Internet Bubble Universes Are All Around Us

I suspect I'm a pretty typical web user in many ways. While I'm a lot more technically inclined than most, I tend to have particular patterns or habits when it comes to what I look at and what I don't. I tend not to visit many sites that are strictly conservative, for instance, for quite a few reasons.

Sadly, though, it's becoming harder for Internet users to break out of whatever habits they are in, thanks to how filtering software works at some of the bigger web sites and search engines, as Eli Pariser explains in this video:



This is yet another reason I avoid going to some of these more "social" sites like Facebook and MySpace. I use Duck Duck Go as a search engine, partly because they do not try to tailor content for, or identify users. If I'm going to select what I do and do not want to see, I want to make that selection. I don't want it done for me.

That's becoming an increasingly hard thing to achieve on the Internet, and I think it's doing as much as anything to keep us all in our own little information bubbles, where things we might not want to see never reach us.