Everybody should read this article. It’s about how Google, Facebook and probably your favorite porn site pay attention to your personal preferences. So, when you type Fish into Google, one person might get articles on ichthyology, another might get recipes. If I type Barack Obama and a teabagger types Barack Obama, we will be given a decidedly different choice of news articles and websites.
The late, great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Even that is in question, now.
The article correctly and rightfully points out a few of the negatives of this. First, of course, is it’s basically a commercial ploy. Once they know what you click on, they know what you’re most likely to buy. That’s O.K. by me. Whether I buy or not is still my choice, but I’d just as soon see ads for things I might conceivably be interested in.
Secondly, it is polarizing society. If left wingers and right wingers are not even following the same news, it makes civilized debate really difficult, if not impossible. This is a problem, but I have come to the conclusion that you can’t have any reasonable, intelligent, informed debate with right wingers anyway. Seriously, what is the point of trying to communicate with people who deny evolution and just shout “LIBERAL!” at every thing you say, as if it were a bad thing.
Thirdly, of course, it is a kind of mind control, but only in the sense that everything is. Books, films, language, the environment and our basic biological structure all work to form our view of the world. There is no escaping the world. Even the most heroic leap of imagination is still going to leave you within the realm of ideas that you are capable of conceiving. WTH.
The author raises one really interesting point near the end of the article, but believes that the rampant customization of the internet is leading us down the wrong path. I’m going to differ with him here.
He says that in the early days of the internet some people viewed it as a forum within which we could solve all the world’s problems, and bemoans the fact that we seem to be using it just to post cute pictures of kittens, keep up on the latest celebrity gossip, play endless time-killing games and wallow in porn. That’s all true enough, but it still could be a forum within which we solve all the world’s problems.
All that is needed is a better filter. People who are actually interested in solving the world’s problems should, and could, be talking to each other and trading ideas, creating rough drafts of policy proposals, debating them, amending them and ultimately implementing them. There would still be plenty of bandwidth left over for the kitten folks.
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