langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2005-12-27-3

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comment-2005-12-27-3

CREATED BY slauti • LAST EDITED BY slauti 6935 days AGO

Maybe I did not express my view explicitly enough. Allthough am not sure about the + in googles organizational analysis (weighting factor tables from offline analysis e.g.), not from their older papers and not from what I read now, I would have expected political bias from any large-scale system. I would always expect political bias to stem mainly from large-scale agreement processes, more than from anything else.

My guess (educated I hope) is that only societies where important media really are not accessible for all or at least the majority of the people allow for strange compromises between different elite and nonelite groups where you can recognize a dividing gap that makes for large easily recognizable differences. Whoever's got access to the internet, most probably also has access to tv, print and acoustic media.

The digestion problem is large and underestimated by many. And help for it comes in many forms. Some people I know share the perception that biased opinioned media (tv, radio, papers) make large inroads on the intentionally weighed out ones. Now the general intellectual pub-theory would be that information glut and the "emptiness" of relativism drive people there. I'd rather call that a sort of regrouping that comes with the still ongoing and slow decline of the dominance of traditional written language and its inherent structures and by that of nation states, even the US.

And so organisations who's business is the construction of meaning (where GOOG and wp are waxing stars and might not need it) might offer readers tools to accelerate that construction. But only large scale visible information (or rather meaning) can easily be suppressed. So I have no great fears there yet. An explicit slider could be less dangerous than what I feared from personalization only a short time ago.

From the point of view of media ecology it might be more important to expose yourself to different media than to different content. And, I agree, we should work harder to understand multiple bias. And I'm glad you link Greg often.