Interesting TED Talk On Unwanted Web Content Filtering

[Ritho]

This is quite interesting.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/1091

What do you guys think. Is this a sort of thing preference based censorship, or simply tailored marketing?

Just out of curiosity, here is a screenshot of the first results of my Egypt search. What does yours look like.

[Remah]

Quite interesting but I kept waiting for something deeper.

Nothing has really changed. Most of us are happier in our own narrow worldspace. To get out of it you still have to be specific (rather than general) and intentional (rather than comfortable). Whether the gatekeepers are given moral intent or not, it will still take intentional action to get out of a narrowing space. He talks about journalistic ethics as solving the old problem. Well it never really did. All the old broadcast channels (newspaper, radio, TV) never solved the problem. And the consumers never really minded much. For example, people who want socialism don't generally read/watch/listen to any of capitalism's flag bearers.

On either hand there is a form of direction. In my opinion, neither is much better than the other.

[Bob]

A really stimulating talk with some very good points, I think.

I get what Remah's saying - basically, that the speaker's last slide is a utopia?

I read somewhere that most people just hang around something like 9 sites. Well I'm one of those people for much of the time. It seems to me almost inevitable (natural perhaps?) that things turn out that way. But I do also hunt things out sometimes (without any pretension of being able to handle massive information overdoses ). And, like the guy says, I want to be able to choose how to do this. In other words, not to be exposed to an automated selection bias.

How much could such issues affect democracy in the long run? I wouldn't care to speculate.

Perhaps naively, I feel we're better off having the choice ourselves. I say "perhaps naively" because if I know I really get off on one sort of flavor, then I may never get to taste another. That's a hazard of our genre-based, iTunes world, I guess. Tailored algorithms may just accentuate the phenomenon.

[Remah]

Originally Posted by Bob

I get what Remah's saying - basically, that the speaker's last slide is a utopia?

Yes, it is. Good take on it. But I wasn't thinking about that aspect.

I think that the speaker's example using a query of "Egypt" is meaningless. It is a question with too many answers. If I want something I need to be intentional about it. With a search engine I need to give more direction by being more specific e.g. "Egypt news" or "Egypt travel".

The speaker thinks we need a moral guide to generate "pseudo-intent" by interspersing morally useful results in whatever search that we are doing. I wouldn't use a search engine that includes a a link to "100 dead in Cairo riots" when I'm researching "Egyptian hieroglyphics in Nubia". Mind you I wouldn't like the situation the speaker was critiquing where a similar search could produce a link to a game (such as "Prince of Persia: The Mummy's Revenge") if they work out I like those sorts of things. Too late, they already know.

[Ritho]

Remah, I think you make good points. But I think that such filtering could definitely go to far. From time to time I do a lot of highly technical searches, and I absolutely need the most relevant results. Not necessarily those filtered because of my geo location, google id, etc.

[Remah]

Originally Posted by Ritho

I think that such filtering could definitely go to far. From time to time I do a lot of highly technical searches, and I absolutely need the most relevant results. Not necessarily those filtered because of my geo location, google id, etc.

In my opinion, if definitely does go too far already.

For interest, have you got a highly technical search that you are particularly interested in. That would be more useful than the "Egypt" search.

[Ritho]

I guess I wonder how much filtering takes place about subjects that are not socially oriented. It seems like technical searches would not be as easily filtered, but I don't know. Does anyone think the following scenario could happen?

Say I were working on a drupal site for a week or two, and doing a lot of searches about php code and functions and how they are used in drupal, then I switched over to working on wordpress site, and were to search on google for "wordpress php redirect loop error," but got a lot of results about drupal instead because of my previous search history, it would be frustrating.

[Bob]

Originally Posted by Ritho

What does yours look like.

Hi Ritho

Mine's big and techy all a long the Nile

Rocky