How to improve your information diet
New research by the Reuters Institute and Oxford University looks at the effect of tools such as aggregators, search engines and social networks on people’s information diet, concluding that their use tends, in general, to generate more diverse sources than when we simply visit our preferred media pages.
A conclusion that, in principle, would challenge Eli Pariser’s well-known theories regarding the so-called “filter bubble”, defined as “the state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches when a website’s algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information it has about them, such as location, past click behavior and search history.” According to the study, people who tend toward more sophisticated information behavior tend to exhibit more diverse information diets that reflect more pluralistic viewpoints.
For more than two decades, I have been recommending generations of entrepreneurs and executives to use specific tools to stay informed. Over the years, my advice has also evolved: now I tend to propose a three-layered system consisting of a feed reader, recommendation algorithms and a social network, subject to specific usage protocols, and even going beyond an individual dimension to a corporate scale, particularly so as to influence the development of organizations with a greater…
