After I listened to this radio link about homophily, I think it was interesting topic that to be discussed. Social scientist call "homophily" refer to the principle of ‘birds of a feather flock together’ means that benefit from the collective interest of a particular group. Ethan Zuckerman, blogger and internet theorist, has been trying to fight this natural force of human during online. He offers techniques for surprising and challenging readers with news that they didn't know they wanted.
I agree with him about homophily has something danger of making us stupid. For example, let's say, we want to watch video something about our study or course. Firstly, if we open YouTube website, we can see the most promoted or watch videos. Absolutely, we think more than one time whether we want to watch these videos or not. I'm really sure that fifty percent probability, we want to watch. There also the related videos those come out after our first watch or at the side of window. So, do you think we lost our time just for these related video. Of course, as Ethan said that probably there are benefits from this "flock" that related to the main topic and we can further known about something. Otherwise, I think that is not necessary for us to know all the events until we forget what are we suppose to do right now.
As we discussed in class about free speech and freedom, the Internet or reading material like newspaper provide us to give any different stuffs and points of views of any topic. People are free to promote these videos and give another link related to them. Back to the homophily habit, this is not an Internet problem but this is a human problem. We really enjoy so much about the fantastic and exciting stuffs rather than get to find something very useful for us. I think that we should concern about these freedom of free speech even through blogging or other social stuffs and only take the positive values from these freedom.
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I agree with you that "homophily" applied to humans is not always a good thing. In the case of pop culture, many people are only interested in music and movies that are considered popular media. Would we rather go see a movie that is rated number 1 or that doesn't have a rating? It's interesting to look at how conformist our society has become. We can compare our society patterns to birds of a flock in that we like to like things that others like rather than express originality in our favorite media. I must add that this is not true for everyone but can be applied to a majority of people living in our society today. This "homophily" is not always a bad thing; yet can reduce creative innovation by a great amount if taken to extremes. I agree with you in that freedom such as this can be taken in a negative way and that we must learn to use freedom for positive progress.
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