Does Internet Tracking Limit the Growth of Ideas?

By now, we are all aware of tracking by internet and social media companies, and its role in advertising.  However, I was shocked to find out, from Eli Pariser’s presentation, that these internet companies use them to tailor everything that we do based on the information they have obtained from our internet history.  If there is some connection to the internet, it is tracked- even an individual’s Amazon’s Kindle activities.  Even as Sue Halpern pointed out, our emails are not private, like we all assume to be.  So outside of privacy concerns, I didn’t know there were other possible complications to this tracking.  But the points made by Eli Palmer make sense.  If this tracking is being taken to the extreme of limiting what we have access to, then where will it stop?  I am a big believer that in order to grow in our ideas, we must be exposed to opposing ideas.  Two results can happen that way:
1. your point of view will grow and you will feel stronger about it, or 
2. You may change your point of view.  But either way, you begin to understand the other side of the issue.

      However, Noma Bar argues that this tracking and focused search results is actually a positive.  In this article, it is argued that while weak links have a large effect on an individual’s life- more job offers have been found by weak links- the frequency of connections are not enough to be able to receive information.  On the other hand, frequency of connections are drastically higher with friends, who are more likely to share the same ideals.  Bar argues that knowledge grows more from these non-weak connections.  When it comes to issues such as foreign policy, however, weak links give new possible points of views that an individual may have not considered earlier.

Overall, I agree more with Pariser.  Having our information and activities tracked not only removes the privacy we are entitled to, but also leads to larger group think.  Without the challenges to our opinions that opposing ideas create, we get stuck in this bubble that grows with ideas like ours, leading to group think.  I do believe that this phenomenon does limit the growth of ideas, because it forces us to remain with our same thinking, even if it is wrong, without giving us the ability to consider otherwise.