The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [6]
When I began the research that led to the writing of this book, personalization seemed like a subtle, even inconsequential shift. But when I considered what it might mean for a whole society to be adjusted in this way, it started to look more important. Though I follow tech developments pretty closely, I realized there was a lot I didn’t know: How did personalization work? What was driving it? Where was it headed? And most important, what will it do to us? How will it change our lives?
In the process of trying to answer these questions, I’ve talked to sociologists and salespeople, software engineers and law professors. I interviewed one of the founders of OkCupid, an algorithmically driven dating Web site, and one of the chief visionaries of the U.S. information warfare bureau. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the mechanics of online ad sales and search engines. I argued with cyberskeptics and cybervisionaries (and a few people who were both).
Throughout my investigation, I was struck by the lengths one has to go to in order to fully see what personalization and filter bubbles do. When I interviewed Jonathan McPhie, Google’s point man on search personalization, he suggested that it was nearly impossible to guess how the algorithms would shape the experience of any given user. There were simply too many variables and inputs to track. So while Google can look at overall clicks, it’s much harder to say how it’s working for any one person.
I was also struck by the degree to which personalization is already upon us—not only on Facebook and Google, but on almost every major site on the Web. “I don’t think the genie goes back in the bottle,” Danny Sullivan told me. Though concerns about personalized media have been raised for a decade—legal scholar Cass Sunstein wrote a smart and provocative book on the topic in 2000—the theory is now rapidly becoming practice: Personalization is already much more a part of our daily experience than many of us realize. We can now begin to see how the filter bubble is actually working, where it’s falling short, and what that means for our daily lives and our society.
Every technology has an interface, Stanford law professor Ryan Calo told me, a place where you end and the technology begins. And when the technology’s job is to show you the world, it ends up sitting between you and reality, like a camera lens. That’s a powerful position, Calo says. “There are lots of ways for it to skew your perception of the world.” And that’s precisely what the filter bubble does.
THE FILTER BUBBLE’S costs are both personal and cultural. There are direct consequences for those of us who use personalized filters (and soon enough, most of us will, whether we realize it or not). And there are societal consequences, which emerge when masses of people begin to live a filter-bubbled life.
One of the best ways to understand how filters shape our individual experience is to think in terms of our information diet. As sociologist danah boyd said in a speech at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo:
Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they’re rare in nature.... In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.
Just as the factory farming system that produces and delivers our food shapes what we eat, the dynamics of our media shape what information we consume. Now we’re quickly shifting toward a regimen chock-full of personally relevant information. And while that can be helpful, too much of a good thing can also cause real problems. Left to their own devices, personalization filters serve up a kind