Interesting Article

Wow! I didn’t know you were allowed to say that sort of thing on Wikki!

Yeah, but they’ve edited it now. I sure wish I’d thought to take a screen shot.

Me too…I wish I could have read it. 😕

Hah! Doesn’t anyone else look at where links go to before they click?? 😉

Back in the old days (when I war a kid), folk used to socialise with their friends or workmates by talking about the shows they’d watched on TV the previous night. There were so few channels that this really was a shared experience by people who were not, at the time, together.

Now, we are back to only having the weather as a shared experience with people we meet but don’t live with.

But the Internet revitalised shared experience. We hang out on bulletin boards and chat rooms and second lifes and we share news and information with unseen friends by exchanging links, visiting the same places, then returning with a common experience we can talk about.

But the way we are heading, with all the filters and personalised settings and cookies and individually-tailored web sites, is a return to too many different channels. What I see on a site may very well not be what you see at the same address, having followed the same link. The main focus of the page may be the same (a news article, for example) but ALL of the peripheral information may be different, and the peripheral information may go a long way to coloring your interpretation of the main focus.

So we could all follow a link as a starting point to a conversation, and all come back having seen something completely different.

And we can’t fall back on talking about the weather, because we don’t even have that in common.

And it’s all Snap’s fault for showing us a preview of this bleak future.