Comparative Post

I would have to agree with the former two articles, the idea that Google's algorithm decides to shape and tailor your results for you. I have read and would agree that it is not all bad, however; you might find yourself well armed with information on given topics. And what's more, that's not such a bad thing for this society. We are a nation of specialists. Sure, we employ a college system that teaches the liberal arts, but at the same time, once you enter the working class, that air of liberalism goes out the door. We all need to be special trained to do the jobs that we need to do, causing people to become very insular in their respective worlds. This is not all bad, however Eli Pariser does have a point. The reality of living in a world where your responses are catered to you and not default responses like, as the nybooks.com article suggests, encyclopedic entries (Wikipedia withstanding). In some ways, I suppose that could be bad, too. Two friends standing next to each other may find completely different info from one search using the PageRank algorithm, two birds one stone. Even if everyone had access to the same information, which is great from an equality stand point, it seems as if we should aspire to diversify under that blanket of informational equality.

I thought the last article was interesting for the its putting into plain terms I had always figured but never really knew. The article claimed of a study that highlights the importance of talking to what one could call "b-list" friends (my term, not that of the article) as opposed to "a-list" friends, or best friends. It is with "b" friends where one hears things with a higher frequency than that of your "a" friends, but it might seem less so because of the frequency with which one talks to "a" friends. So the article suggests speaking to "b" friends, diversifying one's friend group to achieve as many "b" friends as possible (or perhaps make them "a") in order to ensure an influx of varied information. This, however, misses the mark. One gets a bunch of good resources from friends, but the Google issue still looms. Having a friend from each country still might not get you the answer to what String Theory is or, as a matter of regional conflict, what is the best place for commodity x? What is so great about the internet is that it is a gateway to literally millions of people, a resource that no person could reasonably have access to in real life.

What remains paramount is to keep the "filter bubble" as minimal as possible, to keep an open avenue for the dispersion of information and knowledge on the internet, so that one can gain access to an unmediated wealth of knowledge. If Google continues, if we ALLOW Google to continue, refining our search results to what either they or their robots thinks we want, than it seems to me we may need to consider another source for collecting and sifting through information on the web.