The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [58]
Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto is presumably intended to allay some of these concerns. I once explained to a Google search engineer that while I didn’t think the company was currently evil, it seemed to have at its fingertips everything it needed to do evil if it wished. He smiled broadly. “Right,” he said. “We’re not evil. We try really hard not to be evil. But if we wanted to, man, could we ever!”
Friendly World Syndrome
Most governments and corporations have used the new power that personal data and personalization offer fairly cautiously so far—China, Iran, and other oppressive regimes being the obvious exceptions. But even putting aside intentional manipulation, the rise of filtering has a number of unintended yet serious consequences for democracies. In the filter bubble, the public sphere—the realm in which common problems are identified and addressed—is just less relevant.
For one thing, there’s the problem of the friendly world. Communications researcher George Gerbner was one of the first theorists to look into how media affect our political beliefs, and in the mid-1970s, he spent a lot of time thinking about shows like Starsky and Hutch. It was a pretty silly program, filled with the shared clichés of seventies cop TV—the bushy moustaches, the twanging soundtracks, the simplistic goodversus-evil plots. And it was hardly the only one—for every Charlie’s Angels or Hawaii Five-O that earned a place in cultural memory, there are dozens of shows, like The Rockford Files, Get Christie Love, and Adam-12, that are unlikely to be resuscitated for ironic twenty-first-century remakes.
But Gerbner, a World War II veteran–turned–communications theorist who became dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, took these shows seriously. Starting in 1969, he began a systematic study of the way TV programming affects how we think about the world. As it turned out, the Starsky and Hutch effect was significant. When you asked TV watchers to estimate the percentage of the adult workforce that was made up of cops, they vastly overguessed relative to non–TV watchers with the same education and demographic background. Even more troubling, kids who saw a lot of TV violence were much more likely to be worried about real-world violence.
Gerbner called this the mean world syndrome: If you grow up in a home where there’s more than, say, three hours of television per day, for all practical purposes, you live in a meaner world—and act accordingly—than your next-door neighbor who lives in the same place but watches less television. “You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior,” Gerbner later said.
Gerbner died in 2005, but he lived long enough to see the Internet begin to break that stranglehold. It must have been a relief: Although our online cultural storytellers are still quite consolidated, the Internet at least offers more choice. If you want to get your local news from a blogger rather than a local TV station that trumpets crime rates to get ratings, you can.
But if the mean world syndrome poses less of a risk these days, there’s a new problem on the horizon: We may now face what persuasion-profiling theorist Dean Eckles calls a friendly world syndrome, in which some of the biggest and most important problems fail to reach our view at all.
While the mean world on television arises from a cynical “if it bleeds, it leads” approach to programming, the friendly world generated by algorithmic filtering may not be as intentional. According to Facebook engineer Andrew Bosworth, the team that developed the Like button originally considered a number of options—from stars to a thumbs up sign (but in Iran and Thailand, it’s an obscene gesture). For a month in the summer of 2007, the button was known as the Awesome button. Eventually, however, the Facebook team gravitated toward Like, which is more universal.
That Facebook chose Like instead of, say, Important is a small design decision with far-reaching consequences: