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 ...
“Nancy Pelosi is hot”
wait.. what??
Empty chair works well too.
Szoitenly!
That’s Google’s first autocomplete suggestion.
Propaganda...
wait.. what??
Maybe 50 years ago.
Creepy?
She keeps ducking in and out of her home district — in Hades.
bump
Th Lord of the Underworld is her voter
Yep.
You need to watch the TED talk.
Post # 13
Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles”
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
The information about the bubble is interesting but I disagree with him as to his conclusion. “Journalistic ethics” did not “get us through the last century”. In fact, “journalistic Ethics” of the last 50 years acted against America’s interests in a radical and destructive way.
“Algorithmic gatekeepers” programmed to apply neo-”journalistic ethics” are much scarier than ones designed to cater to our personal interests — and more scary even than ones designed to steer us towards specific advertisers or services.
Who decides what is “important”, “challenging” or even “different”? I trust Zuckerberg’s judgment on those things even LESS than I trust his judgment as to what my usage indicates would be of interest to me.
Yes.
But as he said, he is a Liberal.
This issue is certainly not about you or me.
It is about the folks that won’t watch an hour long presentation or read something more than a quarter page.
They are, the Google’s and Yahoo’s of the world are pushing people into a box out of convenience.
I’m not sure about your experience over the years using MS Windows, for example.
The operating system and user interface has progressively attempted to “HELP ME”.
It/they “assume” what I want to do, and try to make that easier for me.
Automatically.
I hate it.
It drives me mad.
Hillary Clinton is a...
Barrack Obama is a...
Harry Reid is a...
Mitch McConnell is a...
Lot of reptiles in this administration, I’m noticing.
“Nancy Pelosi is hot”
In which alternate universe?
Yes, mostly of the variety that has no limbs and slithers on its belly.
Mitch McConnell is a turtle... that’s funny right there.
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