A Modest Proposal: The Netflix Jury
Posted by metaphorical on 3 March 2008
I blog at work, and it can be a close call whether to post something here or there. So from time to time, I’ll be providing a note and link to ones that end up there.
I received a questionnaire for jury duty yesterday in the mail. It wasn’t a summons, though surely it will lead to that. I don’t mind. Serving on a jury is one of our few civic duties, a cornerstone of free and fair trials, which itself is a cornerstone of democracy.
The notice says that my name was culled at random from voter registration, driver registration, unemployment, or other social service records. I have no problem with that. But it did make me stop and think. That’s not a bad way to come up with a jury of my peers – I do, after all, vote, drive, and rely on the social safety net from time to time. But to really come up with a jury of my peers, how about getting records from Netflix?
This entry was posted on 3 March 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under pop culture, technology, the arts. Tagged: recommendation systems, recommender systems, social networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
CMD said
I was older than I should have been when I came face to face with the harsh reality that shared tastes in literature, film, and so on did not guarantee shared worldview. The woman who would become my best friend opened my eyes, “After all,” she said,”Some people read Little Women and identified with Meg.” An appalling revealation, but true.