An aim for some of our most popular online hang outs, for instance Facebook and the Google services, has been to provide the user with an ever increasingly ‘tailored’ and ‘personalised’ experience on the internet. This is dealt to us in the form of which results we are shown in a internet search request, or the news feeds presented to us on Facebook. For the most part this approach sounds like a service to us, being able to filter out the parts of the internet we don’t want to view and the parts that just don’t interest us as much means we have more time to focus on the things that do keep our interest.
Eli Pariser is the author of “The Filter Bubble,” about how personalized search might be narrowing our worldview and gives an excellent talk at TED on this very subject. I highly recommend watching the video to get a different perspective on how algorithmic personalisation could greatly impede the freeing and communicative nature of the internet, perhaps the most important aspects of our World Wide Web.
