The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [40]
The kind of categorical openness that supports creativity also correlates with certain kinds of luck. While science has yet to find that there are people whom the universe favors—ask people to guess a random number, and we’re all about equally bad at it—there are some traits that people who consider themselves to be lucky share. They’re more open to new experiences and new people. They’re also more distractable.
Richard Wiseman, a luck researcher at the University of Hertfordshire in England, asked groups of people who considered themselves to be lucky and unlucky to flip through a doctored newspaper and count the number of photographs in it. On the second page, a big headline said, “Stop counting—there are 43 pictures.” Another page offered 150 British pounds to readers who noticed it. Wiseman described the results: “For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, ‘There are 43 photos. That’s what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?’ We’d say, ‘Yeah, carry on.’ They’d flip some more and say, ‘Do I get my 150 pounds?’ Most of the unlucky people didn’t notice.”
As it turns out, being around people and ideas unlike oneself is one of the best ways to cultivate this sense of open-mindedness and wide categories. Psychologists Charlan Nemeth and Julianne Kwan discovered that bilinguists are more creative than monolinguists—perhaps because they have to get used to the proposition that things can be viewed in several different ways. Even forty-five minutes of exposure to a different culture can boost creativity: When a group of American students was shown a slideshow about China as opposed to one about the United States, their scores on several creativity tests went up. In companies, the people who interface with multiple different units tend to be greater sources of innovation than people who interface only with their own. While nobody knows for certain what causes this effect, it’s likely that foreign ideas help us break open our categories.
But the filter bubble isn’t tuned for a diversity of ideas or of people. It’s not designed to introduce us to new cultures. As a result, living inside it, we may miss some of the mental flexibility and openness that contact with difference creates.
But perhaps the biggest problem is that the personalized Web encourages us to spend less time in discovery mode in the first place.
The Age of Discovery
In Where Good Ideas Come From, science author Steven Johnson offers a “natural history of innovation,” in which he inventories and elegantly illustrates how creativity arises. Creative environments often rely on “liquid networks” where different ideas can collide in different configurations. They arrive through serendipity—we set out looking for the answer to one problem and find another—and as a result, ideas emerge frequently in places where random collision is more likely to occur. “Innovative environments,” he writes, “are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible”—the bisociated area in which existing ideas combine to produce new ones—“because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.”
His book is filled with examples of these environments, from primordial soup to coral reefs and high-tech offices, but Johnson continually returns to two: the city and the Web.
“For complicated historical reasons,” he writes, “they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.”
There’s no question that Johnson was right: The old, unpersonalized web offered an environment of unparalleled richness and diversity. “Visit the ‘serendipity’ article in Wikipedia,” he writes, and “you are one click away from entries on LSD, Teflon, Parkinson’s disease, Sri Lanka, Isaac Newton, and about two hundred other topics of comparable diversity.”
But the filter bubble has dramatically changed the informational physics that determines which ideas