“In search of”

A) I learned that the internet is actually trying to custom tailor everything we see and hear when we search for things based off our first click responses and location we are in.

B) I now see the information that is brought to me by search engines such as Google pretty much as a history/ track record of what I choices I have made in the past on the internet and as a means of spoon feeding me stuff that should “make the baby happy” information rather than information that challenges my intellect, beliefs, morals, and essentially all other types of information that allows a person to grow individually in life.

C) If people at large are not aware of this customization, will the few that do enlighten the others and show people what the world is really like, or will they use it for their personal advantage; attempting to use the algorithms as a type of self induced propaganda filter for the masses while slipping behind the stage and attempt to orchestrate the world events to their own agenda instead of for the good of the people as a whole?

D) I think when we search on the internet now, we must search for the good, the uncomfortable, the confusing, and the relevant with equal importance and stay away from the school honored tradition of hunting and pecking information out of a textbook style search by just grabbing the answer that is most relative to your grade for tomorrow in class.

By pushing my filter bubble I was able to find these new facts about Shakespeare: His father was a glove maker and wool merchant. His mother was Mary Arden, the daughter of a well-to-do local landowner. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and had a daughter together in 1583 with twins coming up in 1585. The first collection of Shakespeare’s work was published after his death in 1623 and is known as 'the First Folio'.

What I did that allowed me to come up with new information is by typing up the word “Shakespeare” and be as vague as possible. I then looked past page 1 into the infinite pages behind the first until I found a new approach in getting the same old news I look for in when I typically do searches. (I actually got this information from the BBC history site.) It was crazy because the first couple links where to Wikipedia and then various Shakespeare interpretations, famous monologues, and soliloquies by Shakespeare (including Mark Anthony’s speech from Julius Caesar) because whenever I have looked up Shakespeare, that was what I was after. It took me at least three pages to get the single news, television information link to get to this result with the added bonus of seeing Google actually being somewhat random since I disregarded its spoon feed diet of the first few pages.

Almost as a side note, I have come to realize that pushing one’s filter bubble can be very hard in practicality because we are all geared for looking for one answer and being done rather than look at a variety of good answers and picking the best one from them.