Netflix recommends movies based on a complex algorithm, but it seems to mostly pick movies which have actors in moves you’ve already watched. The cast is the last thing I’m interested in; I rarely take a Netflix recommendation.
Pandora’s business model is to play new music based on songs it knows you already like. I’d say they hit about 15% of the time, about the same as any random radio station. Sometimes I like to “thumbs down” three or four songs in a row just to see what Pandora comes up with as it flails around trying to please me.
Amazon knows more about my reading habits than my high-school librarian, yet it rarely suggests a book I haven’t already thought about. I do have way of finding new books however: randomly.
In the lobbies of cheap hotels in weird off-the-beaten-track locations, one comes across books discarded by other travelers, volumes which have been bouncing from backpack to backpack like bedbugs. In Cambodia, I found Michael Herr’s Dispatches, a raw memoir of his time reporting in Vietnam. He also worked on the screenplays to “Full Metal Jacket” and “Apocalypse Now,” which is why his prose feels so real to those of us lucky to have experienced war only in movies.
I took perverse pleasure in having never read On the Road and Lake Woebegone Days but, after finding them in a host family’s house in Guatemala, I count them among my favorites. I even passed on Garrison Keillor’s book to my Spanish tutor, who asked if Americans really fished in ice.
Which is why I put chance — nature’s algorithm — up against Silicon Valley’s any day.
I’m Dan Libman, and that’s my perspective.
