The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [2]
Even the number of results returned by Google differed—about 180 million results for one friend and 139 million for the other. If the results were that different for these two progressive East Coast women, imagine how different they would be for my friends and, say, an elderly Republican in Texas (or, for that matter, a businessman in Japan).
With Google personalized for everyone, the query “stem cells” might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and activists who oppose it. “Proof of climate change” might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil company executive. In polls, a huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they’re increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.
Google’s announcement marked the turning point of an important but nearly invisible revolution in how we consume information. You could say that on December 4, 2009, the era of personalization began.
WHEN I WAS growing up in rural Maine in the 1990s, a new Wired arrived at our farmhouse every month, full of stories about AOL and Apple and how hackers and technologists were changing the world. To my preteen self, it seemed clear that the Internet was going to democratize the world, connecting us with better information and the power to act on it. The California futurists and techno-optimists in those pages spoke with a clear-eyed certainty: an inevitable, irresistible revolution was just around the corner, one that would flatten society, unseat the elites, and usher in a kind of freewheeling global utopia.
During college, I taught myself HTML and some rudimentary pieces of the languages PHP and SQL. I dabbled in building Web sites for friends and college projects. And when an e-mail referring people to a Web site I had started went viral after 9/11, I was suddenly put in touch with half a million people from 192 countries.
To a twenty-year-old, it was an extraordinary experience—in a matter of days, I had ended up at the center of a small movement. It was also overwhelming. So I joined forces with another small civic-minded startup from Berkeley called MoveOn.org. The cofounders, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, had built a software company that brought the world the Flying Toasters screen saver. Our lead programmer was a twenty-something libertarian named Patrick Kane; his consulting service, We Also Walk Dogs, was named after a sci-fi story. Carrie Olson, a veteran of the Flying Toaster days, managed operations. We all worked out of our homes.
The work itself was mostly unglamorous—formatting and sending out e-mails, building Web pages. But it was exciting because we were sure the Internet had the potential to usher in a new era of transparency. The prospect that leaders could directly communicate, for free, with constituents could change everything. And the Internet gave constituents new power to aggregate their efforts and make their voices heard. When we looked at Washington, we saw a system clogged with gatekeepers and bureaucrats; the Internet had the potential to wash all of that away.
When I joined MoveOn in 2001, we had about five hundred thousand U.S. members. Today, there are 5 million members—making it one of the largest advocacy groups in America, significantly larger than the NRA. Together, our members have given over $120 million