The New Age of Information

Information, like everything else in life, has become a matter of perspective. However, unlike other experiences, it's not necessarily what you perceive, but what others perceive that you should perceive. Google, Facebook, even Yahoo news tailor their results based on the persons search history, ethnic group, background, and even internet browser. In my opinion, this borders censorship, where the algorithms computing these decisions decide that they know more than you should.

A major problem here is the interplay between man and machine. These algorithms can compute numbers, but not meanings, intrigue, but not relevance. In a world filled "trolls" inaccurate information can become common place, even promoted to be true. A key culprit here is Wikipedia. As an experiment, a classmate and I edited the Wikipedia page associated with the Ethics of Technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_technology In the last section we wrote two sentence fractions regarding course goals and pudding. Checking back the page, our comments are not as they were. Not to say they were deleted, no they were made from two fragments about the philosophy of technology and pudding, into one proper sentence regarding pudding. "Several courses regarding the ethics of technology are available nation wide. Generally speaking, utilization of source texts and film are used to engage the students in pudding." In my opinion, this is a basic experiment that to an extent, proves that the algorithms arnt reliable to the extent that human differentiation is, and thereby have no place in the censorship of information.