Posted on 12/07/2013 12:20:46 PM PST by Slings and Arrows
In the late 1930s, as humans managed to launch yet another war that would fail to end all wars, H.G. Wells wrote a series of essays laying out a plan for a better world. Wells, a novelist, reformer and sometime historian, believed that technology could connect people in ways that had never before been possible, joining them in a network and uniting their wisdom into a kind of synaptic and singular mind. The structure Wells imagined would be, he declared, “a sort of mental clearinghouse for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified, and compared."
Wells’s “World Brain” would, sadly, remain unrealized in his lifetime. But the World Wide Web, built decades later on the foundations of the military-industrial Internet, was created for the express purpose of sharing ideas and connecting people around them—for building, essentially, a global mind of the sort envisioned by Wells. The web has since been organized (and, in some sense, humanized) by search engines operating under the assumption that information is, fundamentally, a means of connection.
Today, thanks to Google, the most dominant of those engines, we have a tool that taps into humanity’s hive mind better than anything Wells could have imagined. We have snapshots of the information people seek when there’s no barrier between them and their curiosity save for an open field and a flashing cursor. We have … Autocomplete.
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(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
There is more to this.
For example:
If most of your web browsing and searches involve “Pop Culture” and you search for “Arab Spring” your results will be completely different from someone that follows the news out of the Middle East.
There is actually a term for this.
Pandering?
The internet today offers as much information as it does disinformation. If ideas can be “sorted, summarized, digested, clarified”, they can also be manipulated.
It’s Google searchers who took shots at Ted, assuming the author is reporting the Autocomplete accurately.
Yup, checked it. Accurate.
Pandering?
While true, that’s not it.
There is actually an industry term for this.
Trying to find it now.
If ideas can be digested, they can be vomited.
It all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.
The Google search results page actually has a pair of buttons over on the right to turn it on or off (a head and shoulders icon and a globe icon).
Awesome !!!
That’s it.
There is also a TED talk on this.
Thanks
Hit me with your non ping list, sir.
Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles”
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
What I learned from Google:
Obama smells like sulfur
Chris Matthews is an idiot/douche/racist/moron
Harry Reid is an idiot crook
AND
Nancy Pelosi is hot
PS people seem most concerned with knowing whether Willie Nelson is still alive or not.
*sznicker*
Try it with empty suit.
Shot on target, firing for effect.
There has to be an amazing story behind #3.
Willie Nelson is alive and presumed baked.
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