The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Eli Pariser’s New York Times best-selling new book, has been applauded by net skeptics like Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov as well as digital optimists like Clay Shirky and Craig Newmark. It’s an important book which argues that leading websites like Google and Facebook are delivering personalized information to us, thereby shielding Internet users from the broad news and ideas that traditional newspapers delivered to us.
Pariser, who is the President of the Board of MoveOn.org is concerned that the Internet isn’t living up to its original promise. And the Filter Bubble is a passionate polemic against Facebook and Google algorithms that simply serves up information that it believes the user wants to see. For Pariser, this is creating a less and less well informed public and compounding the ghettoization of contemporary intellectual and political life.
This is the first part of a two part interview with Pariser. Check in tomorrow to hear whether Pariser believes that progressives have lost faith in the Internet.
What is the internet hiding from us?
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author of “The Filter Bubble:
What the Internet is Hiding from You”.
Eli, your critique is
a very important one but does
it also speak of a
broader cultural or political
malaise in the West
that we really are
now increasingly going on the
internet to read
or hear what we want to read and hear.
It’s got – you can’t really blame it on the internet.
The internet is itself ideology
and reflects more deeply rooted
cultural and social phenomena.
Well, yeah.
There’s definitely other things at play here as well.
The personalization trend is
amplifying something that’s already
going on which is
probably a function of a lot
of us, you know, my generation certainly,
growing up, you know,
being told two thousand times
a day through advertisements that we’re
the center of the world, that
the price for the –
You’re not blaming the advertisers for this, are you?
I am blaming, you know.
I’m blaming this culture
that reinforces this
idea that the way to
express yourself is through and
that, you’re sort of
the center of the universe, it’s…
But
you’re blaming, but I’m not…
…it’s more uncomfortable…
Right.
…you know, to get
outside of that world.
We are not accustomed to being
confronted with really different ideas.
We grew up in increasingly homogenous communities.
And the hope, I
would have hoped that the
internet would be taking us off that path.
Yes, I live in
world a bigger view of the world and something different.
And actually it’s like
we’re taking our neighborhood on line with us.
You can’t get outside of that narrow point of view.
But I personally
don’t buy this Why
don’t people have more of a
thirst for knowledge about the world?
You just can’t blame it on Coca-Cola or McDonald’s.
Oh no, I mean, I think education also plays a role.
So we’re blaming the teachers now?
Well, I’m not blaming the teachers,
but I’m saying to use
media is a critical
part of how we then
experience it.
We don’t have a very
good media literacy curriculum in most schools.
People don’t know how to actually
use media well, or find their way around it.
And as, you know, this
becomes embedded in everything we do.
We see the world through our cell phone or through our online experience.
You have this compounded problem
because people don’t know how
to think about the to
people’s attention you don’t know
that you’re viewing the world through
a kind of distorted lens.
So it’s like Brave New World, we’re
not really even aware of what’s going on.
But, I mean, we could
walk past a newsstand and pick
up The New York Times or
The Wall Street Journal and the physical papers aren’t personalized.
Well the physical papers aren’t but,This
is the trend for the
simple reason, which is that if
you can do it with an
algorithm that’s a lot cheaper than having an editor.
And I don’t think
that that’s necessarily a bad thing as an emulator.
I think, I don’t think
the human editors are…I ‘m
not nostalgic for that
time, but I do
think that if we’re going to
make that shift, then the algorithms better be up to the task.
And they better not just show
us sort of the
most compulsively click-able stuff.
They better show us what we need to know.
Show us a diversity of ideas.
Show us things that are
a hard slog at first
but then change our lives.
All of those things are important as well.
So you still have faith in the idea of the algorithm?
Yeah.
Well I think for better or worse that’s the way that it is going.
And I think probably
for the near future it’s some
mix of human editors or
human curators and algorithmic ones.
I think, There are a
lot of things at this point that
algorithms just can’t do very well.
They don’t anticipate the future very well.
They don’t know that something is going to be news in three days.
They don’t pair information,
pair different articles together very well.
There is a bunch of things
that algorithms just are not
up to yet, but
I think that you really
want these algorithms that so
many of us are viewing the
world through to be
showing us what’s really going on actually.
