The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [45]
Both ways of thinking have their benefits and drawbacks. With Google’s click-based self, the gay teenager who hasn’t come out to his parents can still get a personalized Google News feed with pieces from the broader gay community that affirm that he’s not alone. But by the same token, a self built on clicks will tend to draw us even more toward the items we’re predisposed to look at already—toward our most Pavlovian selves. Your perusal of an article on TMZ.com is filed away, and the next time you’re looking at the news, Brad Pitt’s marriage drama is more likely to flash on to the screen. (If Google didn’t persistently downplay porn, the problem would presumably be far worse.)
Facebook’s share-based self is more aspirational: Facebook takes you more at your word, presenting you as you’d like to be seen by others. Your Facebook self is more of a performance, less of a behaviorist black box, and ultimately it may be more prosocial than the bundle of signals Google tracks. But the Facebook approach has its downsides as well—to the extent that Facebook draws on the more public self, it necessarily has less room for private interests and concerns. The same closeted gay teenager’s information environment on Facebook might diverge more from his real self. The Facebook portrait remains incomplete.
Both are pretty poor representations of who we are, in part because there is no one set of data that describes who we are. “Information about our property, our professions, our purchases, our finances, and our medical history does not tell the whole story,” writes privacy expert Daniel Solove. “We are more than the bits of data we give off as we go about our lives.”
Digital animators and robotics engineers frequently run into a problem known as the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is the place where something is lifelike but not convincingly alive, and it gives people the creeps. It’s part of why digital animation of real people still hasn’t hit the big screens: When an image looks almost like a real person, but not quite, it’s unsettling on a basic psychological level. We’re now in the uncanny valley of personalization. The doppelgänger selves reflected in our media are a lot like, but not exactly, ourselves. And as we’ll see, there are some important things that are lost in the gap between the data and reality.
To start with, Zuckerberg’s statement that we have “one identity” simply isn’t true. Psychologists have a name for this fallacy: fundamental attribution error. We tend to attribute peoples’ behavior to their inner traits and personality rather than to the situations they’re placed in. Even in situations where the context clearly plays a major role, we find it hard to separate how someone behaves from who she is.
And to a striking degree, our characteristics are fluid. Someone who’s aggressive at work may be a doormat at home. Someone who’s gregarious when happy may be introverted when stressed. Even some of our closest-held traits—our disinclination to do harm, for example—can be shaped by context. Groundbreaking psychologist Stanley Milgram demonstrated this when, in an oft-cited experiment at Yale in the 1960s, he got decent ordinary people to apparently electrocute other subjects when given the nod by a man in a lab coat.
There is a reason that we act this way: The personality traits that serve us well when we’re at dinner with our family might get in the way when we’re in a dispute with a passenger on the train or trying to finish a report at work. The plasticity of the self allows for social situations that would be impossible or intolerable if we always behaved exactly the same way. Advertisers have understood this phenomenon for a long time. In the jargon, it’s called day-parting,