The Culture's CDR posted this link in it's livejournal (I'm not even gonna
try to explain....)
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1038261936872356908,00.html
Jon
GSV Next, on Jerry Springer....
Excerpt:
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker.
David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such
labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some
programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has
chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose,
Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo
thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox
it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay,
since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio
executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth,"
he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy
stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me
documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I
was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's
"The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a
My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies"
that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The
software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then
recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and
heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either
know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off
base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon
that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the
Married Man."
Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows
thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record
his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual.
After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay
programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the
Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says.
"My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he
was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him:
"I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused.
The incident inspired an episode of his show
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