The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [92]
And then there are fully algorithmic solutions. For example, why not rely on everyone’s idea of what’s important? Imagine for a moment that next to each Like button on Facebook was an Important button. You could tag items with one or the other or both. And Facebook could draw on a mix of both signals—what people like, and what they think really matters—to populate and personalize your news feed. You’d have to bet that news about Pakistan would be seen more often—even accounting for everyone’s quite subjective definition of what really matters. Collaborative filtering doesn’t have to lead to compulsive media: The whole game is in what values the filters seek to pull out. Alternately, Google or Facebook could place a slider bar running from “only stuff I like” to “stuff other people like that I’ll probably hate” at the top of search results and the News Feed, allowing users to set their own balance between tight personalization and a more diverse information flow. This approach would have two benefits: It would make clear that there’s personalization going on, and it would place it more firmly in the user’s control.
There’s one more thing the engineers of the filter bubble can do. They can solve for serendipity, by designing filtering systems to expose people to topics outside their normal experience. This will often be in tension with pure optimization in the short term, because a personalization system with an element of randomness will (by definition) get fewer clicks. But as the problems of personalization become better known, it may be a good move in the long run—consumers may choose systems that are good at introducing them to new topics. Perhaps what we need is a kind of anti-Netflix Prize—a Serendipity Prize for systems that are the best at holding readers’ attention while introducing them to new topics and ideas.
If this shift toward corporate responsibility seems improbable, it’s not without precedent. In the mid-1800s, printing a newspaper was hardly a reputable business. Papers were fiercely partisan and recklessly ideological. They routinely altered facts to suit their owners’ vendettas of the day, or just to add color. It was this culture of crass commercialism and manipulation that Walter Lippmann railed against in Liberty and the News.
But as newspapers became highly profitable and highly important, they began to change. It became possible, in a few big cities, to run papers that weren’t just chasing scandal and sensation—in part, because their owners could afford not to. Courts started to recognize a public interest in journalism and rule accordingly. Consumers started to demand more scrupulous and rigorous editing.
Urged on by Lippmann’s writings, an editorial ethic began to take shape. It was never shared universally or followed as well as it could have been. It was always compromised by the business demands of newspapers’ owners and shareholders. It failed outright repeatedly—access to power brokers compromised truth telling, and the demands of advertisers overcame the demands of readers. But in the end, it succeeded, somehow, in seeing us through a century of turmoil.
The torch is now being passed to a new generation of curators, and we need them to pick it up and carry