I made a mistake over the weekend. I accidentally clicked on a YouTube of a couple building a tiny house from the ground up. I didn’t watch the whole thing but it was enough for cyberspace to jump on it. This morning my YouTube feed is filled with tiny house videos. They have not completely supplanted my usual card-making, dogs, Harry/Meghan (proverbial train wreck) videos, but there are A LOT of tiny house stuff. Sigh. I know that if I don’t open any more, they will eventually fade away but it’s a little irritating that cyberspace is so completely curating my online experience.
Then yesterday I opened up YouTube on my work laptop to look for a band for a client. The feed was nothing like my home feed and had a preponderant amount of “relaxing music” videos. This didn’t surprise me at first because my main use of YouTube at work has always been background soothing, relaxing music. When I started to think about it, I wondered how YouTube knew this… after all, this laptop is not the laptop I had before I retired. And I haven’t logged onto YouTube using a work address since August. So how did YouTube know, without my even asking, that relaxing music is likely to be what I want? This is just a hypothetical question – I’m sure I wouldn’t understand a real answer about the algorithms used by YT, FB, etc. But it is a little eerie and does make me wonder what my feed would look like if I searched for other random items every few days?
Do you care enough about anything to follow it in cyberspace?