Personalization: A blessing or a curse

One of the things that distinguishes our time from the past (and I mean only a couple of decades ago) is how much more data is available to us. These days, Google and Wikipedia answer pretty much any questions of ours in a matter of seconds, Facebook and Linkedin connect us to the people that we have forgotten where we met and so on. This has introduced a problem called ‘data explosion’: How in hell are we -as individuals- going to deal with this ever-expanding database?

The answer that the current technology pushes is ‘personalization’. Yahoo shows you the ads that are interesting to you. Google News only reports the news that you want to hear. Pandora plays the songs from your favorite genre, etc.

I beg to question personalization: Does personalization allow us to take full advantage of the massive data that is available to us? Aren’t we feeding ourselves with more of the same thing over and over and stay on a little island of information that we happened to land at some point? If this is the case, then not only we are not moving towards the promised globalization and the information age, but instead we are departing from it.

Courtesy of an unknown photographer

Eli Pariser is one of the Internet scholars who expresses doubts on whether personalization is a blessing or a curse in his book, The Filter Bubble. My answer is that personalization is both a blessing and a curse at the same time. However, the interesting part of this story, in my opinion, is the business opportunity that lies in the curse aspect of personalization. I think future Tech companies will eventually need to come up with elegant solutions on feeding their users with the information that they should have in addition to the information that they like to have. The challenge is to architecture the elegance.

When you do your “thing”, you don’t have to try that hard.

Remember Steve Job’s commencement speech at Stanford, when he said, you should search and never stop searching to find the role and the career that suits you. This weekend, I had a chance to go, see Andy Warhol exhibition at National Gallery of Art (http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/warholinfo.shtm). For those of you who don’t know him, aside from the obvious wikipedia, maybe you should check this out.

I’m not still sure how to feel about his art. But, sure I can tell that his work is creative, engaging, and thought provoking. And at the end of the day, aren’t these supposed to be the characteristics of good art? More importantly, he takes the most ordinary subject of our day-to-day life and makes something interesting out of it. So simple and almost effortless.

So the question is how did he become the Andy Warhol doing what he did? What was so special about his art? I think the answer is that he did his “thing”. And when you do your “thing”, you don’t have to try that hard.

Happiness is a blow of warm air

This painting is a homage to the wonderful years I spent in California. I am about to finish it!

Living in the digital era makes your basic skills rusty. However, every once in a while you are in a situation that requires to dust off the rust. Only then you feel the enormous joy in practicing the caveman skills. Getting the mysterious corn heater working in this cold November Saturday night was certainly a joyful experience for me. The blow of warm air is worth the failed attempts.

I was so close to give up.. I’m happy I didn’t.

I’m Mahyar, fresh 28. Welcome to my world!