Selection and Committee

It's clear that the people at Amazon are getting more confident with the software that allows them to pinpoint customers with specific tastes. For instance, a while back I bought Penny Von Eschen's excellent book Race Against Empire online. From this, it seems as if someone guessed I would like a copy of Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin De Siecle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship by Leela Gandhi. Maybe, we'll see. But the main point is that the same approach and technology could be used to fine-tune the delivery of information, one individual at a time. There are benefits to this, but also a danger of turning the news into what my colleague Andrew Calcutt calls the 'daily me', where none of the news presented threatens to unsettle your cosy worldview.

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Elsewhere in cyberspace there's a new trailer for the movie Plato's Breaking Point, on which I did a night's work a few years ago. It looks sweary with gunplay, which is what the British film industry was into back then. It also looks very good, which is the point of trailers I suppose. (You can buy the DVD here from Amazon and have similar purchases suggested to you for the rest of your life.)