The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [46]
On his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg lists “transparency” as one of his top Likes. But there’s a downside to perfect transparency: One of the most important uses of privacy is to manage and maintain the separations and distinctions among our different selves. With only one identity, you lose the nuances that make for a good personalized fit.
Personalization doesn’t capture the balance between your work self and your play self, and it can also mess with the tension between your aspirational and your current self. How we behave is a balancing act between our future and present selves. In the future, we want to be fit, but in the present, we want the candy bar. In the future, we want to be a well-rounded, well-informed intellectual virtuoso, but right now we want to watch Jersey Shore. Behavioral economists call this present bias—the gap between your preferences for your future self and your preferences in the current moment.
The phenomenon explains why there are so many movies in your Netflix queue. When researchers at Harvard and the Analyst Institute looked at people’s movie-rental patterns, they were able to watch as people’s future aspirations played against their current desires. “Should” movies like An Inconvenient Truth or Schindler’s List were often added to the queue, but there they languished while watchers gobbled up “want” movies like Sleepless in Seattle. And when they had to choose three movies to watch instantly, they were less likely to choose “should” movies at all. Apparently there are some movies we’d always rather watch tomorrow.
At its best, media help mitigate present bias, mixing “should” stories with “want” stories and encouraging us to dig into the difficult but rewarding work of understanding complex problems. But the filter bubble tends to do the opposite: Because it’s our present self that’s doing all the clicking, the set of preferences it reflects is necessarily more “want” than “should.”
The one-identity problem isn’t a fundamental flaw. It’s more of a bug: Because Zuckerberg thinks you have one identity and you don’t, Facebook will do a worse job of personalizing your information environment. As John Battelle told me, “We’re so far away from the nuances of what it means to be human, as reflected in the nuances of the technology.” Given enough data and enough programmers, the context problem is solvable—and according to personalization engineer Jonathan McPhie, Google is working on it. We’ve seen the pendulum swing from the anonymity of the early Internet to the one-identity view currently in vogue; the future may look like something in between.
But the one-identity problem illustrates one of the dangers of turning over your most personal details to companies who have a skewed view of what identity is. Maintaining separate identity zones is a ritual that helps us deal with the demands of different roles and communities. And something’s lost when, at the end of the day, everything inside your filter bubble looks roughly the same. Your bacchanalian self comes knocking at work; your work anxieties plague you on a night out.
And when we’re aware that everything we do enters a permanent, pervasive online record, another problem emerges: The knowledge that what we do affects what we see and how companies see us can create a chilling effect. Genetic privacy expert Mark Rothstein describes how lax regulations around genetic data can actually reduce the number of people willing to be tested for certain diseases: If you might be discriminated against or denied insurance for having a gene linked to Parkinson’s disease, it’s not unreasonable just to skip the test and the “toxic knowledge” that might result.
In the same way, when our online actions are tallied