“Oh, no! I’m getting to watch, hear, and read exactly what I want. Help me! Somebody do something!”
Are you sure your feeds — Netflix, Amazon, whatever social media you prefer — is providing you with personalized content? (More about the difference between personalization and customization here.) Are you being given content that aligns with your actual interests, or is the algorithm steering you around?
Is your feed populated by your interests or by corporate interests?
It’s entirely possible that your experiences online have been hijacked by corrupt personalization.
What is corrupt personalization?
Christian Sandvig of the University of Michigan coined this term in a (rather sassy, the subtitle of this article is from his piece) 2014 blog post expressing his concerns with how algorithms allocate our attention. Corrupt personalization breaks down to a “process by which your attention is drawn to interests that are not your own.”