The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading About Child Murder

[salvorhardin]

On February 8, 2012, I was on Yahoo's homepage when a headline caught my eye: "Mo. teen gets life with possible parole in killing." Curious, I clicked to see what atrocity had transpired in the state where I live. Alyssa Bustamante, a teenager from Jefferson City, had strangled and stabbed her nine-year-old neighbor for the sheer thrill of it, later describing the event in her diary as an "ahmazing" experience. Horrified, I closed the page. Like many whose homepage defaults to Yahoo, this quick scan of a story was a rote action, information via procrastination, almost subconsciously performed every morning before I move on to other things. In this case, the story was so awful that I wanted to get away. Except, it turned out, I couldn't.

For the next month, I woke up to a barrage of horrifying stories that seemed to signal an epidemic of child torture in America. ... I rarely clicked on any of these headlines, and at first, I didn't notice the way they had crept into my Yahoo homepage -- and into my mind -- until their pervasiveness became impossible to ignore.

That's when I realized: Yahoo had decided I liked child murder.

"If there is one unambiguous trend in how the Internet is developing today," writes Evgeny Morozov, "it's the drive toward the personalization of our online experience. Everything we click, read, search, and watch online is increasingly the result of some delicate optimization effort, whereby our previous clicks, searches, 'likes,' purchases, and interactions determine what appears in our browsers and apps."

Morozov was writing about algorithmic optimization, a concept outlined in Eli Pariser's "The Filter Bubble," which describes the way that websites like Yahoo and Google tailor what they show someone according to the previous online activity of that user. By capitalizing on what are assumed to be your pre-existing interests, it intends to make you more likely to read stories or click on ads.

Full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-day-yahoo-decided-i-liked-reading-about-child-murder/255970

[Quantess]

1. Interesting.

[kenny blankenship]

2. That's why they call them "search engines"

if they called them perpetually watching and recording SPY engines, few people would use them. It still says Land of the Free over the door, not PANOPTICON. But truth in advertising need not apply to countries.


Unreasonable searches, as in searches made on individuals and records kept on them for no reason or probable cause, used to be off-limits for the government. That's all changed of course, and outsourcing unreasonable searching to the private sector is one of the ways the change came about.

[HiPointDem]

3. +1

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. You said it better than I could.

[salvorhardin]

6. I think that's hyperbolic

It's really a tradeoff. Like all technologies, content personalization has unintended consequences, and can be abused. The question is really one of counteracting the unintended consequences, and preventing the abuses. Right now the big problem is that the technology is moving faster than the greater cultural understanding of the effects of that technology, or even awareness of it. It's the classic problem James Burke outlined in the last episode of Connections way back in 1977. So I think stories such as this one, and more educated criticisms such as those provided by Morozov are important. Let's not lose our heads though. The panopticon ain't here just yet. And lest you think I'm naive, I've read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion, Douglas Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed, and much of the research they cite. I also tend to heap scorn on many of the digital Pollyannas such as Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Jeff Jarvis.

[dipsydoodle]

4. Works with advertisers too

Yesterday I googled something which I knew I'd posted long ago on DU2. When I found it I clicked on it but I wasn't signed in DU2. Low and behold adverts I wouldn't normally see appeared. There were three adverts for baby wipes.

Well ha ha. ! The subject of the post was they contain the worst of the contents which make up Corexit as do many other household products.

What a dandy advert for baby wipes.