Limitless

A friend lent me Republic.com 2.0 yesterday. I've only read the first few chapters but so far I think Cass Sunstein is way off the mark. Here's part of the reason why. The UK government is making much of their public information available online. Rather than people consuming more and more heterogeonous information, I think that the very nature of surfing means that people are exposed to more things which they wouldn't have even had the opportunity of being exposed to by chance in the pre-digital age.
While there are aggregating sites, Sunstein seems to be missing the very way that people use the internet, many taking pleasure in the discovery of totally random information.
My final concern with his opening arguments is that by being recommended articles/books/music by 'people like you' the result is an increasingly homogenous experience. In my experience, however, the recommendations from sites like Amazon means that I can be exposed to new ideas. What often happens is that taste intersects on one point but the rest of their orders might be very different and so rather than exponentially decreasing the scope of my reading, suddenly I encounter brand new possibilities.