The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [42]
Despite this discovery, however, the idea that California was an island persisted for several more centuries. Other explorers discovered Puget Sound, near Vancouver, and were certain that it must connect to Baja. Dutch maps from the 1600s routinely show a distended long fragment off the coast of America stretching half the length of the continent. It took Jesuit missionaries literally marching inland and never reaching the other side to fully repudiate the myth.
It may have persisted for one simple reason: There was no sign on the maps for “don’t know,” and so the distinction between geographic guesswork and sights that had been witnessed firsthand became blurred. One of history’s major cartographic errors, the island of California reminds us that it’s not what we don’t know that hurts us as much as what we don’t know we don’t know—what ex–secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld famously called the unknown unknowns.
This is one other way that personalized filters can interfere with our ability to properly understand the world: They alter our sense of the map. More unsettling, they often remove its blank spots, transforming known unknowns into unknown ones.
Traditional, unpersonalized media often offer the promise of representativeness. A newspaper editor isn’t doing his or her job properly unless to some degree the paper is representative of the news of the day. This is one of the ways one can convert an unknown unknown into a known unknown. If you leaf through the paper, dipping into some articles and skipping over most of them, you at least know there are stories, perhaps whole sections, that you passed over. Even if you don’t read the article, you notice the headline about a flood in Pakistan—or maybe you’re just reminded that, yes, there is a Pakistan.
In the filter bubble, things look different. You don’t see the things that don’t interest you at all. You’re not even latently aware that there are major events and ideas you’re missing. Nor can you take the links you do see and assess how representative they are without an understanding of what the broader environment from which they were selected looks like. As any statistician will tell you, you can’t tell how biased the sample is from looking at the sample alone: You need something to compare it to.
As a last resort, you might look at your selection and ask yourself if it looks like a representative sample. Are there conflicting views? Are there different takes, and different kinds of people reflecting? Even this is a blind alley, however, because with an information set the size of the Internet, you get a kind of fractal diversity: at any level, even within a very narrow information spectrum (atheist goth bowlers, say) there are lots of voices and lots of different takes.
We’re never able to experience the whole world at once. But the best information tools give us a sense of where we stand in it—literally, in the case of a library, and figuratively in the case of a newspaper front page. This was one of the CIA’s primary errors with Yuri Nosenko. The agency had collected a specialized subset of information about Nosenko without realizing how specialized it was, and thus despite the many brilliant analysts working for years on the case, it missed what would have been obvious from a whole picture of the man.
Because personalized filters usually have no Zoom Out function, it’s easy to lose your bearings, to believe the world is a narrow island when in fact it’s an immense, varied continent.
4
The You Loop
I believe this is the quest for what a personal computer really is. It is to capture one’s entire life.
—Gordon Bell
You have one identity,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told journalist David Kirkpatrick for his book The Facebook Effect. “The days of