The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [5]
Second, the filter bubble is invisible. Most viewers of conservative or liberal news sources know that they’re going to a station curated to serve a particular political viewpoint. But Google’s agenda is opaque. Google doesn’t tell you who it thinks you are or why it’s showing you the results you’re seeing. You don’t know if its assumptions about you are right or wrong—and you might not even know it’s making assumptions about you in the first place. My friend who got more investment-oriented information about BP still has no idea why that was the case—she’s not a stockbroker. Because you haven’t chosen the criteria by which sites filter information in and out, it’s easy to imagine that the information that comes through a filter bubble is unbiased, objective, true. But it’s not. In fact, from within the bubble, it’s nearly impossible to see how biased it is.
Finally, you don’t choose to enter the bubble. When you turn on Fox News or read The Nation, you’re making a decision about what kind of filter to use to make sense of the world. It’s an active process, and like putting on a pair of tinted glasses, you can guess how the editors’ leaning shapes your perception. You don’t make the same kind of choice with personalized filters. They come to you—and because they drive up profits for the Web sites that use them, they’ll become harder and harder to avoid.
OF COURSE, THERE’S a good reason why personalized filters have such a powerful allure. We are overwhelmed by a torrent of information: 900,000 blog posts, 50 million tweets, more than 60 million Facebook status updates, and 210 billion e-mails are sent off into the electronic ether every day. Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it’d take up about 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. Now we’re creating that much data every two days.
Even the pros are struggling to keep up. The National Security Agency, which copies a lot of the Internet traffic that flows through AT&T’s main hub in San Francisco, is building two new stadium-size complexes in the Southwest to process all that data. The biggest problem they face is a lack of power: There literally isn’t enough electricity on the grid to support that much computing. The NSA is asking Congress for funds to build new power plants. By 2014, they anticipate dealing with so much data they’ve invented new units of measurement just to describe it.
Inevitably, this gives rise to what blogger and media analyst Steve Rubel calls the attention crash. As the cost of communicating over large distances and to large groups of people has plummeted, we’re increasingly unable to attend to it all. Our focus flickers from text message to Web clip to e-mail. Scanning the ever-widening torrent for the precious bits that are actually important or even just relevant is itself a full-time job.
So when personalized filters offer a hand, we’re inclined to take it. In theory, anyway, they can help us find the information we need to know and see and hear, the stuff that really matters among the cat pictures and Viagra ads and treadmill-dancing music videos. Netflix helps you find the right movie to watch in its vast catalog of 140,000 flicks. The Genius function of iTunes calls new hits by your favorite band to your attention when they’d otherwise be lost.
Ultimately, the proponents of personalization offer a vision of a custom-tailored world, every facet of which fits us perfectly. It’s a cozy place, populated by our favorite people and things and ideas. If we never want to hear about reality TV (or a more serious issue like gun violence) again, we don’t have to—and if we want to hear about every movement of Reese Witherspoon, we can. If we never click on the articles about cooking, or gadgets, or the world outside our country’s borders, they simply fade away. We’re never bored. We’re never annoyed. Our media is a perfect reflection of our interests and desires.
By definition, it’s an appealing prospect—a return to a Ptolemaic universe in which the sun and everything