Hello to anyone who still reads this blog. As you might have noticed, this blog has taken a backseat to pretty much everything in my life. But then I got comments from Stephanie Yu and Sam Chen, so here I am again. I’m that easy.

Don’t really have anything fun to talk about these days, so I’ll go with something serious. If you’re new here, trust me, I don’t usually do write about this kind of stuff.

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I watched this video online yesterday, and it kind of bothered me. It’s nine minutes long, and I understand that that’s a lot of time these days, so I’ll try to sum it up for you.

It starts with an exchange between a reporter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. The reporter is taking a look at Facebook’s news feed, and asks Mark Zuckerberg, “Why is this so important?” The dude has a point. I love reading my wall, but it’s not what you would call “essential.” For every post telling me that someone’s gotten engaged or had a kid, there’s ten posts filled with videos or photos of cats.

Quoth the Zuckerberg:

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

It’s an incredibly cold thing to say. The scary thing is that it’s true.

The video goes on to explain that Web companies have started to personalize the pages that we peruse on the Internet. For example, Facebook has a filter that shows us the most relevant news items. Netflix and Amazon have algorithms that show us the movies and items that we would probably be most interested. Great. Saves us time, right?

But apparently this is happening with Google. Turns out, Google’s search results are personalized to you too. If I search for “basketball”, I will get different results from when Joe Sixpack in Alaska searches for “basketball.” In this case, I doubt Joe would get the link that I get for purchasing San Diego State basketball tickets.

Still, this doesn’t seem so bad. I really am interested in San Diego State basketball tickets (as long as they stay good). Why am I so worried about this?

The problem is when we merge these two facts:

  1. Web pages are becoming personalized to me.
  2. In my spare time, I like to look at funny pictures of cats.

 

 

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Basically, the Internet is starting to pander to us, a society that cares more about the dying squirrels in front of us than the dying people in the world. And by doing so, it is effectively filtering out all the stuff that doesn’t already fit our own comfortable, predefined worldviews. Which is scary. We disparage the Internet censorship that happens in other countries all the time. Well, as it turns out, we’re also being censored. By our own stupidity.

I think what bothers me the most is that there’s no one in this situation that I can blame other than myself. I can’t blame Google or Yahoo News (yeah, the news are getting personalized too!), since it’s my own choices that define what I see. If I click on links to games more than I click on world stories, well, it’s my own fault if I just get more games in my searches, right? I guess I could get mad at them for using those algorithms to “help” me, but oh wait, those algorithms are what I’m studying in college.  Oops.

I dunno. I think I might be overreacting, since I can still get to the news I want to. (I think.) But it’s frightening to see some of the results. In the talk, the dude has two examples that kind of scared me. The first is where a guy types “Egypt” into Google, and doesn’t get a single link to a news story about the protests while they’re going on. The second is in Facebook, where eventually, all the conservative viewpoints disappeared from the speaker’s wall since he clicked on their links less often than the liberal ones. I think we’d kick up some controversy if this happened elsewhere, right?

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Well, I’m done. Sorry to come back with such a downer. I know I’m starting to get on my high horse once I start using words like “society.”

-Tim

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