The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [7]
In the filter bubble, there’s less room for the chance encounters that bring insight and learning. Creativity is often sparked by the collision of ideas from different disciplines and cultures. Combine an understanding of cooking and physics and you get the nonstick pan and the induction stovetop. But if Amazon thinks I’m interested in cookbooks, it’s not very likely to show me books about metallurgy. It’s not just serendipity that’s at risk. By definition, a world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn. If personalization is too acute, it could prevent us from coming into contact with the mind-blowing, preconception-shattering experiences and ideas that change how we think about the world and ourselves.
And while the premise of personalization is that it provides you with a service, you’re not the only person with a vested interest in your data. Researchers at the University of Minnesota recently discovered that women who are ovulating respond better to pitches for clingy clothes and suggested that marketers “strategically time” their online solicitations. With enough data, guessing this timing may be easier than you think.
At best, if a company knows which articles you read or what mood you’re in, it can serve up ads related to your interests. But at worst, it can make decisions on that basis that negatively affect your life. After you visit a page about Third World backpacking, an insurance company with access to your Web history might decide to increase your premium, law professor Jonathan Zittrain suggests. Parents who purchased EchoMetrix’s Sentry software to track their kids online were outraged when they found that the company was then selling their kids’ data to third-party marketing firms.
Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life—much of which you might not trust friends with. These companies are getting better at drawing on this data to make decisions every day. But the trust we place in them to handle it with care is not always warranted, and when decisions are made on the basis of this data that affect you negatively, they’re usually not revealed.
Ultimately, the filter bubble can affect your ability to choose how you want to live. To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you’re letting the companies that construct it choose which options you’re aware of. You may think you’re the captain of your own destiny, but personalization can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you’ve clicked on in the past determines what you see next—a Web history you’re doomed to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever narrowing version of yourself—an endless you-loop.
And there are broader consequences. In Bowling Alone, his bestselling book on the decline of civic life in America, Robert Putnam looked at the problem of the major decrease in “social capital”—the bonds of trust and allegiance that encourage people to do each other favors, work together to solve common problems, and collaborate. Putnam identified two kinds of social capital: There’s the in-group-oriented “bonding” capital created when you attend a meeting of your college alumni, and then there’s “bridging” capital, which is created at an event like a town meeting when people from lots of different backgrounds come together to meet each other. Bridging capital is potent: Build more of it, and you’re more likely to be able to find that next job or an investor for your small business, because it allows you to tap into lots of different networks for help.
Everybody expected the Internet to be a huge source of bridging capital. Writing at the height of the