A new "dotcom" bubble ?

I've noticed an unfamiliar word cropping up in the media lately. It isn't a techie neologism, like "sidejacking" or "netizen". In fact, it isn't a new word at all - but it's a word I haven't heard in a decade, at least not with reference to the technology industry. The word is "bubble".

Are we witnessing a second "dotcom" bubble? Ordinarily, I take such predictions with a pinch of salt - after all, commentators make their money by being interesting, not by being right. But this time one of the commentators is Larry Summers, the American economist who was US Treasury Secretary during the original boom.

It's true that investors are pouring money into technology like it's 1999. Linkedln recently went pjblic with a market capitalisation of almost $10 b llion; Facebook is expected to float for five times as much. That would make it worth more than "real world" brands Nike and Gap put together.

There's extravagance within the industry, too. The venture capital isn't flowing quite so freely as it was in the 1990s. But established hardware manufacturers are burning through vast piles of their own money producing tacky iPad knock-offs that nobody in their right mind is buying. And I won't even mention the price Microsoft paid for Skype.

If you're still not persuaded, look at the rise of the "social media expert". Right now, it pays more to come up with a re-tweeting strategy than it does to design actual programs and products. "The buzzwords have changed since the last bubble, but companies are buying into them just as superstitiously as they d d the first time around.

Should we panic? Personally, I rather enjoyed the first boom. With all that money sloshing about, it was easy to get a good job in IT with out any relevant qualifications whatsoever - which is exactly what I did. After the crash, the money went away for a while, but the experience and contacts I'd gained never did.

Indeed, as the world climbs out of the economic doldrums, perhaps a flurry of activity - even futile, short-term activity - is just what's needed to keep the money going round. Bubbles burst, of course; but those who've kept their heads shouldn't be too badly hit. And hopefully the overall economy will, by then, be strong enough to weather a sharp correction.

I'm more concerned about a different type of internet bubble. Not an economic bubble, but a social

one, a bubble that shields us netizens from the wider world and skews our perceptions of reality.

The insulating power of the bubble was made clear to me during the recent Alternative Vote referendum. In the run-up to the vote, almost every analysis, slogan and cartoon I saw online was strongly pro-AV-even as the papers consistently (and correctly) predicted a heavy defeat for the "Yes" camp. I felt like I was watching two different campaigns unfold on different planets.

To an extent, this is probably a reflection of the demographics of the web. Although the internet is no longer the exclusive preserve of students, an awful lot of online content is still posted and shared by young urban liberals. As an ever wider range of voices makes itself heard online, we might expect the internet to gradually fall into step with reality.

In fact, as political activist Eli Pariser noted in a recent lecture for TED. things could get worse. The unlikely culprits are online services such as Facebook and Google, which seek to personalise the user experience. For example, let's say you have a friend on Facebook who regularly posts political links with which you disagree. If you never click on them, Facebook stops shewing them. Google uses a similar principle to choose which results appear at the top of its search results for logged-in users, aid which are relegated to subsequent pages. Overtime you end up not seeing that opposing viewpoints even exist.

Although the intention may be innocent, this type of automatic filtering is potentially very dangerous. It creates a personal bubble for each of us, tailored to reinforce whatever we believe, and to conceal different perspectives even if they're all over the internet. It's invisible, so we never know what we're missing. And it's seductive: sure, we can choose to leave this comfortable environment and go looking for arguments - but who'd want to?

For our own good, we must. For many of us, the internet is a primary source of news and commentary, and instrumental in shaping the way we see the world. If our online experiences are insular and self-reinforcing, we'll inevitably end up disconnected from reality - and from the rest of society. To me. that's a more worrying prospect than any economic boom and bust. And it would be a pretty poor outcome for a technology designed to connect everyone in the world.