The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [87]
What Individuals Can Do
Social-media researcher danah boyd was right when she warned that we are at risk of the “psychological equivalent of obesity.” And while creating a healthy information diet requires action on the part of the companies that supply the food, that doesn’t work unless we also change our own habits. Corn syrup vendors aren’t likely to change their practices until consumers demonstrate that they’re looking for something else.
Here’s one place to start: Stop being a mouse.
On an episode of the radio program This American Life, host Ira Glass investigates how to build a better mousetrap. He talks to Andy Woolworth, the man at the world’s largest mousetrap manufacturer who fields ideas for new trap designs. The proposed ideas vary from the impractical (a trap that submerges the mouse in antifreeze, which then needs to be thrown out by the bucket) to the creepy (a design that kills rodents using, yes, gas pellets).
But the punch line is that they’re all unnecessary. Woolworth has an easy job, because the existing traps are very cheap and work within a day 88 percent of the time. Mousetraps work because mice generally establish a food-seeking route within ten feet of where they are, returning to it up to thirty times a day. Place a trap in its vicinity, and chances are very good that you’ll catch your mouse.
Most of us are pretty mouselike in our information habits. I admittedly am: There are three or four Web sites that I check frequently each day, and I rarely vary them or add new ones to my repertoire. “Whether we live in Calcutta or San Francisco,” Matt Cohler told me, “we all kinda do the same thing over and over again most of the time. And jumping out of that recursion loop is not easy to do.” Habits are hard to break. But just as you notice more about the place you live when you take a new route to work, varying your path online dramatically increases your likelihood of encountering new ideas and people.
Just by stretching your interests in new directions, you give the personalizing code more breadth to work with. Someone who shows interest in opera and comic books and South African politics and Tom Cruise is harder to pigeonhole than someone who just shows interest in one of those things. And by constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.
Going off the beaten track is scary at first, but the experiences we have when we come across new ideas, people, and cultures are powerful. They make us feel human. Serendipity is a shortcut to joy.
For some of the “identity cascade” problems discussed in chapter 5, regularly erasing the cookies your Internet browser uses to identify who you are is a partial cure. Most browsers these days make erasing cookies pretty simple—you just select Options or Preferences and then choose Erase cookies. And many personalized ad networks are offering consumers the option to opt out. I’m posting an updated and more detailed list of places to opt out on the Web site for this book, www.thefilterbubble.com.
But because personalization is more or less unavoidable, opting out entirely isn’t a particularly viable route for most of us. You can run all of your online activities in an “incognito” window, where less of your personal information is stored, but it’ll be increasingly impractical—many services simply won’t work the way they’re supposed to. (This is why, as I describe below, I don’t think the Do Not Track list currently under consideration by the FTC is a viable strategy.)