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Showing posts from February, 2016

The powers wielded by search engines and social media

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It seems to me that it's increasingly becoming a frightening new world that we live in. Back when the internet was merely nascent, I was studying psychology in college: numerous examples hammered home to me the notion that we, collectively, are easily manipulable, emotionally, cognitively, and that our memories are scarily labile, too. Over three years ago, I'd blogged about  Google+ increasing its reach , which has since apparently been adopted by many more people . Sure, a small fraction of its estimated 2.2 billion + account holders are publicly posting content - but Google has access to all the trackable behaviours of everyone who remains authenticated, not to mention numerous third party cookies and ways metrics are being recorded. Last summer, amongst other topics I'd read the coverage on Facebook's 1-week, 700K user experiment on emotional contagion, which is well summarized in the Atlantic . Then, about a week ago, another piece was brought to my attention