Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Epic 2015 and the loss of choice

This video has been updated three or four times to reflect current media ... and what the landscape may look like a few years down the road. For some reason, it made me worry about the depersonalization of choice.

How are will completely free to choose when choices are made for us? If I want vanilla ice cream and search for a brand I'd like, there is a bias in the selections which are given to me by Google or Bing or any other search engine. Results are sorted by popularity or familiarity of my preferences, but they do not represent a full scope of choice but rather a determined range of choices in a determined order. Apply the vanilla ice cream analogy to larger choices and I wonder how much of what I do online is by my own choice.

How free are we?


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