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By Root 744 0

all of us to shoulder the responsibility for understanding and managing our world than the Internet. But in practice, the Internet is headed in a different direction. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, captured the gravity of this threat in a recent call to arms in the pages of Scientific American titled “Long Live the Web.” “The Web as we know it,” he wrote, “is being threatened.... Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web.... Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights. If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands.”

In this book, I’ve argued that the rise of pervasive, embedded filtering is changing the way we experience the Internet and ultimately the world. At the center of this transformation is the fact that for the first time it’s possible for a medium to figure out who you are, what you like, and what you want. Even if the personalizing code isn’t always spot-on, it’s accurate enough to be profitable, not just by delivering better ads but also by adjusting the substance of what we read, see, and hear.

As a result, while the Internet offers access to a dazzling array of sources and options, in the filter bubble we’ll miss many of them. While the Internet can give us new opportunities to grow and experiment with our identities, the economics of personalization push toward a static conception of personhood. While the Internet has the potential to decentralize knowledge and control, in practice it’s concentrating control over what we see and what opportunities we’re offered in the hands of fewer people than ever before.

Of course, there are some advantages to the rise of the personalized Internet. I enjoy using Pandora, Netflix, and Facebook as much as the next person. I appreciate Google’s shortcuts through the information jungle (and couldn’t have written this book without them). But what’s troubling about this shift toward personalization is that it’s largely invisible to users and, as a result, out of our control. We are not even aware that we’re seeing increasingly divergent images of the Internet. The Internet may know who we are, but we don’t know who it thinks we are or how it’s using that information. Technology designed to give us more control over our lives is actually taking control away.

Ultimately, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy told me, information systems have to be judged on their public outcomes. “If what the Internet does is spread around a lot of information, fine, but what did that cause to happen?” he asked. If it’s not helping us solve the really big problems, what good is it? “We really need to address the core issues: climate change, political instability in Asia and the Middle East, demographic problems, and the decline of the middle class. In the context of problems of this magnitude, you’d hope that a new constituency would emerge, but there’s a distraction overlay—false issues, entertainment, gaming. If our system, with all the freedom of choice, is not addressing the problems, something’s wrong.”

Something is wrong with our media. But the Internet isn’t doomed, for a simple reason: This new medium is nothing if not plastic. Its great strength, in fact, is its capacity for change. Through a combination of individual action, corporate responsibility, and governmental regulation, it’s still possible to shift course.

“We create the Web,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote. “We choose what properties we want it to have and not have. It is by no means finished (and it’s certainly not dead).” It’s still possible to build information systems that introduce us to new ideas, that push us in new ways. It’s still possible to create media that show us what we don’t know, rather than reflecting what we do. It’s still possible to erect systems that don’t trap us in an endless loop of