We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves.

Democracy actually requires that the whole public be able to see common problems and address them and step outside of their own sort of narrow self-interest to do so.

The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.

Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don't decide what gets in - and more importantly, you don't see what gets edited out.

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.

The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.

If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible.