I am doing some research for an exam on Tuesday, and one of the questions is about whether the options to customize things like RSS feeds and readers is actually a good thing. For example, if we only read our rss feeds (of websites we choose because we like the content)- would most people ever look at anything outside of their own beliefs? Ie, if you only watched CNN all of your life, how would that change what you thought as compared to reading a variety? So this article by
Cass R. Sunstein argues that we become more homogenous by reading the same content, because even if it is a social network most of the users have the same interests as us (and the outliers are ignored- called the echochamber effect).
Anyway, what are your thoughts? Do you think by creating a"Daily Me" can limit you (as far as what you might see)?
This is my google reader (not used that much). This is all the stuff Brady shares with me - he should comment and tell me what he thinks :)
I use Google Reader a lot, as in many many times a day. It's an easy way for me to aggregate all of my content. It keeps me from having to click around wondering if some site or another has been updated today. The news comes to me.
ReplyDeleteAs to it making me more close minded, I don't know. I would probably just click around to see the same things anyways. To me, its the same as reading a newspaper. I always go to the same sections, and read whatever is available there. I skim article headlines and read whatever jumps out at me. Same deal with my google reader, except I feel the compunction to mark everything as read. If the newspaper showed me the number of unread articles, I would probably be more inclined to read them all, or at least mark them as read.
Feed readers improve my ambient awareness. When I want to get more news about a subject, I usually don't rely on a reader or an RSS for details. Just for that initial tip in a direction.