The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [8]
Friedman seemed to have in mind a kind of global village in which kids in Africa and executives in New York would build a community together. But that’s not what’s happening: Our virtual next-door neighbors look more and more like our real-world neighbors, and our real-world neighbors look more and more like us. We’re getting a lot of bonding but very little bridging. And this is important because it’s bridging that creates our sense of the “public”—the space where we address the problems that transcend our niches and narrow self-interests.
We are predisposed to respond to a pretty narrow set of stimuli—if a piece of news is about sex, power, gossip, violence, celebrity, or humor, we are likely to read it first. This is the content that most easily makes it into the filter bubble. It’s easy to push “Like” and increase the visibility of a friend’s post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It’s harder to push the “Like” button on an article titled, “Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years.” In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues—the rising prison population, for example, or homelessness—are less likely to come to our attention at all.
As a consumer, it’s hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country. “It’s a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest,” technology journalist Clive Thompson told me. “In a complex world, almost everything affects you—that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest.” Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it a different way: “Customers are always right, but people aren’t.”
THE STRUCTURE OF our media affects the character of our society. The printed word is conducive to democratic argument in a way that laboriously copied scrolls aren’t. Television had a profound effect on political life in the twentieth century—from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11—and it’s probably not a coincidence that a nation whose denizens spend thirty-six hours a week watching TV has less time for civic life.
The era of personalization is here, and it’s upending many of our predictions about what the Internet would do. The creators of the Internet envisioned something bigger and more important than a global system for sharing pictures of pets. The manifesto that helped launch the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the early nineties championed a “civilization of Mind in cyberspace”—a kind of worldwide metabrain. But personalized filters sever the synapses in that brain. Without knowing it, we may be giving ourselves a kind of global lobotomy instead.
From megacities to nanotech, we’re creating a global society whose complexity has passed the limits of individual comprehension. The problems we’ll face in the next twenty years—energy shortages, terrorism, climate change, and disease—are enormous in scope. They’re problems that we can only solve together.
Early Internet enthusiasts like Web creator Tim Berners-Lee hoped it would be a new platform for tackling those problems. I believe it still can be—and as you read on, I’ll explain how. But first we need to pull back the curtain—to understand the forces that are taking the Internet in its current, personalized direction. We need to lay bare the bugs in the code—and the coders—that brought personalization to us.
If “code is law,” as Larry Lessig famously declared, it’s important to understand what the new lawmakers are