A good ted talk from Eli Pariser on what he calls Filter Bubbles:
He has presented on a growing phenomena which we should all be more aware of, the algorithmic manipulation of digital feeds of information, our “personal web” that I would suggest the majority is oblivious to. Like it or hate it our new digital world is formed by digital giants, machines, bots and the result is fantastic opportunity, a new level of interconnectivity between us with the caveat that it allows scope for both promotion and demotion, at the will of another. In terms of models for media manipulation, I find it just an extension of the previous, a more effective, efficient machine that was already working well with tv, newspapers, advertisements etc. Filters online are in essence a common sense progression, if we skip to the business section of the paper each time do we really need to look through every other page to find it?
The issue of realisation though will have a delay. The mass population will not realise they are not even being shown the rest of the paper for some time, however beyond basic information announcements “this is a filtered feed” I do not see it as the service providers obligation to distinctly highlight their filtering. No doubt complete transparency or a step towards it would be good but the mass majority of users (certainly to online social media) would never pay it attention either way.
It is probably already the case that each of us is becoming more and more resolved as a sum, call it our media consumption dna, our preferences boiled down, resolved to an equation explaining us in the eyes of the services we use. Designed to improve the way they serve us, inadvertently they provide labels, a digital description. In every discourse with a website we help the automated behemoths of programs refine our own equation, from the browser we use, to the time of day we facebook John doe, to the websites we frequent and the words we type.
(I just look forward to facebook announcing transparency and letting us see what we resolve to in their algorithmic eyes!)
) people are awesome, thanks for having me and I shall be back 
.
