Monday, March 6, 2017

The Internet: Creating Ideas or Cultivating Them?

The internet provides a wide array of information that spans in scope topically, and origin geographically. What we believe to be true may be contested in one circle of the internet, and this brings about the dilemma which the Ted Talk by Eli Pariser addresses. Eli discusses how our own personal biases will shape our experiences on the internet, which includes the information that is more easily available to us, and what information will seem to not exist. Eli sees this as a negative outcome of the internet, as our lack of exposure to opposing and new ideas will be at odds with our vision of democracy.

Sue Halpern makes a similar observation in her article, Mind Control & the Internet, where she argues that it would be short-sighted to bring about a transhumanism revolution where humans would become one with computer technology, as even the most well equipped algorithms(Google's search engine) suffer from confirming our biases and giving us a skewed sense of reality.

These two sources differ from Clive Thompson's article, Clive Thompson on High-Bandwidth Buddies where he believes that sticking to people with similar worldviews will inevitably help us learn more than having a diverse network of friends and acquaintances. He states that on account of the fact that we talk more with people who share similar ideas with us, we are more likely to be introduced to new ideas to them, and often in ways that are easier for us to understand than if we were to hear the same concept form someone who doesn't know us as well. The difference in the sources lies in that although they all draw form the same fact that we will gravitate more towards ideas and people that are similar to us, the outcomes in the first two sources are seen as negative whereas the third source sees a more positive outcome of the situation.

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