Eli Pariser: The Filter Bubble

If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

Andrew Lewis(quoted)

Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they're rare in nature... In the same way, we're biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We'll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole. Just as the factory farming system that produces and delivers our food shapes what we eat, the dynamics of our media shape what information we consume.

Danah Boyd(quoted)

By definition, a world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there's nothing to learn. If personalization is too acute, it could prevent us from coming into contact with the mind-blowing, preconception-shattering experiences and ideas that change how we think about the world and ourselves.

When the technology's job is to show you the world, it ends up sitting between you and reality, like a camera lens.

Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we're being offered parallel but separate universes.