At TED, Eli Pariser, author of the The Filter Bubble, talks about how:
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our world-view. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.
His point is that the web is, technologically, a fantastic system of giving the consumers of information (i.e. you) exactly what they want, when they want it. It's enabled a degree of personalization which old media could never come close to. But this isn't necessarily a good thing, because people tend to pick and choose information that fits with their existing views and interests, and filters out everything else.
The problem is not entirely new. Back in ...
