Beware the Filter Bubble!
"When confronted with a list of results from Google, the average user (including myself until I read this article) tends to assume that the list is exhaustive. Not knowing that it isn't ... is equivalent to not having a choice. Depending on the quality of the search results, it can be said that I am being fed junk -- because I don't know I have other choices that Google filtered out."
Aubrey Pek, commenting on Kim Zetter's "Junk Food Algorithms":
Wondering why people have disappeared from your facebook feed, if you check that? Author and political activist for moveon.org, Eli Pariser, has an answer for that in his TED speech. Pariser talks about the unseen filter algorithms that control what we see on the web without our consent. Your google search and my google search have both been filtered, or "tailored" to us, in gentler terms. As a result, we are being denied information and the right to choose what we want to read. Pariser points out the dangers of these tailored algorithms and how they are creating a "filter bubble" on the internet, where we're being isolated from information that may make us uncomfortable and challenge our world views. So instead of the internet being used as a unifying force, it manages to separate us even further. Hit the vid for more information from Pariser. His book, The Filter Bubble, dropped three days ago.