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Amazon sells billions of dollars in merchandise by predicting what each customer is interested in and putting it front and center.
Andrew Lewis: if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you're the product being sold.
Because the filter bubble distorts our perception of what's important, true, and real, it's critically important to render it visible.
Fair Information Practices were identified in 1973, but they've never been enforced.
For a time it seemed that the Internet was going to re-democratize society. But democracy requires a reliance on shared facts. Instead we're each being offered parallel but separate universes.
Google engineers don't really understand what works or why it works when it comes to the search engine, they just look at the result.
On December 4, 2009 Google announced it would start using 57 signals to make guesses about who you were and what you want to see. The era of personalization had begun.
Our brains trade a tight rope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close to matching human cognition in this way.
Participants exposed to a steady stream of news about defense or about pollution came to believe that defendants were pollution were more consequential problems.
Personalization filters serve up invisible auto propaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas
Personalization is affecting the headlines you see, the videos offered to you, the restaurants recommended to you, and potential dates on dating sites. The algorithms that orchestrate ads are starting to orchestrate our lives
Personalization may be driving us toward an Adderall society, in which I hyperfocus displaces general knowledge and synthesis.
Researchers have found that humanity is forgetting its past faster with each passing year
The days when the filter bubble disappears when we step away from our computers, are numbered.
The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed.
The information deluge is real. Eric Schmidt notes that all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003 would require 5 billion GB of storage space to store. Now that much data is created every two days.
The Internet was supposed to deliver "bridging capital," and it's bridging that creates our sense of the "public" where we address problems that transcend our niches and narrow self interests.
The trend in elections is clear, we're moving from swing states to swing people.
To be truly helpful to us, algorithms may need to work more like the fuzzy minded, nonlinear humans there supposed to serve.
We are trading a broadcast media system with a defined and well debated sense of it civic responsibilities and roles for one with no sense of ethics.