There's the saying that says something along the lines of "you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket." If you're going out to the market in the olden age to sell those eggs, isn't it better if you're more efficient and make better spatial use of that basket by putting as many as you can in there? You'd definitely have more eggs to sell by the time you reached the market, and therefore make more revenue. But what if you dropped that basket? Wouldn't it be better to have split up your 50 eggs into different baskets and have only dropped 10 of them?
In the same way, it's not always good to invest one's resources or opinions completely into one side of a subject area. After all, isn't the number one rule of a good stock portfolio diversity? (It not only makes you sound intelligent if you know both sides of an argument in a conversation, but if you're talking with an opponent on a certain subject matter, wouldn't it be better if you knew their side of the argument and could point out all of the flaws with their opinion and lord your better, smarter opinion over them? Maybe that's just me.) As students, we're taught certain things and pick up particular habits from the people who teach us; this is how we grow. People grow by meeting other people and interacting with them, and often times we consider people who are well traveled and well-versed in today's political climate to be wise.
Each individual has his or her own viewpoint on certain things, and will inevitably take more interest in news about their party than the party of their opposition. However, this is becoming a dangerous thing for today's people. As Eli Pariser mentions in his talk about "filter bubbles,"people no longer receive the same news. We are fed what web algorithms think we want to see, and that only leads to a narrowing of our view on the world.
In one way, it's understandable that websites would tailor search results to what they think we would want - it's just simple rules of successful marketing. It is, however, unhealthy for us as citizens, in the long run, for this to continue in the manner it is presently in. It's like feeding a child only candy because that's what they like to eat. For all that, that child will grow up having eaten exactly what they wanted, but they will most likely have cavities and diabetes amongst a host of other health issues that might ensue.
Because these web algorithms that are used to personalize our web experience are not yet encoded with rationality or human moral aptitude, we are not able to give the "vegetables" and other important "nutrients" that our informational diet needs to be healthy. We as citizens of the web must, to the best of our aptitude, go out in search of information other than from our default source or point of view to verse ourselves in the ways of the world, otherwise we'll be stuck with no virtual teeth and virtual dibetes.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/mind-control-and-internet/
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/st_thompson_homophily
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