Depersonalization

I recently came across a paper that referred to "personalization" of feedback to students being generated by a machine-learning algorithm. For some reason, this gave me pause to think about this use of the word. What the authors meant, and how this term is used across e-commerce, is a reductionist view of humanity; it is one in which people are considered as feature vectors in a machine learning algorithm. You bought Product A, and so you might like Product B, because other people in your cluster bought Product B. Using the most popular contemporary machine learning techniques, an analyst cannot even look at the cluster and tell what it is in any human sense: it is a computational and statistical phenomenon with predictive powers, so here is an ad for Product B. 

That is the opposite of personalization. Personalization means that I know you like puns so I stick one in my email. Personalization means I know to put just this much sugar and that much cream in your coffee. Personalization means I know you're struggling with this course, and so I give you an extra emotional boost in my written comments, reminding you that you can do it. Personalization means I love you. The adoption and abuse of this word by modern businesses is shameful. It is the antithesis of personalization. It is the reduction of the person into mere bits.