The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There’s a big difference between “you are what you click” and “you are what you share.
A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there’s nothing to learn.
By constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.
Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days
Personalization filters serve a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar in leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.
Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating “compulsive media” to get you to click things more.
The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.
Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life–much of whic you might not trust your friends with.
Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.
To be a good citizen, it’s important to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible.