Goodbye Betty, Goodbye Phoebe, Goodbye Amy

As is the custom for the cold last week of December, television and radio news programs pulled out the list of famous men and women who died throughout the year.

I was almost ready to hop out of bed the other day when NPR did an audio montage featuring musicians and songwriters we lost in 2011. Listening to it cast me into one of those bittersweet moments when the corner of my lips turn up into a small smile while my heart aches just a bit.

This may sound terrible, but my favorite part of the yearly Oscar show is when the glitterati take time out from honoring one another to remember the movie stars and filmmakers who died throughout the year. Watching the clips from old movies is like thumbing through a family scrapbook and being reminded of long forgotten friends.

I don't know exactly when it started to happen, but gradually the faces of those who passed away during the year have moved from being almost exclusively from my mom and dad's generation, to include many from my generation.

Of course, my generation has long been represented. We've lost many to tragic overindulgences and the inability to cope, like Mama Cass, John Belushi and Richard Brautigan. Others, like John Lennon, were taken from us far too soon.

However, for the longest time these were the exceptions. For every one from my generation who left us early like the shooting star you catch out of the corner of your eye, there were ten from my parents' generation.

I knew them too. I've always loved old movies and music. I'll still watch just about any Cary Grant movie they queue up on AMC and I've been downloading a lot of Louie Armstrong music to my iPhone lately.

When noted artists from my parents' generation died, I could look back and appreciate their entire body of work and see how much they contributed to entertaining us through the years. But, when someone like Jimi Hendrix was included in the montage, it was different. The influence was huge, but somehow incomplete.

Today notable men and women from my generation are beginning to pass on who have had enough time to let us know what they were capable of doing. Steve Jobs gave us an entire digital lifestyle starting with the humble Apple II computer and moving on to the iEverything. Gil Scott-Heron and Phoebe Snow created truly singular music and sounds that both inspired and entertained. (And, for those of us who appreciated Phoebe Snow, there are many things unsettling about losing Amy Winehouse in the same year.)

There are still many from my parents' generation making the year end roster; James Arness, Jackie Cooper and Betty Ford, are a few names included in most of the 2011 lists.

But my generation is catching up fast and very soon we'll be dominating.

Ad sales steer you along the 'Information Superhighway'

There's an excellent TED talk you should see. Eli Pariser speaks to how the Internet is funneling information to us in a way that's putting us into comfortable little personalized worlds where we're fed only the information that the algorithms presuppose we want to know.

It's the "Information Superhighway" version of marrying your first cousins.

One thing the talk doesn't say is that virtually every editorial or informational decision on the Internet is being made by an adman, or adwoman—although technically it's a digital or software version of an advertising salesman.

My background is in print journalism and I've worked in the newspaper industry. There is a fence between the editorial side and advertising side of a newspaper...or at least there used to be. Ad salespeople are not allowed to meddle in the work being done on the editorial side of the newspaper.

On the Internet, just about every page you see is in someway connected to putting an ad in front of your face with the hopes that you'll click on a link or a banner and ultimately buy something. Editorial content is being digitally micro-managed to ultimately collect advertising revenue.

What makes this scary is that the news and information you are being fed on Google searches and even in your Facebook news feed is being edited and tailored in a way that attempts—very successfully I might add—to predict the kinds of things you want to see.

If you love cute cat pictures or news about professional sports, you are going to be presented with web pages and search results tailored to those interests. You'll never be treated to the absolutely hilarious dog pictures or the important ballet news.

In his TED talk, Pariser discusses how he noticed that Facebook had stopped sending him updates about his politically conservative friends. Admittedly, Pariser engaged his conservative friends less on Facebook than his liberal friends. Because the software running the news feed at Facebook is only concerned about commanding as much of your eyeball time as possible, it edits out information from the people you engage less often—without regard to the importance of what those individuals might be saying.

Ultimately, the decision is made solely to maximize profit from advertising sales.

Here's the paradox: The "Information Superhighway" is pushing us onto off ramps that lead to little side streets where we're surrounded only by the friends, family and information that make us feel comfortable.

When I was growing up we received both a morning and evening newspaper. The morning paper was the San Francisco Chronicle which covered larger regional, national and world news. The evening paper, The Redwood City Tribune, covered our hometown news.

Each day editors at these papers—men and women whose lives were devoted to gathering and reporting the news—made decisions about what they regarded as the most important stories. As space allowed, these stories were organized into newspapers that ended up on my front step. I made the final editorial decision on which stories I read and which stories I ignored. You can't get any more "personalized" than that, can you?

And, I was able to make those decisions absent of any advertising influence, except for the fact that had there been no ads, there wouldn't have been any newspaper to begin with.

It's starting to look to me like the old system was far superior for me and for society.

We are seeing dangerous political polarization all around the world. I can't help but think that as Internet news and information has become increasingly "personalized" it has made this problem worse, and all in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.