When Whitney Houston died, social networking and info-sharing sites exploded with the news. So, were you refreshing CNN.com that very moment or instead receiving a Twitter alert accompanied by a link and an obligatory sad-faced emoticon from the Houston superfan in your online social circle? What happened to the pre-social Web days when we hunted down the news instead of the other way around? When did we stop searching the Internet and the Internet start searching us?
Maybe the more important issue is how the Internet is searching us. One way is through good old-fashioned math. But this brand of math is more than just that Intro to Calculus class we took in high school. This is the good shit that Netflix will (and did) pay a million dollars for – the kind of calculating that makes us log off Pandora because it’s getting a little too good at guessing what else would make our ears happy.
Prognosticating programs aside, by making ourselves easily predictable, we are in fact our own worst enemies. We put our likes and dislikes on display for everyone to see, and where advertisers and companies can hunt that info down to make sure we are getting what they think we want. More often than not, they’re right, but it can be unnerving.