The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [36]
For similar reasons, a filtered environment could have consequences for curiosity. According to psychologist George Lowenstein, curiosity is aroused when we’re presented with an “information gap.” It’s a sensation of deprivation: A present’s wrapping deprives us of the knowledge of what’s in it, and as a result we become curious about its contents. But to feel curiosity, we have to be conscious that something’s being hidden. Because the filter bubble hides things invisibly, we’re not as compelled to learn about what we don’t know.
As University of Virginia media studies professor and Google expert Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in “The Googlization of Everything”: “Learning is by definition an encounter with what you don’t know, what you haven’t thought of, what you couldn’t conceive, and what you never understood or entertained as possible. It’s an encounter with what’s other—even with otherness as such. The kind of filter that Google interposes between an Internet searcher and what a search yields shields the searcher from such radical encounters.” Personalization is about building an environment that consists entirely of the adjacent unknown—the sports trivia or political punctuation marks that don’t really shake our schemata but feel like new information. The personalized environment is very good at answering the questions we have but not at suggesting questions or problems that are out of our sight altogether. It brings to mind the famous Pablo Picasso quotation: “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
Stripped of the surprise of unexpected events and associations, a perfectly filtered world would provoke less learning. And there’s another mental balance that personalization can upset: the balance between open-mindedness and focus that makes us creative.
The Adderall Society
The drug Adderall is a mixture of amphetamines. Prescribed for attention deficit disorder, it’s become a staple for thousands of overscheduled, sleep-deprived students, allowing them to focus for long stretches on a single arcane research paper or complex lab assignment.
For people without ADD, Adderall also has a remarkable effect. On Erowid, an online forum for recreational drug users and “mind hackers,” there’s post after post of testimonials to the drug’s power to extend focus. “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my inbox apparently shut down,” author Josh Foer wrote in an article on Slate. “Normally, I can only stare at my computer screen for about 20 minutes at a time. On Adderall, I was able to work in hourlong chunks.”
In a world of constant interruptions, as work demands only increase, Adderall is a compelling value proposition. Who couldn’t use a little cognitive boost? Among the vocal class of neuroenhancement proponents, Adderall and drugs like it may even be the key to our economic future. “If you’re a fifty-five-year-old in Boston, you have to compete with a twenty-six-year-old from Mumbai now, and those kinds of pressures [to use enhancing drugs] are only going to grow,” Zack Lynch of the neurotech consulting firm NeuroInsights told a New Yorker correspondent.
But Adderall also has some serious side effects. It’s addictive. It dramatically boosts blood pressure. And perhaps most important, it seems to decrease associative creativity. After trying Adderall for a week, Foer was impressed with its powers, cranking out pages and pages of text and reading through dense scholarly articles. But, he wrote, “it was like I was thinking with blinders on.” “With this drug,” an Erowid experimenter wrote, “I become calculating and conservative. In the words of one friend, I think ‘inside the box.’” Martha Farah, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has bigger worries: “I