maureen greenbaum's List: Internet learning

• one unambiguous trend in how the Internet is developing today, it's the drive toward the personalization of our online experience. Everything we click, read, search, and watch online is increasingly the result of some delicate optimization effort, whereby our previous clicks, searches, “likes,” purchases, and interactions determine what appears in our browsers and apps.

• What if we click on the same link that, in theory, leads to the same article but end up reading very different texts?

    

    

    

     

   
• social implications are quite dubious. At the very least, there's a danger that some people might get stuck in a vicious news circle, consuming nothing but information junk food and having little clue that there is a different, more intelligent world out there. And the communal nature of social media would reassure them that they aren't really missing anything
• our refusal to investigate the social and political consequences of living in a world where reading anonymously becomes a near impossibility. It's a world that advertisers—along with Google, Facebook, and Amazon—can't wait to inhabit, but it's also a world where critical, erudite and unconventional thinking may become harder to nurture and preserve.  
• Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slat

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