Info 202 Fall 2011

Article: An Interview With Eli Pariser on The Filter Bubble

One of the downsides of physical information objects is they
can only be in one place at one time. While this rule of physicality is generally
thought of as limitation, it’s actually quite comforting to know that things
stay put. Imagine trying to find a book in a library where every time you
visited, the shelves were organized differently? Or think about the frustration
you felt when your local grocery store rearranged things and you could no
longer find your favorite breakfast cereal. While the way things are organized
might not be optimal at the individual level, at least the system is
predictable, knowable, and the organizing principles tend to be discernable. It
also happens to be the same for everyone accessing the system lending itself to
a shared reality.

With digital collections like those found on Google, Netflix,
Amazon and the New York Times, resources like webpages, movies, products, and
the news can be organized in infinite ways, on demand, and each individual
resource can be in limitless sub-collections simultaneously. While this should increase
the likelihood that any one resource will be found, limitless organization (and
reorganization) of resources has some pretty serious side effects especially
when the organization of resources becomes personalized based on what the
system knows about the individual accessing the collection.

In this interview with Eli Pariser, the man behind
MoveOn.org, he talks about his recent book titled The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You and argues
that we are losing our information ‘fruits and vegetables’, the information
diversity that’s good for us, with personalized collections. Instead, these
organizing systems just serve up the ‘desserts’; the pieces of information the
system knows we’ll like based on what it knows about us. He uses the example of
two people searching for information about BP during the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill, one searcher got information about the spill while the other literally
saw nothing.

In this highly personalized future, we won’t have to look at
anything we don’t want to see or be exposed to ideas or opinions that differ
from our own. Every collection will be organized just for us. Sure, it will be
more efficient (no more wading through crap to find the good stuff) but at what
cost? Sifting through the diversity of opinions (whether we read them or not)
at least gives us some sense that an issue is far from settled. Seeing things
we wouldn’t normally look at (whether we like them or not) allows us to form a
more complete picture of the world we live in. With the explosion of information
in recent years, we need some filtering to keep things manageable but we shouldn’t
forget to keep a balanced information diet in the process.