakfast or getting dressed to sleep.

Another sign of the new recommendation industry is Perfectly Imperfect, a magazine founded in 2020 by Tyler Bainbridge, a software engineer at Facebook. Twice a week, subscribers receive a list of recommendations from young musicians, artists, or Internet celebrities on everything from traditional niche products to gadgets. of self-care. Molly Ringwald recommended the Criterion Channel. Songwriter MJ Lenderman inspired “Shoes Without Laces.” Jack Antonoff recommended saline nasal spray. Each recommended item is printed with the appropriate emoji and explained in a short text. This newsletter is designed, as Bainbridge told me recently, “to get you out of your algorithm by showing you what someone else likes.”

In March 2021, Bainbridge moved to New York City from Boston and drew students from the traditional area near Dimes Square, a district of the city that became a destination during segregation. “As Catholicism and religion become more common in the city, you can see that in the recommendations. We have very little of that now,” he said. (City writer Matthew Davis recently recommended praying the Rosary, though he admitted it wasn’t a new tip: “people have been doing it for about 1,000 years.”) taking the project over time full. The journal’s blend of pithy irreverence and traditional fidelity proved popular and grew, amassing nearly five hundred studies. Bainbridge also built a separate Perfectly Imperfect social network where users could post their own unedited recommendations and read others’. As of this month, Perfectly Imperfect is graduating from Substack to its own independent website (designed in lo-fi style Geocities by the same firm as the “Brat” campaign of Charli XCX) and started producing videos. The new post featured a post by Olivia Rodrigo—the most popular participant so far—promoting English morning tea and a card game called Kings Corner. This site so far has about a hundred thousand users. Bainbridge told me, “PI’s goal is to be a kind of global flavor space.” (He has recommended about fifteen hundred things on his account, from New York’s Congee Village restaurant to “getting real.”)

The word “taste” has recently become a buzzword in the tech community. Online suggestions are ubiquitous—we’ve posted what we like on the Internet since the early days of Facebook profiles—but “taste,” with its suggestion of deep knowledge, perhaps, of why or How a good thing, it turns the act of advocacy into something unique, with an aura of irreplaceability. In a recent essay, “Taste is Eating Silicon Valley,” entrepreneur Anu Atluru drew attention for his argument that taste was a major new commodity in the age of artificial intelligence, when it came to Machine motivation is more threatening than human knowledge or skill. “In this world of scarcity, we value resources. In a world of abundance, we love our taste, “Atlaru wrote. Because the Internet gives us so many options, the choice of what to pay attention to, what to eat, or what to pay special attention to. By sharing your taste online, you can develop cultural capital. As Bainbridge said, “Making the right recommendation comes with power.”

Therefore, people who do not work on the Internet compete to make the best, most authoritative or provocative recommendations. A friend of mine, journalist Delia Cai, recently observed that the digital media landscape often feels like “just a list of recommendations for where to find your recommendations.” Very imperfect in some ways to try to resist online personal commitments. The Site does not count the number of followers or recommend content in an algorithmic manner; Posting is done for the fun of sharing (or, at the very least, for the chance to have your picks featured in the newspaper alongside a celebrity). Perhaps partly due to the absence of commercial incentives, the recommendations in the PI area tend towards the pleasant banal: “sunshine comes through the window like a cat,” “being extremely honest with yourself, ” movie “Practical Magic. ” The content feels like the center of your blogs or a selection of things from the early 2010s. There are at least nine suggestions for calling or visiting grandparents yours.

Another problem with recommendations as grist for the digital content mill is that there are only so many things to recommend. Repetition, or scalability, is the enemy of taste, because over time it reveals the hidden similarities in what we all like to like. Bainbridge admitted that the problem is this: “You want to feel special and you want to feel like you have something of your own. When a lot of people are talking about Bar Italia”—an indie rock band in London—“or whatever, you feel like you’re a nobody.” Sharing recommendations online can now create confusion when it comes to spreading your favorite content: if algorithmic content finds it, it can be attacked by millions of people and destroy your campaign. to anything. that is you like. (Or worse, fed into the maw of generative AI and reproduced.) The restaurant grows inexorably; The artist’s work is disturbed by the discussion of social issues. It may be better to recommend a nasal spray.

Most recommendation systems still focus on efficiency. We want to eat the best things, cultivate the best habits, and visit the best places. However an arbitrary process, whether suggested algorithmically or organically, is not acceptable in the development of a deep sense of taste. Another buzzword – “guarding the gates” – has started in a new and different way recently, to create a desire. not to promote. “Guarding the gates” means keeping the information inside of you instead of throwing it out into the air. In a recent much-discussed essay, designer and artist Ruby Justice Thelot praised the gatekeeper for erecting “a fence over which the enthusiast jumps with joy” but which “restricts amateurs”— in other words, by making it difficult to find anything that is happening. recommended without a bit of investment. Mundane things are easy fodder for inspiration; what is really close to your heart may allow you to say no, however it seems against the pressures of being online. ♦