The Teleology of the Recommendation Age

Chris Anderson quotes Frog Design, who says “we are leaving the information age and entering the recommendation age,” where the influx of information has become unmanageable in its raw state and needs to be whittled down in order to give it context. This context is what gives meaning to the information, and this context seems based in phenomenology, where the reviews are real, and have impact to real people. These recommendations are no longer fake, scopic information (like billboards, big advertisers), but have been rooted in the “real” world of perception. It is odd to say a “real world of perception” since schizophrenia is an undercurrent in perceptionism and indeed our entire culture. If perception is real only to one person, then there is an automatic disconnect between the information being passed from one user to another. “I think this is good,” is a perception. Algorithms merely group these people together, automatically filtering out dissenting opinions. “I think this is good, but…” A rating scale is another form of flattening, except instead of allowing for a lot of diverse perceptions into the picture, it creates a rigid grid of categories which delineate instead of merge, which cordon-off instead of letting opinions mingle.
The next question one might ask is what happens when there are too many recommendations to sort through and we have the same problem the information age ran up against. When recommendations grow too ubiquitous and are enfolded into the information in which they are trying to sort, another infrastructure will have to be formed to help us sort. It seems like this could repeat infinitely. If the answer to this is that you just dig further and further into your niche, until there are a workable number of recommendations to deal with, doesn’t this just cordon us off more? If more and more groups have to be cut out in order to get at something manageable, doesn’t that seem like a teleological quest?