Is the Yahoo, Google, Facebook filter bubble damaging our creativity?

A couple of weeks ago I watched a really inspiring TED talk from Eli Pariser titled ‘Beware the Online Filter Bubble’ – I breathed a huge sigh of relief and thought ‘finally someone else that sees through the smoke of the personalized world’.

I’m not in anyway against personalized content, I have used it in projects myself and in a lot of cases (if used correctly) it invaluably enriches experiences online and offline. However, I am a little wary that in some cases we are slowly being cut off from our informational 5-a-day and in the long run this could be detrimental to our creativity.

Here’s a couple of quotes from the people in power to get your brain lubed up, is this really what we want?:

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa” – Mark Zuckerberg, Facbook

“It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not, in some sense, been tailored for them” – Eric Schmidt, Google

A Balanced Informational Diet

Like nutrition, to grow as rounded healthy individuals we need nourishment from many different sources. Like we need to balance our diet between vegetables and desserts, we need to expose our minds to things in the world that are shocking, challenging, exciting, disturbing and inspiring.

For example, only eating one type of food is bad for you. Even if it’s pineapples. As yummy and healthy as they are, eventually you’re going to develop some deficiencies if all you eat is pineapple. So what do you think will happen if Google, Yahoo and Facebook are all feeding you only pineapples and nothing else? 

A Tunnel Full Of Mirrors

Content based on content that you’re already looking at – you end up in a loop of only one kind of informational nourishment. It’s like when you hold a mirror in front of another mirror to create a never ending tunnel. Google, Yahoo and Facebook are projecting reflections of ourselves, back on to ourselves. Instead of giving us content that challenges our morals and opinions to create new trains of thought and ideas, we are in danger of constantly reaffirming our own opinions with similar opinions, just from other sources.

How This Will Effect True Innovation

The internet is our greatest tool. It’s a research trip to ancient Egypt when you have no funding, it’s a trip back in time to the mesozoic era until we can invent time machines, it’s a university course in design when you don’t have enough money to go back to school. Most of all, it’s a piece of social technology that allows ideas to spread faster and further than ever before. It allows you to implant a thought from your mind, into the mind of someone else and alter the way they think forever.

Creativity is the greatest tool I have. But I don’t come up with new ideas by reading or watching things that I already know about. New ideas appear when researching areas I know nothing about. The greatest feeling is when two completely unrelated areas of knowledge and experience suddenly collide in your mind. It’s the true ‘lightbulb moment’. The birth of something truly innovative.

So if the internet is most peoples first choice research tool, how are we supposed to encourage more of these ‘lightbulb moments’ if we’re always surrounded by familiar content? I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this, so if you have an opinion please leave a comment. Maybe you’ll change the way I think forever.

**Free Stuff Alert**

Read this free e-book on ‘The Medici Effect’ to understand more about cross-sections of global culture colliding to create the Renaissance.

Facebook Faux pas and failures

Another quality infographic from Mashable. This one is all about the secret and not-so-secret failures of Facebook. See the full image here on Mashable’s website.

On a tediously related point, did you know that we share more data in a week than Hubble computed in it’s first 20 years? If you like that little factoid, you’ll pee your pants at this content sharing infographic from Smashing Magazine, here.

Go on, add to the statistic and share this page around!

You Should Follow Me on Twitter

Yeah you should. Here, all you have to do is push this link with your cursor/finger/stylus-type interface device.

Now to reward your self for your good deed of the day, you should watch this rather fantastic video on called ‘The internet is my religion’.

Ta ta for now.

The Internet is My Religion

Jim is alive because of the actions of anonymous people online, fighting to get him a lung transplant after his lungs were scarred by radiation treatment to fight cancer – Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

If you only watch one video today, this should be it. It has been called ‘the best video on the internet’ and ‘one of the greatest stories in human history’. I had a tear in my eye watching it and I actually clapped at the end on my own in front of my computer.

“Today I breath through someone else lungs while anothers blood flows through my veins. I have faith in people, I believe in God and the internet is my religion” – Jim Gilliam

Jim talks about an interesting idea that ”God is what happens when humanity is connected…and the internet is how we’re all connected” therefore the internet is his religion.

1 year old thinks a magazine a broken iPad

Having been born in 1985, and pretty much known the internet since being about 11 years old, I have always considered myself to be a Digital Native.

Raised in a time when the World Wide Web and digital technology have had their biggest boom, all of my teen and adult life has been spent online.

I remember the days when only one of my friends could afford a computer so we’d all gather around their house, listen to the screech of the dial-up modem and talk to boys from across the globe on Teen Chat*.

But no matter how many friends I have on Facebook, how many devices I have in ‘the cloud’, whether or not I can make Siri Tweet for me, it doesn’t matter that I’m part of a generation that shares more data weekly than Hubble processed in the 1st 20 years because, I’m not really a Digital Native. I’m about 10 years too early. However, naturally assuming you can pinch-adjust the sizes of images on the pages of magazines before you can even say the word ‘iPad’ definitely gets you in the club.

Old Fuddy-Duddy Warning: If you’re born before 1995, it will make you feel old.

* If any of you remember this website, in hindsight, don’t you think it was was really creepy how many times you’d enter a chatroom and be asked if you wanted cyber? – thank goodness for internet security now-a-days.

Source Plug: The video was originally found on Buzzfeed.com

Astronomical Content Sharing

This is going to be a super quick post for two reasons:

1. I’ve had too much coffee and have a really short attention span right now

and

2. The infographic is as self-explanatory as is it astounding

Can you believe that in just 1 week, we share more data than the Hubble Telescope captured in the first 20 years of it’s life? This requires an ‘OMG’ as you visually absorb the information in this vertically scrolling picture.

**If the image that I cmd+c’d isn’t displaying, you can see it in all it’s non-copywright infringement glory here on Mashable.com**

Rid your life of food rage, forever

Food Rage. It’s like a socially awkward club that you only know you’re in, if you’re in. You know you have food rage, your partner (and sometimes your best friend) knows you have food rage, but to everyone else you’re just the impatient child who whines and bitches that people aren’t leaving the office fast enough to get to lunch.

Gojee.com will help reduce your cognitive strain enough so that you can still maintain function of your bodily organs long enough to get some seriously tasty food in your face.

You can search recipes by food you crave, food you hate or food you have. There is always a danger that the really big photos of food will make you worse. But sometimes, it’s a chance you’ve just got to take.

The phenomenon known as Food Rage isn’t only confined to the inconvenience of the foodless office space, it can also occur:

•  at weddings when you’ve starved yourself for the buffet but went to the toilet at the wrong time and now find yourself at the back of the que as all the mini-onion bajis quickly disappear into the fat bridesmaids mouth.

•  at the supermarket when you thought it would be a good idea to think about dinner at dinner time and now all you want, as you stare with piercing caveman eyes at a packet of mini sausages, is for someone to bring you some food, any food. You just want to eat something so you can think straight and leave.

•  at a restaurant when you believed so much that this was going to be the greatest meal of all time so you starved yourself since elevenses and now you’re so hungry that you can’t choose what you want to eat, beating yourself up inside knowing that your vicious cycle of hunger = indecisiveness is holding off the food from ever arriving at your table at all. Then you dare to ask the waitress ‘what would you have?’.

Unfortunately food rage is not recgonised as an illness, so please take sympathy on someone you suspect may suffer from these symptoms and always carry an emergency doughnut.

Check out these 8 terrifying case of Food Rage that hit the news on Yahoo