Recommend this, Amazon!

Tonight, in a weird pique, I got pissed off at Amazon's stupid "Recommended for You" feature and tried to circumvent it not by signing off my account like any sane person, but by going through the list of "Items You Own" and deleting all of them. The same list showed me items I had bought from Amazon, which could not be deleted but whose "Use to make recommendations" setting could be deselected.

My act of defiance (ha!) did not stem from any concerns about privacy or the company's attempt to make me buy more things using my personal purchasing patterns. No. For while it was kind of interesting to see how Amazon reconciled my Austen purchases with my purchases of Simpsons DVDs and a Christmas-related purchase of the children's classic The Hungry Caterpillar, I usually ended up getting insulted by the recommendations. Just because I like The Simpsons doesn't mean that I like The Family Guy, okay? In fact, I hate The Family Guy. And just because I bought some Austen-related books, it doesn't mean that I'm interested in a poorly written sequel to one of her clearly superior novels. And being inundated by recommendations for a plethora of children's books based on one (one!) purchase seems a little excessive as well. As it is, Amazon didn't really seem to know what to do with my ownership of Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere or purchase of Foucault's The Order of Things—except to recommend The Birth of the Clinic.

But I shouldn't be too angry with Amazon, really. It's not like they've taken one look at my purchasing history, categorized me as a "hipster intellectual" and offered me a reading list based on said categorization. Or asked me to take a quiz to determine which reading list my lifestyle would be the best match for.

(Found while searching for a recently married friend's wedding registry.)