With your worry that "information will become narrower in terms of both subject and approach, and arguably will begin to influence how I think about a given topic", you seem to be heading down similar lines to the "Daily Me" critique of personalised media here -- Cass Sunstein is the exponent of this I hear most often. My hunch about why we shouldn't get hung about this is based on:
few of us exist in just one 'narrow group', and even narrow groups look beyond their boundaries more often than you might think
while we all get gulled into groupthink from time to time, in the long term we quickly get bored of hearing the same views from the same perspective and seek out alternatives
what's the point of sharing and filtering stuff with people who you know already share your point of view. (more on this here)
There's a kind of reductio ad absurdam you can imagine with the social filtering dystopia: that we all exist in bubbles passing round news and views that we're guaranteed to agree with, while different bubbles hold polarised and opposing views. Evidently this would be so* unstable and *so explosive a situation that it wouldn't last 24 hours before the bubbles burst and we were confronted by opposing perspectives again.
David
With your worry that "information will become narrower in terms of both subject and approach, and arguably will begin to influence how I think about a given topic", you seem to be heading down similar lines to the "Daily Me" critique of personalised media here -- Cass Sunstein is the exponent of this I hear most often. My hunch about why we shouldn't get hung about this is based on:
There's a kind of reductio ad absurdam you can imagine with the social filtering dystopia: that we all exist in bubbles passing round news and views that we're guaranteed to agree with, while different bubbles hold polarised and opposing views. Evidently this would be so* unstable and *so explosive a situation that it wouldn't last 24 hours before the bubbles burst and we were confronted by opposing perspectives again.