"when people were offered search and categorization side by side fewer and fewer people used categorization to find things"
Two thoughts pop into my mind which guide me gently to the conclusion we need to be careful here.
1) every configuration is a set of trade-offs
2) any parameter or paradigm pushed to extreme produces perversion
On point number 1: categorization contains the benefit of discoveribility when you lack the information necessary to form the search query in the first place.
On point number 2: search forces you to generate the query and direct your attention towards a given subject. However, some of the most important discoveries you have ever made in your life were when other people held your attention in conversation and kindly directed it in a direction it wasn't going but that arrived at an illuminating destination.
We need all implementations to some degree to get all possible benefits. I suspect this is why suggestion algorithms have flourished but in doing so they create echo chambers because they are a charicature of yourself bending your own ear.
If only algorithms could suggest what you needed to hear and not what you wanted to hear.
Some books I have bought at my local bookstore I never would have found on Amazon. It's amazing what being able to direct our own attention and have the world organized in exactly that way has done for us, and it is equally as amazing as the paths we are lead down when we let other people direct our attention.
As a solution developer, I find the most bang for my buck is when I produce solutions for people who come to me with a problem rather than a solution.
Imagine if Google made you answer the question "Why?" five times before it showed you results. I wonder if a well trained network would produce such accurate results we would no longer need to see a list of results, and could simply hit the lucky button.
But good luck finding a user who's willing to answer "Why?" five times rather than brute-forcing a search engine into their "echo chamber," as you accurately described it.
Well theres no disagreement from me that what you describe is how it plays out.
My caution is that we have found the equivalent of cheap, fast, microwavable meals and we are now consuming them almost exclusively and in 15 ~ 20 years it's going to become painfully obvious what deleterious side-effects arise as a result of that. We can't see it now, so we don't feel the need not to do it, and that simply is what it is, but in time it will act as a control signal that nudges us to modify our behavior.
This is both a great and terrifying time to be alive. The 20th century was full of some pretty hefty social experiments and the thing with those were they were obvious and in your face. The 21st century versions are much less obvious and reveal themselves very slowly.
Two thoughts pop into my mind which guide me gently to the conclusion we need to be careful here.
On point number 1: categorization contains the benefit of discoveribility when you lack the information necessary to form the search query in the first place.On point number 2: search forces you to generate the query and direct your attention towards a given subject. However, some of the most important discoveries you have ever made in your life were when other people held your attention in conversation and kindly directed it in a direction it wasn't going but that arrived at an illuminating destination.
We need all implementations to some degree to get all possible benefits. I suspect this is why suggestion algorithms have flourished but in doing so they create echo chambers because they are a charicature of yourself bending your own ear.
If only algorithms could suggest what you needed to hear and not what you wanted to hear.
Some books I have bought at my local bookstore I never would have found on Amazon. It's amazing what being able to direct our own attention and have the world organized in exactly that way has done for us, and it is equally as amazing as the paths we are lead down when we let other people direct our attention.