couchprojects

The New York Times posted an interesting infographic about the patterns of Netflix queues across regions. Highlighting Harlem (above), demonstrates a skewed sample in discord with the movie tastes of most people in my neighborhood. (My non-objective assessment – I have not polled people in neighborhood barbershops to see what they thought of Milk.)

The beauty and danger of databases that assess tastes (like amazon.com) is that the sampling is skewed to people who have internet access, money to buy things online, and in the Netflix example, fluency in English, time to work a queue and time to watch movies. This specificity makes it creepily easy to track singular people down by their movie ratings and endorsements: see Wired’s article: Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit Claims.

BTW, Netflix lists my personal top categories as “Critically-acclaimed Dark Documentaries” and “Quirky TV shows.”

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