The concept of "Freedom of Choice" was born, in the Western world, at a time when individual's socio-economic fate was only determined by birth. The choice was binary. Stay in your hometown and be defined by your family name, or risk everything and leave for the "New World."
Today, we have an abundance of options and believe we have complete Freedom to Choose. But think again. Our choices are filtered by:
- Where we are born.
- Our parents, siblings, and relatives.
- What we first consume.
- Who teaches us first.
- Our first friends.
- The first media we are exposed to.
Our first independent choices are also filtered by:
- Peer group diversity and pressure.
- Authority figure endorsement decisions.
- The media's information flow decisions.
- Retailer inventory and merchandising decisions.
Individuals are incredibly mobile, many making the decision to leave their hometown and families to make their way in other places.
But few choose isolation over joining new communities. Just as parents and local communities filtered our choices, without our realizing it, the new communities do to.
Consequently, the most important choice we make is the new communities we choose to be a part of.
Searching "The Long Tail" promised to give us access to information outside of our communities. But according to Eli Pariser, the "personalization" of search is reinforcing our peer influenced behavior in the past, not opening our minds to new information.
Social Media is an efficient way to interact with multiple individuals whom we connected to outside of the internet, originally. This means if we want to protect our personal conversations, identitiy, or other assets, we may use traditional means of communicating.
But neither give us all the information to help us to pick better communities, judge the "tilt" of their filters, the depth of their knowledge, the trustworthiness of fellow participants, or even distinguish between commercial and non-commercial participants.
To improve our freedom of choice we need a better way to design public information about communities before we join them and maintain transparency and trust after we join them. Once new technology offers access to better communities which may only be accessed via new technology, individuals will demand better communities - more impeccable systems to protect our individual rights.
