Good read.<p>This is from 2008 and hindsight is 20/20 but theres a couple of disturbing omissions that have started making themselves apparent.<p>The piece emphasizes how all of this "cogitive surplus" is going to promote sharing and in the hands of good actors that's fantastic.<p>E.g.<p>"Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring."<p>But now for the other side of the coin. What happens when the people providing and sharing content are _bad_ actors?<p>E.g.<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...</a><p>Further, you're always assuming the provided data is accurate. It mandates a level of trust with the data provider. Sure, there may not be much incentive to provide fake data to a simple crime map but this can change quite readily when commercial interests are involved or some coordinated group of malicious actors. My mind jumps to small business owners being 'brigaded' on Yelp and state funded troll farms.<p>One final piece that I found particularly disturbing.<p>"Media that's targeted at you but that doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for."<p>It's hard to argue that finding a niche for oneself is bad but I don't think that there are many intelligent people left that would argue media bubbles are a force for good. That's not to say the author would disagree but this is not an endorsement it seems to border on sympathetic.<p>I don't learn and grow from media that targets me. If anything it's antagonistic to that. Media that targets me makes me feel comfortable. It promotes narrative formation over reality testing.<p>Media not targeted for me, or that doesn't include me on the other hand, requires analysis. It requires comparison and contrast to my ideals and beliefs. It requires assessing why that media _doesn't_ target me and understanding who it's intended audience is and why _they_ consume it.<p>/rant<p>Felt the need to work on my writing this morning.