1447 Me News

There’s this old philosophy mind exercise known as solipsism. The only thing that’s real is you. You imagine the whole world is all a figment of your imagination. Everything in it is under your control. Maybe not your total conscious control, some of it’s involuntary like the pumping of your heart and the filtering of your liver, but your control nonetheless.
Bobby and Kris and Cousin Sue are just people you made up in your giant dream world. Or people I made up. And I’m not sure why I’m bothering to tell you about it since you are me after all.
I’m afraid technology is heading us in that direction more all the time. What with computerized devices being trained to predict your whims based on your past behavior, and ads popping up next to your email based on stuff you sent out before, and your Google search engine auto-completing your search requests before you even finish them, we are getting more and more tightly wrapped in a cocoon of our own making.
An insulating and isolating cocoon.
And now it’s happening with how we get our news too. The new Google news page and other aggregators are customizable. Their displayed headlines can be tweaked based on what we’ve read about before. Now we can just read what we want.
Narcisso-news.
But what we want, Google thinks, is what we wanted before. That means with each new wave of preference selecting we go down a narrower and narrower road. Which means we’ll become more and more polarized in our opinions.
That’s bad. New things can be scary. But if you spend all your time looking in the mirror, you’ll never appreciate the diversity of beauty around you.
Or around me.
Oh heck. Why am I talking to myself like this? I know better.
America, ya gotta love it.