the daily boo.

This past week, I spent 40 hours sitting at a desk, looking at a corporate computer and wishing I had access to a personalized little literary gem called my Google Reader page.

Google Reader is probably Nicholas Negroponte's worst nightmare about the emergence of digital media, but it's my most wonderful dream fulfilled. He worried that technology would enable people to choose to hear only the voices with which they agreed rather than the assortment of attitudes and tastes one finds scattered unfiltered throughout the media. An enormous echo chamber without dissent, the Internet would reify people's opinions, not challenge them. As a result, the chasm between us would grow as our disparate ideas hardened into distinct truths and we replaced plurality with complacency.

The way I see it, Google Reader helps me keep my life in order. While I'm sitting in my overly air-conditioned office, toiling over marketing collateral and remembering wistfully the endless hours I used to spend in coffeeshops, my Reader is slowly accumulating and filtering terabytes of information so that today, my first weekend day as an employed person, I can return to my Google Reader page and see an aggregate of the news and updates I missed while at work.

More to the point, Google Reader doesn't, by necessity, estrange me from the thoughts and ideas of those different from me; it brings me closer to them. As always, the problem isn't the technology itself. We shouldn't shun tools that allow us to customize what we see and hear. The problem is that sometimes we take the easy way out. We cover our ears when someone disagrees with us. And in this age, technology affords us not only the means to find people who think like we do, but also the ability to tune out those who don't. So, it seems to me we need to shift our focus from whipping ourselves into a centripetal ball of tightly held opinions to remembering that evolution relies on diversity.

To that end, why can't my Google Reader page make recommendations for sites I should visit that aren't similar to those I already read? Why not look at my list and say, "boo reads Talking Points Memo; maybe she'd also enjoy National Review"?... Okay, "enjoy" might be a bit generous, but you hear what I'm saying, right? After all, you probably already agree with me.