Mar 6 2012: I'm not saying you're wrong Stephen Eggett, but part of the point here is that traditional media may have been better at presenting people with "information that challenges" people. That is, there's something with a medium like a newspaper called "incidental exposure," which is basically that I pick up a newspaper to be told what the day's news is and I am incidentally exposed to views and information that may challenge things I previously believed. At the same time, (before the internet) I would have been also exposed to the same things that everyone in my community was exposed to and that put us on relatively equal footing in terms of the information we had access to. So in this way, not having as much choice meant individuals being more prompted, potentially, to expose themselves to different points of view. Choice, on the other hand, can lead to narrow choices in which people fail to be exposed to as much diversity of views.
Jul 4 2011: This is the best way I can think of to answer your question with an original answer that gets at what you really seem to be asking: "how come the cool things we have aren't as cool as I we might imagine they could be?"
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A comment on Talk: Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"
A comment on Conversation: Why does the diffusion of innovation take so long?
A comment on Conversation: Why does the diffusion of innovation take so long?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk