The Universe Is Indifferent; the Internet Is Not
A couple of years ago, Google fundamentally changed something about their search results: the ones you see are based on who you are.
If you have a Google account under which you do lots of browsing, try opening another browser or go to another computer where you're not logged in. Try doing a few Google searches when you're logged in as yourself, then as an anonymous user not logged in.
It make take some trial and error, but eventually, you should see some disparities in the results. Google is tailoring the results they're giving you based on your own tastes, preferences, and what you clicked on in the past.
I'm certainly not going to dispute the convenience of this, and as far as Google is concerned, it makes a lot of sense. Their mission has always been to provide people with quality results, so giving each person their own custom results for any given search makes logical sense. (Also, it would be immensely more difficult for Bing to scrape these results and offer them up to their own users.)
In and of itself, this isn't a bad thing, but the Internet itself is increasingly driven by commercialization. In the advertising world, marketers studying people's behavior and trying to figure out how to get people to buy things is nothing new, but this is probably the first time that technology has the potential to put each individual inside of a bubble that has the potential to be divorced from reality.
How do you feel about global warming? Are you politically conservative or liberal? There's a good chance the Internet knows. And there's a good chance it will eventually be willing to serve up results and content that reinforce your own beliefs, instead of showing you everything. The incentive to do this is clear: feeling as though you're right feels good, and people who feel good (especially about themselves) are more likely to buy things.
Granted, this is nothing new. One of the key features of the Internet is that you can easily go looking for whatever information your heart desires. People creating their own bubbles is a function of their drive to reinforce what they know, not the quality of the information available to them.
But this is probably the first time that reinforcement will be technologically possible by means of push instead of pull. When you go searching online and off, you are pulling information towards you, and you're well within your rights to decide what kind of information that should be. But when the medium you're using to poll for information develops a brain (e.g. Google's neural networks) and starts pushing the kind of information you want towards you, a kind of feedback loop is created that strengthens the effect of the reinforcement.
This wouldn't be a big deal, except for the perception of objectivity that people have about Internet search results. The change in Google's algorithm to tailor search results to each individual user happened without most people knowing it, and this part of their search is being updated and refined all the time. It's shifting under everyone's feet, largely without them knowing, and this is where the crux of the issue lies.
What happens when the Internet becomes our own personal "yes man"?
If you have a Google account under which you do lots of browsing, try opening another browser or go to another computer where you're not logged in. Try doing a few Google searches when you're logged in as yourself, then as an anonymous user not logged in.
It make take some trial and error, but eventually, you should see some disparities in the results. Google is tailoring the results they're giving you based on your own tastes, preferences, and what you clicked on in the past.
I'm certainly not going to dispute the convenience of this, and as far as Google is concerned, it makes a lot of sense. Their mission has always been to provide people with quality results, so giving each person their own custom results for any given search makes logical sense. (Also, it would be immensely more difficult for Bing to scrape these results and offer them up to their own users.)
In and of itself, this isn't a bad thing, but the Internet itself is increasingly driven by commercialization. In the advertising world, marketers studying people's behavior and trying to figure out how to get people to buy things is nothing new, but this is probably the first time that technology has the potential to put each individual inside of a bubble that has the potential to be divorced from reality.
How do you feel about global warming? Are you politically conservative or liberal? There's a good chance the Internet knows. And there's a good chance it will eventually be willing to serve up results and content that reinforce your own beliefs, instead of showing you everything. The incentive to do this is clear: feeling as though you're right feels good, and people who feel good (especially about themselves) are more likely to buy things.
Granted, this is nothing new. One of the key features of the Internet is that you can easily go looking for whatever information your heart desires. People creating their own bubbles is a function of their drive to reinforce what they know, not the quality of the information available to them.
But this is probably the first time that reinforcement will be technologically possible by means of push instead of pull. When you go searching online and off, you are pulling information towards you, and you're well within your rights to decide what kind of information that should be. But when the medium you're using to poll for information develops a brain (e.g. Google's neural networks) and starts pushing the kind of information you want towards you, a kind of feedback loop is created that strengthens the effect of the reinforcement.
This wouldn't be a big deal, except for the perception of objectivity that people have about Internet search results. The change in Google's algorithm to tailor search results to each individual user happened without most people knowing it, and this part of their search is being updated and refined all the time. It's shifting under everyone's feet, largely without them knowing, and this is where the crux of the issue lies.
What happens when the Internet becomes our own personal "yes man"?