The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [81]
Even books aren’t immune. Cathy’s Book, a young-adult title published in September 2006, has its heroine applying “a killer coat of Lipslicks in ‘Daring.’ ”That’s not a coincidence—Cathy’s Book was published by Procter & Gamble, the corporate owner of Lipslicks.
If the product placement and advertiser-funded media industries continue to grow, personalization will offer whole new vistas of possibility. Why name-drop Lipslicks when your reader is more likely to buy Cover Girl? Why have a video-game chase scene through Macy’s when the guy holding the controller is more of an Old Navy type? When software engineers talk about architecture, they’re usually talking metaphorically. But as people spend more of their time in virtual, personalizable places, there’s no reason that these worlds can’t change to suit users’ preferences. Or, for that matter, a corporate sponsor’s.
A Shifting World
The enriched psychological models and new data flows measuring everything from heart rate to music choices open up new frontiers for online personalization, in which what changes isn’t just a choice of products or news clips, but the look and feel of the site on which they’re displayed.
Why should Web sites look the same to every viewer or customer? Different people don’t respond only to different products—they respond to different design sensibilities, different colors, even different types of product descriptions. It’s easy enough to imagine a Walmart Web site with softened edges and warm pastels for some customers and a hard-edged, minimalist design for others. And once that capacity exists, why stick with just one design per customer? Maybe it’s best to show me one side of the Walmart brand when I’m angry and another when I’m happy.
This kind of approach isn’t a futuristic fantasy. A team led by John Hauser at MIT’s business school has developed the basic techniques for what they call Web site morphing, in which a shopping site analyzes users’ clicks to figure out what kinds of information and styles of presentation are most effective and then adjusts the layout to suit a particular user’s cognitive style. Hauser estimates that Web sites that morph can increase “purchase intentions” by 21 percent. Industrywide, that’s worth billions. And what starts with the sale of consumer products won’t end there: News and entertainment sources that morph ought to enjoy an advantage as well.
On one hand, morphing makes us feel more at home on the Web. Drawing from the data we provide, every Web site can feel like an old friend. But it also opens the door to a strange, dreamlike world, in which our environment is constantly rearranging itself behind our backs. And like a dream, it may be less and less possible to share with people outside of it—that is, everyone else.
Thanks to augmented reality, that experience may soon be par for the course offline as well.
“On the modern battlefield,” Raytheon Avionics manager Todd Lovell told a reporter, “there is way more data out there than most people can use. If you are just trying to see it all through your eyes and read it in bits and bites, you’re never going to understand it. So the key to the modern technology is to take all that data and turn it into useful information that the pilot can recognize very quickly and act upon.” What Google does for online information, Lovell’s Scorpion project aims to do for the real world.
Fitting like a monocle over one of a jet pilot’s eyes, the Scorpion display device annotates what a pilot sees in real time. It color-codes potential threats, highlights when and where the aircraft has a missile lock, assists with night vision, and reduces the need for pilots to look at a dashboard in an environment where every microsecond matters. “It turns the whole world into a display,” jet pilot Paul Mancini told the Associated Press.
This is augmented-reality technology, and it’s moving rapidly from the cockpits of jet planes to consumer devices that can tune out the noise and turn up the signal of everyday life. Using your iPhone camera and an app developed