Thinking - Bacon

I thought it was just me that was a big bacon fan, but lately I've been seeing bacon T-shirts, bacon poems, bacon coffee mugs etc everywhere I go online. Which brings me to remind myself how the net works. If I do a search on google, I see things that google thinks I'm interested in. That means that if there is even the slightest connection to bacon, I get a lot of bacon hits. Everything I search for adds to the database of things I'm interested in, so google thinks that even a tenuous connection is worth reporting, because I'm clearly interested in bacon AND electronics.


If I do the same search on someone else's computer, I get different results.

One of the side effects of getting good search results that are relevant to the searcher, is that there is no editor to decide on the things that everyone is interested in. That tends to mean we keep a tight lid on broadening our horizons. One role of a TV news editor was to decide that say, an impending asteroid impact about to wipe us all out, was important to even people who were only normally interested in puppies and real estate. This, because it might impact their desire to buy more puppies or real estate, or might just be worth knowing about in spite of their desire to buy more puppies and real estate.

Google never includes impending asteroid impacts in search results for "haberdashery" on your grand parent's computer.

A good haberdashery magazine editor might at least mention in passing that's it's worth buying some extra buttons to see you through the coming asteroid induced ice age.

I'm guessing magazines are a weigh point on that path, from hearing about things to only hearing about our obsessions.

The net can be an amazing way of gaining information, but it can also be a trap, set to turn us back on ourselves, and blindly confirm that which we already believe to be unconditionally true.






120 Things in 20 years is just reminding itself to wake up and smell the bacon.