Are Recommendation Engines Killing Discovery?

Are recommendation engines – like Yelp, Google, and Spotify – ruining the way we experience life? "Absolutely," says Ned Lampert. The average person looks at their phone 150 times a day, and the majority of content they're looking at is filtered through a network of friends, likes, and assumptions. Life is becoming prescriptive, opinions are increasingly polarized, and curiosity is being stifled. Recommendation engines leave no room for the unexpected. Craig Key says, "absolutely not." The Web now has infinitely more data points than we did pre-Google. Not only is there more content, but there’s more data about you and me: our social graph, Netflix history (if you’re brave), our Tweets, and yes, our Spotify activity. Data is the new currency in digital experiences. While content remains king, it will be companies that can use data to sort and display that content in a meaningful way that will win. This session will explore these dueling perspectives.