To the two tech-minded folks who occasionally stumble through this blog, and the one other, less tech-ish reader, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on Eli Pariser’s TED talk. For me, I’d prefer that no one attempt to “personalize” my knowledge base. Seems sort of unavoidable, though, doesn’t it?
Are there other search engines, email clients, etc that we could be using to get away from the brain police? Who are they? Where are they? Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!
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Yeah, I notice it’s already happening quite a bit. Since I’ve been visiting lots of sites about South America, I see not only my search results change, but ads for LAN and hot looking Latinas popping up all over the place (on Lexulous, on Facebook). I don’t mind the hot Latinas, mind you, but now the internet seems to think all I care about is South America. The speaker’s ideas about coding in a sense of “Civic Responsibility” and options sounds hard. I’d be interested in Kork’s view on this, as someone who has much deeper understanding of that sort of thing.
Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about this. I think this happens out of a base capitalistic instinct to make the product “better” and in this age its very easy to tailor a product to your market. Okay, that can be good. But I also don’t want my computer censoring things that I might not “like” especially when it comes to social/economic/political issues. Frankly, I’d rather read the best article opposing my position than the 100th-best post reinforcing it. Again, this is all designed to get clicks and…dum da da dum…make more money. And I’m not opposed to anyone making their product better or making money. But maybe there should be the option to let the consumer choose whether we want Google deciding what we want to see.