Filtering Reality: Who's In Charge of Your Perceptions?

WATCH HERE The Internet is a fascinating phenomenon. I remember back before it caught on and it was populated largely by academics and government geeks exchanging files and folders and then the Mozilla browser came along and it began to explode. That was all before Google and Amazon and Yahoo and Ebay and all that sort of mad connectivity like Facebook and MySpace. The sophistication of it all continues to be amazing, but it is troubling that the net is beginning not only to keep records on you but to try to serve you by telling you one what they think you want to hear. That leads to a Balkinization of ideas, all cut up into nice little cubicles where your news is selected to feed your predilections. That's a great way to be a selfsatisfied prig where everything confirms what you think is true and right, but it's unsatisfactory because it isn't true, it's cherry picked reality. It's bad enough that we all tend to do that quite a bit all by ourselves, but it is extremely troubling when we are helped to do it. The Internet should help us to know the truth, not filter our truth for us so that we can maintain our prejudices.