BTW, this “bubble” theory wasn’t arrived at, it was predicted all along. It was written up in Time Magazine, (if my memory serves me correctly) in the late 80’s. No more would we all sit in front of our TV sets at 8pm to watch The Cosby Show, and see the same news and same commercials. It was predicted back then that information would become very individualized. It even went so far as to suggest that it could defragment society so successfully that the great melting pot of information could work to keep some social groups down, feeding them advertisements that only perpetuate a particular demographics perspective and keeping them there, like liquor and cigarette ads in the projects. But most people will never know this is happening to them, so their view of the world will become quite small. I think this is especially true for the younger generations who will use their smart phones for almost everything. Smart phones generally offer up only one search engine: Google.

I am increasingly amazed at how fast information from my searches and fed back to me in a matter of moments through my Yahoo account or my Facebook, or otherwise. It actually has a creepy feeling to it and I find myself wanting to find smart ways around it.

What I do find intriguing is the virtual thumbprint of an individual’s psyche, from their search patterns. Now that is fascinating territory to me, and scary.. What can and will people, corporations, government do with that kind of information? Wait – didn’t we see this movie? Wasn’t it called The Matrix?

Alas, it comes down to checks and balances, educating the masses, keeping people aware of their own behaviors and choices. We’ve been riding the wave of the Super Information Highway, and it is doing exactly what they said it would do. Now, as individuals, we have to decide to be smarter than the machine, or be sucked down the rabbit hole. Think I’ll watch the Matrix today.

We might wish that we are provided with “unfiltered info”, but that is just impossible. If your search query matches with 300000 pages, you will not carefully study all the entries. They will be presented to you at least as a list, and you will skim through the top 100, at most. Such list would not serve to your best interests. Using the human brain metaphor, you just don’t want to overwhelm your consciousness with the raw sensory data that actually streams to you every second.

Thus, providing you with “most reasonable” guesses is not only desirable, it just happens automatically, even if the service provider doesn’t do any filtering (ie, you will use only the top 100 matches).

So, the big question is not whether we want filters there to be, but rather what the filtering algorithm should be like, and what possibility the should should have to configure it’s functionality.

The filter you described is called “confirmation bias” within the context of sociology(http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html), and this personalized filter bubble will only cement the said bias. Making democratic debate more difficult, if not impossible at all(http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_the_lost_art_of_democratic_debate.html).