Let’s say the internet does fragment into many overlapping internets… In fact, this isn’t a hypothetical argument; elements of it already exist. Just try searching for the same things on Google in various countries, or for more blatant examples, try running parallel searches on Baidu and Google. And that’s just Google.

Think about what a search engine does for a minute. People normally talk about search engines as bringing you “the most relevant results” but really that is marketing-speak for automatically filtering out massive sets of data which an algorithm assumes are not useful given the nature of your information request.

Now hook that into an ISP which is in turn adding another layer of filtering and prioritization to types and sub-types of information which eventually end up in your browser. Then tack onto that a content filter running on your browser, home computer, company or school servers and all of a sudden you have a whole hell of a lot of content stripped out, in order to “bring you the most relevant results” - by, of course, automatically eliminating sets of data which someone else has decided for you aren’t useful or acceptable.

Without much sci-fi speculation or trend-casting, we already exist in an information landscape which is severely compromised and vastly different from one person to the next. Programmatic methods of filtering out data don’t even take into account personal preferences, technological literacy and information usage patterns which vary from person to person. If you’ve ever watched (as an internet back-seat driver) someone else doing a search for a particular piece of information online, you probably have some idea of how different various people approach things. It’s like watching someone else play Tetris: “No, move that piece over here, rotate it and slide it down like this!”

In a sense, the internet is already quite fragmentary and balkanized - thanks to differences in the human perceptual experience. The question over the next few years though is what will that fragmentation mean to us? What has it meant to us already? Fragmentation of experience, meaning and value among human experience has always been a double-edged sword, adding both value through diversity and causing conflict because of that same diversity. As technology ramps up and the human perceptual experience becomes increasingly hardwired together with technology through things like augmented reality, we need to look more deeply at these issues and make conscious decisions as humans about how they will impact our lives and communities; because if we don’t make those decisions ourselves, corporations and their algorithms and technology will gladly make them for us.