The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [75]
In 2002, the sci-fi movie Minority Report featured personalized holographic advertisements that accosted pedestrians as they walked down the street. In Tokyo, the first Minority Report–style personalized billboard has gone up outside of the NEC corporation’s headquarters (minus, for now, the holography). It’s powered by the company’s PanelDirector software, which scans the faces of passersby and matches them to a database of ten thousand stored photos to make guesses about their age and gender. When a young woman steps in front of the display, it responds instantly by showing her ads tailored to her. IBM’s on the case, too; its prototype advertising displays use remotely readable identity cards to greet viewers by name.
In Reality Hunger, a book-length essay composed entirely of text fragments and reworked quotations, David Shields makes the case for the growing movement of artists who are “breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.” Shields’s examples are far-ranging, including The Blair Witch Project, Borat, and Curb Your Enthusiasm; karaoke, VH1’s Behind the Music, and public access TV; The Eminem Show and The Daily Show, documentary and mockumentary. These pieces, he says, are the most vital art of our time, part of a new mode characterized by “a deliberate unartiness” and “a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.” Truthiness, in Shields’s view, is the future of art.
As goes art, so goes technology. The future of personalization—and of computing itself—is a strange amalgam of the real and the virtual. It’s a future where our cities and our bedrooms and all of the spaces in between exhibit what researchers call “ambient intelligence.” It’s a future where our environments shift around us to suit our preferences and even our moods. And it’s a future where advertisers will develop ever more powerful and reality-bending ways to make sure their products are seen.
The days when the filter bubble disappears when we step away from our computers, in other words, are numbered.
The Robot with Gaydar
Stanford Law professor Ryan Calo thinks a lot about robots, but he doesn’t spend much time musing about a future of cyborgs and androids. He’s more interested in Roombas, the little robotic vacuum cleaners currently on the market. Roomba owners name their machines like pets. They delight in watching the little bumbling devices wander around the room. Roombas provoke an emotional response, even a sense of relationship. And in the next few years, they’ll be joined by a small army of consumer-electronic brethren.
The increasing prevalence of humanlike machines in everyday life presents us with new dilemmas in personalization and privacy. The emotions provoked by “humanness,” both virtually (advertars) and in reality (humanlike robots) are powerful. And when people begin to relate to machines as we do to humans, we can be convinced to reveal implicit information that we would never directly give away.
For one thing, the presence of humanoid faces changes behavior, compelling people to behave more like they’re in public. The Chinese experiment with Jingjing and Chacha, the cartoon Internet police, is one example of this power. On the one hand, Calo points out, people are much less likely to volunteer private information when being interrogated by a virtual agent than when simply filling out a form. This is part of why the intelligent-agent