Our Web bookmarks and our chosen social-media feeds help us retreat deeper into our partisan camps. (Cable-television news lends its own mighty hand.) “It’s the great irony of the Internet era: people have more access than ever to an array of viewpoints, but also the technological ability to screen out anything that doesn’t reinforce their views,” Jonathan Martin wrote in Politico last year, explaining how so many strategists and analysts on the right convinced themselves, in defiance of polls, that Mitt Romney was about to win the presidency.

But this sort of echo chamber also exists on cultural fronts, where we’re exhorted toward sameness and sorted into categories. The helpful video-store clerk or bookstore owner has been replaced, refined, automated: we now have Netflix suggestions for what we should watch next, based on what we’ve watched before, and we’re given Amazon prods for purchasing novels that have been shown to please readers just like us. We’re profiled, then clustered accordingly.

By joining particular threads on Facebook and Twitter, we can linger interminably on the one or two television shows that obsess us. Through music-streaming services and their formulas for our sweet spots, we meet new bands that might as well be reconfigurations of the old ones. Algorithms lead us to anagrams.

I keep thinking about a widely circulated speech that the movie director Steven Soderbergh gave earlier this year. He recounted a flight he’d taken from New York to California and the way a nearby passenger had been using an iPad. “I begin to realize that what he’s done is he’s loaded in half a dozen sort of action extravaganzas and he’s watching each of the action sequences,” Soderbergh said. “This guy’s flight is going to be five and a half hours of just mayhem porn.”

Soderbergh was mainly lamenting the endangered appreciation of real storytelling and character development. But there’s an additional moral to his story. As his fellow flier traversed an entire continent, he used a device capable of putting a galaxy of information within reach to collapse the universe into one redundant experience, one sustained note, a well-worn groove also known as a rut. There he happily spun his wheels.

I say that as someone who has too frequently spun his own, clutching my smartphone, looking down instead of up, tap-tap-tapping, maintaining unbroken contact with the usual suspects and entertainment and ideas. But I try to resist, because trading serendipity for safety is a raw deal in the end. There’s a skyline in Shanghai unlike any I’ve seen. Who knows what other discoveries are in store?