[...] With 36 percent of Americans under 30 getting their news through social-networking sites, personalization also affects the news we consume. Ever wonder why you don’t see updates from some Facebook friends in your News Feed? It’s due to an algorithm, partly based on the amount of time you spend interacting with that person.

The consequences of this social engineering, Pariser argues, is that we interact more with people who think like we do. Rather than fulfilling the early Internet dreams of diversity and freedom of choice, we are living in an echo chamber. As a result, there’s less room for “the chance encounters that bring insight and learning.” Where once we had human news editors who would temper the Britney coverage with a foreign war or two, now algorithms select our news for us based on what we click on and what we share.

The idea that the Web is an echo chamber is almost as old as the Web itself. But there still isn’t much empirical evidence to suggest that the Internet is narrowing our collective horizons. A new Pew report, “Social Networking Sites and Our Lives,” found that there is no relationship “between the use of social networking services and the diversity of people’s overall social networks.” Nor were Internet users less likely to consider both sides of an issue.

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