http://www.wfs.org/content/escaping-filter-bubble
Escaping the Filter Bubble
in
Sci/Tech
World Affairs
By Eli Pariser
The former executive director of MoveOn.org warns that more-
personalized Internet searching may have hidden side effects.
ELI PARISER
Photo Credit: Jen Campbell
With little notice or fanfare, the digital world is fundamentally
changing. What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be
anyone—where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody
knows you’re a dog—is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our
personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top
fifty Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average
of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search
for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site
installs up to 223 trackers tracking cookies and beacons on your
computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants
ads.
The race to know as much as possible about you has become the
central battle of the era for Internet giants like Google, Facebook,
Apple, and Microsoft.
In the next three to five years, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told
one group, the idea of a Web site that isn’t customized to a
particular user will seem quaint. Yahoo Vice President Tapan Bhat
agrees: “The future of the Web is about personalization … now the
Web is about ‘me.’ It’s about weaving the Web together in a way that
is smart and personalized for the user.”
Google CEO Eric Schmidt enthuses that the “product I’ve always
wanted to build” is Google code that will “guess what I’m trying to
type.” Google Instant, which guesses what you’re searching for as
you type and was rolled out in the fall of 2010, is just the start—
Schmidt believes that what customers want is for Google to “tell
them what they should be doing next.”
The basic code at the heart of the new Internet is pretty simple.
The new generation of Internet filters looks at the things you seem
to like—the actual things you’ve done, or the things people like you
like—and tries to extrapolate. They are prediction engines,
constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what
you’ll do and want next. Together, these engines create a unique
universe of information for each of us—what I’ve come to call a
filter bubble—which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas
and information.
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 global
lobotomy instead.
Without sitting down next to a friend, it's hard to tell how the
version of Google or Yahoo News that you're seeing differs from
anyone else's. But because the filter bubble distorts our perception
of what's important, true, and real, it's critically important to
render it visible. Ultimately, the filter bubble can affect your
ability to choose how you want to live. To be the author of your
life, professor Yochai Benker argues, you have to be aware of a
diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter
bubble, you're letting the companies that construct it choose which
options you're aware of. You may think you're the captain of your
own destiny, but the personalization can lead you down a road to a
kind of informational determinism in which what you've clicked on in
the past determines what you see next--a Web history you're doomed
to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever-narrowing version of
yourself--an endless you-loop.
Early Internet enthusiasts like Web creator Tim Berners-Lee hoped it
would be a new platform for tackling these problems. I believe it
still can be. 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.
About the Author
Eli Pariser is the board president and former executive director of
the 5 million member organization MoveOn.org. This essay is
excerpted from his latest book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet
Is Hiding From You. A longer article is scheduled to appear in the
September-October 2011 issue of THE FUTURIST.
From The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli
Pariser. Reprinted by arrangement of The Penguin Press, a member of
Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Eli Pariser.
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