Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in New York today that in the next three to five years, a website that isn’t tailored to a specific user’s interest will be an anachronism, according to coverage from media industry blog PaidContent, and reported on by ReadWriteWeb.
“That’s fantastic: a new level of subject-level sophistication, detail and efficiency will be available to a wider variety of people than ever before. Reading the news no longer means opening the local newspaper and seeing the lowest-common denominator news that the largest number of people will likely find palatable.
The other side of the coin is perhaps more familiar: the argument that personalization is an information silo. It leads to self re-enforcing political perspectives, unchecked extremism, a shortage of empathy, stunted learning about the world and a weak democracy.”