I didn't catch any references to the Beats and have not read Howl (my Beat generation is weak - could only ever get into small amounts of Boroughs and smaller amounts of Kerouac) - but otherwise yes and I would say I'm surprised Postman and Mumford, and maybe even Kaczynski, somehow didn't make the cut; and of course the constellation of other notables who have contributed to the sphere of ideas. It is difficult to define a surface area to this large volume, but if I were to suggest a few I would also add the Extended Mind Thesis and Nudge (or something like it).

Certainly. Take the Pew Research study on news media trends [1]. The majority of younger people are getting their news primarily or entirely from Facebook and Twitter - both of which have algorithms that decide and organize which news and information should populate each stream. What's worse is that these algorithms are not only private, and difficult to understand in their ancillary affects, but also they are controlled by parties whose incentives are not in line with providing people with the information that helps them to be the most informed; and in fact what's worse is both Facebook and Twitter are major stages for both state sponsored and funded propaganda and PR campaigns.

Beyond this, Google, Bing, Baidu and other search engines can not on principle provide links to news on regular search terms, as people do not and can not know what news has happened to search without first being introduced to it. In both search and news aggregation, these search algorithms prioritize items according to profiles they believe match the underlying personalities performing the search. First, the same fundamental problems are present in this search aggregation - studies have been done by governments on reordering search terms to get elections and population affects they desire (and wide scale search engine manipulation has been seen in at least one national election in India) and that for search engines the customer is not the person searching but the PR firms and advertizers who pay to use the searcher's screen real estate establishing incentives which if not wrong on their face are askew and should call for transparency.

Now, this is before other effects are taken into consideration. Presuming aggregation were neither malicious, political or gamed by SEO and that somehow this aggregation is done in a way tailored only to the expectations and demands of the consuming entity. There exists what people call an 'information bubble' of the sort Pynchon predicted I had quoted - where the availability of the information in theory is overshadowed by the immediacy and digestibility of the information that is familiar. And in fact, however anecdotal this may seem, this is my experience with myself and the people who I know. Effort beyond merely searching for new information must be sought. An imaginary and completely invented scenario is as follows: Some scandal happens within government and from outside the internet a left leaning young person hears about it. When they perform a search to get more information about this scandal they will almost certainly be presented - by a 'well working' algorithm - a left leaning perspective on that event aimed towards a young audience cruely devoid of evidence that perspectives from the right, the middle, the top, the bottom, other countries, older people, etc even exist.

Adversarial case aside (e.g. United States Special Forces are known to purposefully surround the media consumption of adversaries and their families in crafted information bubbles to break their faith and ideologies), and poor incentive structure aside (e.g. Digg) there are significant challenges faced by the paternalistic arrangement of algorithmic management not the least of which is knowing the 'ground truth' (a term scientists use to refer to the ideal objective result from an intelligence algorithm) and how far a complicated algorithm is from reaching it.

I tend to wax and wane, but I guess that's what you asked for. :P

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-m...