I get a feed from Delancy Place press everyday, with a snippet/synopsis of a book. They do a good job - and today I read one that I find particularly frightening. And might go a long way to explaining why I feel so many conversations are so narrowly inspired these days.
"Today's encore
selection -- from The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser. Because of the
personalization of the internet, an internet search of the same term by two
different people will often bring very different results. We are each
increasingly being served not only ads for what we are more likely to want, but
also news and information that is familiar and confirms our beliefs. The issue
is that we are increasingly unaware of what is being filtered out and why --
leaving us each more and more in our own unique and self-reinforcing
information bubble. Author Eli Pariser calls this 'the filter bubble' -- and it
is leaving less room for encounters with unexpected ideas:
"Most
of us assume that when we 'google' a term, we all see the same results -- the
ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most
authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no
longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best
for you in particular -- and someone else may see something entirely different.
In other words, there is no standard Google anymore.
"It's
not hard to see this difference in action. In the spring of 2010, while the
remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were spewing crude oil into the Gulf
of Mexico, I asked two friends to search for the term 'BP.' They're pretty
similar -- educated white left-leaning women who live in the Northeast. But the
results they saw were quite different. One of my friends saw investment
information about BP. The other saw news. For one, the first page of results
contained links about the oil spill; for the other, there was nothing about it
except for a promotional ad from BP.
"Even
the number of results returned by Google differed -- about 180 million results
for one friend and 139 million for the other. If the results were that
different for these two progressive East Coast women, imagine how different
they would be for my friends and, say, an elderly Republican in Texas (or, for
that matter, a businessman in Japan).
"With
Google personalized for everyone, the query 'stem cells' might produce
diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and
activists who oppose it. 'Proof of climate change' might turn up different
results for an environmental activist and an oil company executive. In polls, a
huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just
because they're increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your
computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests
while algorithmic observers watch what you click. ...
"For a time, it seemed that
the Internet was going to entirely redemocratize society. Bloggers and citizen
journalists would single-handedly rebuild the public media. Politicians would
be able to run only with a broad base of support from small, everyday donors.
Local governments would become more transparent and accountable to their
citizens. And yet the era of civic connection I dreamed about hasn't come.
Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but
instead we're more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a
reliance on shared facts; instead we're being offered parallel but separate
universes.
"My
sense of unease crystallized when I noticed that my conservative friends had
disappeared from my Facebook page. Politically, I lean to the left, but I like
to hear what conservatives are thinking, and I've gone out of my way to
befriend a few and add them as Facebook connections. I wanted to see what links
they'd post, read their comments, and learn a bit from them.
"But
their links never turned up in my Top News feed. Facebook was apparently doing
the math and noticing that I was still clicking my progressive friends' links
more than my conservative friends' -- and links to the latest Lady Gaga videos
more than either. So no conservative links for me.
"I
started doing some research, trying to understand how Facebook was deciding
what to show me and what to hide. As it turned out, Facebook wasn't alone.
"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
[automatically collects and stores information about your computer or mobile
device and your activities] so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants.
Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the
Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots. Open -- even for an instant -- a page
listing signs that your spouse may be cheating and prepare to be haunted with
DNA paternity-test ads. The new Internet doesn't just know you're a dog; it
knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble."
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