Incredibly important article by Eli Pariser in The Observer — "How the net traps us all in our own little bubbles" — about how personalization of the web by Google, Facebook and others now limits the the variety of information we can find. Increasingly, search engines only feed us stuff that looks, sounds, and reads like stuff we've seen, heard or read before — reducing our chances of bumping into something new or surprising or uncomfortable, all of which are required to spur growth or change. Favorite two paragraphs:
"We are predisposed to respond to a pretty narrow set of stimuli – if a piece of news is about sex, power, gossip, violence, celebrity or humour, we are likely to read it first. This is the content that most easily makes it into the filter bubble. It's easy to push "Like" and increase the visibility of a friend's post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It's harder to push the "Like" button on an article titled "Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years". In a personalised world, important but complex or unpleasant issues – the rising prison population, for example, or homelessness – are less likely to come to our attention at all.
"As a consumer, it's hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country. 'It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest,' technology journalist Clive Thompson told me. Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it a different way: 'Customers are always right, but people aren't.'"
What does your filter bubble keep you from learning (or caring) about?
