Amazon has me all figured out. Can it help me figure me out?

All Categories Arts & Photography Astronomy Classics Composers & Musicians Contemporary Art Criticism Culture Drawing Electronica Ethnic Studies European Geography German History History of Science Indie & Lo Fi Lo-Fi Modern Music Nonfiction Philosophy Renaissance Rock Social History Urban

During a recent visit to my "personalized" amazon home page, I was startled by its new format. In addition to suggestions, the new style presents a list of categories culled from past purchases with the font size adjusted for relevance! (I assume that it is frequency of purchase from each category that determines relevancy.)

This page could be a useful tool for self-reflection. One could mine their personalized amazon page for cheap psychological advice, or better yet, career counseling. Looks like I should have gone for my Ph.D. in philosophy after all. Damn. Why didn't I have this page senior year of college? Oh yeah, I was too busy studying philosophy to conduct elaborate shopping sprees on Amazon.

Perhaps instead of allowing participants on social networking sites to choose their own likes, influences, etc., one should have the option of submitting an objective summary, courtesy of Amazon.

However, there are a couple of flaws in this system. For instance, these categories are presented as equal concepts when they are actually wildly irrelevant types of classification. Surely, inserting Lo-Fi and History into the same hierarchy can be done by an algorithm but makes no sense to a human being. Second, the above list of my favorite categories includes Ethnic Studies; this can only have been included due to a purchase of textbooks I made for a friend. Also, every time I log on Amazon tries to sell me pastel ruffled baby socks, similar to a set that I purchased once for an acquaintance's baby shower. I feel like these items have nothing to do with me. And yet it is a true and unavoidable fact that I purchased them through Amazon. And so they must!