One of the things that distinguishes our time from the past (and I mean only a couple of decades ago) is how much more data is available to us. These days, Google and Wikipedia answer pretty much any questions of ours in a matter of seconds, Facebook and Linkedin connect us to the people that we have forgotten where we met and so on. This has introduced a problem called ‘data explosion’: How in hell are we -as individuals- going to deal with this ever-expanding database?
The answer that the current technology pushes is ‘personalization’. Yahoo shows you the ads that are interesting to you. Google News only reports the news that you want to hear. Pandora plays the songs from your favorite genre, etc.
I beg to question personalization: Does personalization allow us to take full advantage of the massive data that is available to us? Aren’t we feeding ourselves with more of the same thing over and over and stay on a little island of information that we happened to land at some point? If this is the case, then not only we are not moving towards the promised globalization and the information age, but instead we are departing from it.
Courtesy of an unknown photographer
Eli Pariser is one of the Internet scholars who expresses doubts on whether personalization is a blessing or a curse in his book, The Filter Bubble. My answer is that personalization is both a blessing and a curse at the same time. However, the interesting part of this story, in my opinion, is the business opportunity that lies in the curse aspect of personalization. I think future Tech companies will eventually need to come up with elegant solutions on feeding their users with the information that they should have in addition to the information that they like to have. The challenge is to architecture the elegance.
Redwood Guitar 