Much of the most recent paper I’ve written is concerned with this process & how a focus on personal reflexivity can help us understand it. From Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, by Douglas Rushkoff, loc 482-496:
The overwhelming variety of possibilities leads us to gravitate to machine-winnowed lists, if for no other reason than to make the selection process more manageable. In turn, the more we depend on an item’s popularity for discovery and selection, the more we reinforce that item’s popularity and the more of a winner-takes-all landscape we create. As Harvard University researcher Anita Elberse observed, the knowledge that even a single person has streamed a movie makes it more desirable than the one nobody watched yet. Two streams makes it even more popular. The outcome is inevitably winner-takes-all.
Mark Carrigan 