Surrounded By People Like Us

I lean heavily
toward one side of
the political spectrum.

Yahoo thinks
I lean toward
the other side
so every article they show me
reaffirms that point of view.

Which made me realize
that other information deliverers
feed me only articles
that reaffirms the opposite
point of view.

I’m living in an echo chamber.
My own beliefs aren’t challenged,
the way they should be.
They are blindly reinforced.

Seth Godin
shares

“The web knows
what you like and
it’s working hard
to surround you with
reminders that you’re right.”

What does that mean
for business building?

We have to realize
when we do a search on
“Do 20 year old women
like fantasy romance novels?”,
we’ll receive thousands of articles
that say they do
because our question is framed that way.

And then we’ll get prompts
in the future
saying that’s true.

We have to dig deeper
for facts to base
business decisions on.
We have to read the studies,
ALL of the studies,
look at the facts,
go out and verify,
if we can,
these facts ourselves.

You are likely to get
the answer you want
on the internet.

That might not be
the answer you need.