Another key component of today’s reality is what was originally called “collaborative filtering,” which was invented at the MIT Media Lab in the late 90s. My company was a sponsor of the Media Lab, which meant that I went to Cambridge twice a year from 1995-2001 for sponsor meetings where we saw demos of all the stuff they were working on, plus lectures, talks and meetings with industry luminaries. In 1996 (or 95, I forget which year) one of those people was Jeff Bezos. The memorable quote from his talk was, “we’re going to obsess about our customers and make our competitors obsess about us.” Pretty accurate, even today.
At that same meeting, one of the groups at the Media Lab demonstrated the first iterations of collaborative filtering. The idea was simply “if you like these things and someone else also likes them, then other things they like could be of interest to you and vice-versa.” Bezos saw immediately the possibilities of this and Amazon was the first large scale practitioner of what is now a huge core component of today’s commercial internet.
This is relevant to the free-with-ads model. One need only look at Facebook with a critical eye to see how this has taken on a life of its own. Their newsfeed is largely built on top of this concept. And in that form, it is key to driving people into the “filter bubbles” that are now widely studied by sociologists because they as seen as heavy contributors to our increasingly polarized societies. This is nowhere close to the good intentions of the Media Lab people who came up with the idea.
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