Nothing Random about Taste
In our digital age, “Is there an app for that?” gets asked and answered for books, but not the canon, until the invention of an online, tessellating medium of personal choice expansion called TasteKid. Its voter-influenced algorithm continuously updates users' personalized canons seeded from whatever writer or title they choose. This atypical engendering of literacy challenges—perhaps inadvertently—what the canon is and how it can be experienced for readers new to critical or cultural literacy and Toni Morrison fans alike. In fact, her works get linked to other media by the thumbs up or down responses of site visitors. In this way, technology eclipses the canon's previous assumption of “the center” because only a reader's choice can occupy it. Likewise, with the distance between authors decreasing, (at the pace of the site visitors' unpredictable orders), the obsolescence of “margins” effects a power shift.
