The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [35]
The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias—in a way, it’s designed to. Consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult. This is why partisans of one political stripe tend not to consume the media of another. As a result, an information environment built on click signals will favor content that supports our existing notions about the world over content that challenges them.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, rumors swirled persistently that Barack Obama, a practicing Christian, was a follower of Islam. E-mails circulated to millions, offering “proof” of Obama’s “real” religion and reminding voters that Obama spent time in Indonesia and had the middle name Hussein. The Obama campaign fought back on television and encouraged its supporters to set the facts straight. But even a front-page scandal about his Christian priest, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was unable to puncture the mythology. Fifteen percent of Americans stubbornly held on to the idea that Obama was a Muslim.
That’s not so surprising—Americans have never been very well informed about our politicians. What’s perplexing is that since the election, the percentage of Americans who hold that belief has nearly doubled, and the increase, according to data collected by the Pew Charitable Trusts, has been greatest among people who are college educated. People with some college education were more likely in some cases to believe the story than people with none—a strange state of affairs.
Why? According to the New Republic’s Jon Chait, the answer lies with the media: “Partisans are more likely to consume news sources that confirm their ideological beliefs. People with more education are more likely to follow political news. Therefore, people with more education can actually become mis-educated.” And while this phenomenon has always been true, the filter bubble automates it. In the bubble, the proportion of content that validates what you know goes way up.
Which brings us to the second way the filter bubble can get in the way of learning: It can block what researcher Travis Proulx calls “meaning threats,” the confusing, unsettling occurrences that fuel our desire to understand and acquire new ideas.
Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara asked subjects to read two modified versions of “The Country Doctor,” a strange, dreamlike short story by Franz Kafka. “A seriously ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant,” begins the story. “A severe snowstorm filled the space between him and me.” The doctor has no horse, but when he goes to the stable, it’s warm and there’s a horsey scent. A belligerent groom hauls himself out of the muck and offers to help the doctor. The groom calls two horses and attempts to rape the doctor’s maid, while the doctor is whisked to the patient’s house in a snowy instant. And that’s just the beginning—the weirdness escalates. The story concludes with a series of non sequiturs and a cryptic aphorism: “Once one responds to a false alarm on the night bell, there’s no making it good again—not ever.”
The Kafka-inspired version of the story includes meaning threats—incomprehensible events that threaten readers’ expectations about the world and shake their confidence in their ability to understand. But the researchers also prepared another version of the story with a much more conventional narrative, complete with a happily-ever-after ending and appropriate, cartoony illustrations. The mysteries and odd occurrences are explained. After reading one version or the other, the study’s participants were asked to switch tasks and identify patterns in a set of numbers. The group that read the version adopted from Kafka did nearly twice as well—a dramatic increase