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> In either case, given the modus operandi of a "tech" company, its an encroachment on free will. Given the nature of every medium ever includes some focus inh

> In either case, given the modus operandi of a "tech" company, its an encroachment on free will. Given the nature of every medium ever includes some focus inherent in what creators make and curators highlight/disseminate, this seems like a bit of an overstatement. The decisions of a film studio, book author, or magazine editor aren't an encroachment on my free will, I can always tune out and look for something else. Heck with social media, no matter how it may nudge via the feed. I'm usually free to choose my own walk through individual profiles, groups, and pages on a scale that would have been hard to really understand a half century ago. If there is one thing that is not our problem, it's being nudged/herded into an oversmall number of options.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Disagree with this assessment. Tech companies are able to manipulate the audience for someone else's content "on a scale that would have been hard to really understand a half century ago." Films, books and magazines are not interactive media. Computers force their users to provide input, much more input than a channel to a TV tuner. As developers, it is definitely our problem because we can control that input. We can require input to suit our needs over the user's. We can monitor the user's interaction. We can easily redirect the user to locations he never intentionally specified he want to go. The TV tuning dial, the buttons on a TV remote or a TV's onscreen menu were more or less fixed. These could not be continually manipulated to optimise for the advertiser. No redirection. There was no software developer who was paid to manipulate, positioned between a film and a viewer in a theater, or between a reader and a physical book, or between a reader and a printed magazine. Yes, people have more options thanks to computers, but theres now a middle layer of manipulation between people and the media they are consuming.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Disagree with this assessment. Tech companies are able to manipulate the audience for someone else's content "on a scale that would have been hard to really understand a half century ago." Films, books and magazines are not interactive media. Computers force their users to provide input, much more input than a channel to a TV tuner. As developers, it is definitely our problem because we can control that input. We can require input to suit our needs over the user's. We can monitor the user's interaction. We can easily redirect the user to locations he never intentionally specified he want to go. The TV tuning dial, the buttons on a TV remote or a TV's onscreen menu were more or less fixed. These could not be continually manipulated to optimise for the advertiser. No redirection. There was no software developer who was paid to manipulate, positioned between a film and a viewer in a theater, or between a reader and a physical book, or between a reader and a printed magazine. Yes, people have more options thanks to computers, but theres now a middle layer of manipulation between people and the media they are consuming.