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(October 31, 1999 12:12 a.m. EDT) - Sucker! Chump! Nerd! In our irony-saturated culture, the three worst things they could call you in high school are the same labels that now strike fear in the hearts of adults. And what a boon that has been to American business.
Rampant insecurity has helped offer a culture of trends, buzz and hype to a populace that believes the way to be hip, cool and with-it is to embrace the voguish curve, no questions asked - if you have to ask, you just don't get it.
What does this mean in practice? To find out let's dig a little into Malcolm Gladwell's article on the book business in the Oct. 4 issue of The New Yorker. Titled "The Science of the Sleeper: How the Information Age could blow away the blockbuster," Gladwell's piece is a doe-eyed appreciation of how technology will "reshape the book market."
He begins his story at an independent bookshop in Blytheville, Ark., run by Mary Gay Shipley. A hand-seller extraordinaire, Shipley is not just a bookseller but a tastemaker: Most readers frequent her shop "to find out what Mary Gay thinks they ought to be reading." With conviction and taste, Shipley has used her forum to help turn sleepers such as Rebecca Wells' "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" into best sellers.
However, Gladwell notes, "with the decline of the independent bookstore in recent years, the number of Shipleys out there creating sleeper hits has declined as well." The megastores that now dominate the industry offer so many books, and so little guidance, that readers are overwhelmed. In response, they tend to stick with the name brands, authors such as John Grisham, Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy.
But lo and behold, Gladwell proclaims, technology may offer us a way out of this blockbuster mentality by creating computerized versions of Mary Gay Shipley. The process he touts is called "collaborative filtering," which he elegantly describes as "a kind of doppelganger search engine."
Collaborative filtering assumes that the best way to determine what you will want is by knowing what you have wanted. So you tell a computer which books you've loved and which you've hated. It aligns your preferences with those of others who share your tastes (they are your doppelgangers) and spits out recommendations that will almost certainly please you.
Pretty cool, huh? So what's my beef? Sure, collaborative filtering does sound nifty and efficient. I might even be tempted to try it. However, my first criticism - which extends to the golly gee whillikers attitude that informs so much reportage of technology - is Gladwell's unquestioning stance on the troubling implications of this technology. (Maybe they don't bother him. Fair enough. Trouble is, he doesn't say.)
For example, when Kenneth Starr subpoenaed Monica Lewinsky's receipts from a Washington bookshop, many Americans were outraged. However, collaborative filtering will only work if we turn over that same information.
But isn't there a difference between willingly handing over personal information and being forced to surrender it? I'd say that line blurs to nothing when it becomes society's modus operandi. Gladwell paraphrases an e-commerce consultant who says we will soon see "the rise of what they call 'informediaries,' which are essentially brokers who will handle our preference information. Imagine, for example, that I had set up a company that collected and analyzed all your credit-card transactions. That information could be run through a collaborative filter, and the recommendations could be sold to retailers in exchange for discounts."
Will we swap our Social Security numbers for bar codes? I also dispute Gladwell's idea that collaborative filtering will favor sleepers over blockbusters. A computer's output is only as good as its input. A machine cannot read a book. It cannot decide, like Mary Gay Shipley, to trumpet an obscure book like "Ya-Ya Sisterhood." In an automated world, who will get the book rolling?
The deepest problem Gladwell fails to address is the creeping alienation that mechanization has stamped onto modern life. Technology is like booze. It can make life smoother, easier and more agreeable, but it also leaves us cranky, impatient and disagreeable. The more time we spend buying books - and doing everything else - in our solitary cubicles, the less connected we feel to one another.
This separation from real people and real things begets a disquieting life. Is it any wonder our prosperous nation feels so cold and distant? A machine may be more efficient at determining my tastes than a bookseller. But hooking up with my virtual doppelgangers can never replace the fundamental and necessary human experience of interacting with a fallible, flesh-and-blood person.
As we embrace change, we must never stop asking: Is this really progress? Only suckers, chumps and nerds would fail to ask such a basic question.