The dangers of the internet

The dangers of the internet

Invisible sieve

Hidden, specially for you

Jun 30th 2011 /The Economist

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. By Eli Pariser. Penguin Press; 294 pages; $25.95. Viking; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ELI PARISER is worried. Why? Call a friend in another city or a foreign country, and ask them to Google something at the same time as you. The results will be different, because Google takes your location, your past searches and many other factors into account when you type in a query. In other words, it personalises the results. As Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, once put it, “the ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean, and give back exactly what you want.” Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, muses that someday it might be possible for people to ask Google which college they should apply for, or which book to read next.

This is only one example of internet personalisation. Mr Pariser, an internet activist best known as a leading light at MoveOn.org, a progressive online campaign group, sees this as a dangerous development. Netflix, Amazon and Pandora can predict with astonishing accuracy whether you will enjoy a particular film, book or album, and make appropriate recommendations. Facebook shows you updates from the friends you interact with the most, filtering out people with whom you have less in common. “My sense of unease crystallised when I noticed that my conservative friends had disappeared from my Facebook page,” Mr Pariser writes. The result is a “filter bubble”, which he defines as “a unique universe of information for each of us”, meaning that we are less likely to encounter information online that challenges our existing views or sparks serendipitous connections. “A world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn,” Mr Pariser declares. He calls this “invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas”.

It all sounds scary. Mr Pariser concedes that there is a good reason for all this personalisation and filtering. When so much information is available, it makes sense for websites you visit to filter it using information about you, your interests and your friends. Essentially, you trade personal information in return for more useful results. But this neuters the internet’s potential to break down social barriers between people or groups who might otherwise not connect with each other. “We’re getting a lot of bonding but very little bridging,” Mr Pariser worries. Worse, as the internet becomes an increasingly important source of information (it is now second only to television as a source of news in America, and is already the main source of news for the under-30s) people will be invisibly steered away from important issues that are unpleasant or complex, such as homelessness or foreign policy. Mr Pariser is concerned, in short, that because of personalisation, the internet is failing to live up to its “transformative promise”.

The question of whether the internet is inherently pro-democratic has become a hot topic lately, particularly in the light of the Arab spring, which has provided ammunition for those on both sides of the argument. In “The Net Delusion”, which came out in January, Evgeny Morozov attacked what he called the “cyber-Utopian” view of the merits of the internet as a force for liberation and empowerment, pointing out that it can just as easily be used as a tool of repression. Mr Pariser’s thesis is noteworthy because in contrast with Mr Morozov’s gleeful iconoclasm, he is critiquing the internet from an openly progressive starting-point.

Mr Pariser’s book provides a survey of the internet’s evolution towards personalisation, examines how presenting information alters the way in which it is perceived and concludes with prescriptions for bursting the filter bubble that surrounds each user. Some of the author’s suggestions make sense: there is unquestionably a case for internet firms to give users more control over the personal information being held about them. You can also turn off personalisation in many cases. And if you are still worried about filter bubbles, you can favour sites that are transparent about the ways in which they filter and present information (though that rules out Facebook and Google, Mr Pariser’s main villains, both of which regard their filtering algorithms as trade secrets).

Some of Mr Pariser’s other ideas, however, are less convincing. He proposes that big internet companies appoint independent ombudsmen, like those at newspapers. He advocates systems to promote more serendipity (by which he seems to mean randomness)—Amazon could recommend books outside your usual genres, for example, just in case you like them. Another suggestion is that filtering algorithms could be complemented by human editors who show you worthy things you ought to see, as well as things the algorithms calculate you will want to see. That will simply open internet firms, like news providers, to accusations of bias. Strangest of all, Mr Pariser calls for an “active promotion of public issues and cultivation of citizenship” by big internet firms. Whether or not you agree with Mr Pariser’s prescriptions, however, there is no doubt that his book highlights an important and easily overlooked aspect of the internet’s evolution that affects everyone who uses it.