Big Google Brother and Big Amazon Sister?

I was reading this morning about relatively new concerns about the Internet, and especially about search engines. Searching on the Internet is increasingly personalized, in ways that are not apparent to the searcher. Google and Amazon, for instance, have secret (for competitive reasons) algorithms that use your past searching patterns to give you highly personalized results. If you and someone else enter a search word in Google, you will not necessarily get the same results.

This may seem either harmless or beneficial. If Amazon has figured out what kind of books you like, why not have them recommend more of a similar kind?

But as this article pointed out, a possible result of this increasing personalization is that we are exposed less and less to things outside our current micro-world. One critic (sorry, I’ve already forgotten his name and can’t now find where I read this—early senility) says this tends toward auto-propaganda: immersing ourselves entirely in our own ideas.

It has been common to point out that people increasingly choose their sources of information to reinforce their ideas and values, but I hadn’t thought much about how the Internet silently reflects our choices back to us in ways that actually limit our choice. (That is, I’m less likely to be exposed to an idea that diverges from my present thinking but which I might have found attractive).

All of this applies to any person, including people of faith, who make strong commitments and want to engage the broader world. That broader world may be increasingly difficult to find if our “helpers” steer us only toward what we already believe.