Breaking the routine: spatial hypertext concepts for active decision making in recommender systems

Recommender Systems are omnipresent in our digital life. Most notably, various media platforms guide us in selecting videos, but recommender systems are also used for more serious goals, such as news selection, political orientation and work decisions. As argued in this survey and position article, the paradigm of recommendation-based feeds has changed user behaviour from active decision making to rather passively following recommendations and accepting possibly suboptimal choices that are deemed “good enough”. We provide a historic overview of media selection, discuss assumptions and goals of recommender systems and identify their shortcomings, based on existing literature. Then, the perspective changes to hypertext as a paradigm for structuring information and active decision making. To illustrate the relevance and importance of active decision making, we present a use case in the field of TV or media selection and (as a proof of concept) carried over to another application domain: maintenance in industry. In the discussion section, we focus on categorising these actions on a spectrum of “system-1” (fast and automated) tasks and “system-2” (critical thinking) tasks. Further, we argue how users can profit from tools that combine active (spatial) structuring and categorising with automatic recommendations, for professional tasks as well as private, leisure activities.