The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [30]
Clay Shirky points out that newspaper readers always mostly skipped over the political stuff. But to do so, they had to at least glance at the front page—and so, if there was a huge political scandal, enough people would know about it to make an impact at the polls. “The question,” Shirky says, “is how can the average citizen ignore news of the day to the ninety-ninth percentile and periodically be alarmed when there is a crisis? How do you threaten business and civic leaders with the possibility that if things get too corrupt, the alarm can be sounded?” The front page played that role—but now it’s possible to skip it entirely.
Which brings us back to John Dewey. In Dewey’s vision, it is these issues—“indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behavior”—that call the public into existence. The important matters that indirectly touch all of our lives but exist out of the sphere of our immediate self-interest are the bedrock and the raison d’être of democracy. American Idol may unite a lot of us around the same fireplace, but it doesn’t call out the citizen in us. For better or worse—I’d argue for better—the editors of the old media did.
There’s no going back, of course. Nor should there be: the Internet still has the potential to be a better medium for democracy than broadcast, with its one-direction-only information flows, ever could be. As journalist A. J. Liebling pointed out, freedom of the press was for those who owned one. Now we all do.
But at the moment, we’re trading a system with a defined and well-debated sense of its civic responsibilities and roles for one with no sense of ethics. The Big Board is tearing down the wall between editorial decision-making and the business side of the operation. While Google and others are beginning to grapple with the consequences, most personalized filters have no way of prioritizing what really matters but gets fewer clicks. And in the end, “Give the people what they want” is a brittle and shallow civic philosophy.
But the rise of the filter bubble doesn’t just affect how we process news. It can also affect how we think.
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The Adderall Society
It is hardly possible to overrate the value . . . of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. . . . Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.
—John Stuart Mill
The manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker’s performance than an electronic brain’s.
—Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers
In the spring of 1963, Geneva was swarming with diplomats. Delegations from eighteen countries had arrived for negotiations on the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, and meetings were under way in scores of locations throughout the Swiss capital. After one afternoon of discussions between the American and Russian delegations, a young KGB officer approached a forty-year-old American diplomat named David Mark. “I’m new on the Soviet delegation, and I’d like to talk to you,” he whispered to Mark in Russian, “but I don’t want to talk here. I want to have lunch with you.” After reporting the contact to colleagues at the CIA, Mark agreed, and the two men planned a meeting at a local restaurant the following day.
At the restaurant, the officer, whose name was Yuri Nosenko, explained that he’d gotten into a bit of a scrape. On his first night in Geneva, Nosenko had drunk too much and brought a prostitute back to his hotel room. When he awoke, to his horror, he found that his emergency stash of $900 in Swiss francs was missing—no small sum in 1963. “I’ve got to make it up,” Nosenko told him. “I can give you some information that will be very interesting to the CIA, and all I want is my money.” They set up a second meeting, to which Nosenko arrived in an obviously inebriated state. “I was snookered,