Ever since the internet started to permeate
everyday life, academics and journalists
have fretted about the ill effects of
personalized information environments. This
idea was first popularized by Negroponte
(1996) in the mid-1990s as the “Daily Me,”
and developed into its best-known form
primarily by Sunstein (2007) and Pariser
(2011). Other closely-related concepts
include echo chambers, cyberbalkanization,
filter bubbles, and selective exposure to
media content. Personalized information
environments are digital content delivery
systems configured to suit the idiosyncratic
tastes of a single user. They may be
constructed manually, as by following
particular accounts on a social media
platform; or automatically, as when a
recommender system serves content on the
basis of a user’s prior behaviors. Many
contemporary sociotechnical systems,
including Facebook and Twitter, incorporate
both manual and automated components to
generate each user’s individual feed.