The Personalization Paradox

I used to think personalization was one of the best things technology had given us. My own little corner of the internet, shaped around what I like, what I click on, what I watch. For a long time, that felt like progress.

But somewhere along the way, I started feeling uneasy about it. Not because personalization doesn't work. It works incredibly well. That's kind of the problem.

We're social creatures. We want to connect, to feel like we belong, to matter to the people around us. That's not some abstract idea. It's the thing that makes us human. And I can't shake the feeling that personalization, for all its benefits, is quietly pulling us apart.

Think about it. We've never been more connected to each other, and we've never felt more alone.

Let's go back to the 1950s for a second. Picture a neighborhood where everyone went to the same school, attended the same church, watched the same three TV stations, and bought their groceries at the same store down the street. There wasn't much choice, and there definitely wasn't personalization. But there were shared experiences. Tons of them. I can almost hear the guys at the water cooler on a Monday morning: Did you see the game last night? Wasn't that bit on Ed Sullivan funny? Did you hear the union's pushing for higher wages?

Honest question... does water cooler talk even exist anymore?

Now look at where we are. If I asked five friends what they watched last night, I'd probably get five completely different answers, each one pulled from their own algorithmic bubble. And where would I even ask the question? Over text? In a DM? As a comment on someone's Instagram story?

We've traded shared experiences for personalized ones. And the trade-off is steeper than I think most of us realize.

I saw this play out in my own classroom. In 2011, I was teaching Algebra 1 and the big thing was "flipping the classroom." The idea sounded great on paper: students watch lessons at home, go at their own pace, then come to class to practice and get help. It was personalized learning, and everyone was excited about it.

That year, I saw some of my weakest student gains.

I can't pin all of that on flipped learning. There are always a dozen factors at play in a classroom. But the experience stuck with me. Education has always been a collective thing. Everyone reading the same book, working through the same problems, struggling through the same material together. There's something powerful about that shared struggle. When you pull it apart and hand each student their own individual track, I wonder what gets lost.

Is personalized education actually better? I don't know. I really don't. I lean toward thinking there's a balance somewhere, that some personalization helps but too much strips away the communal experience that makes learning stick. I'm still working that out.

And that's sort of my point with all of this. I'm not trying to say personalization is bad. It gives us things we genuinely want. But it might also be chipping away at the common ground we need to feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves.

The question I keep coming back to is this: how do we keep the benefits of a personalized world without losing the shared experiences that hold communities together? I don't have an answer. But I think it's a question worth sitting with.