Eli Pariser: Beware Online 'Filter Bubbles'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/14/internet-censorship_n_1147078.html?1323877374
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Watch author Eli Pariser discuss secret censorship on the Internet,
and read is accompanying blog post below following up on his talk.
People love sharing lists -- the list is one of the formats that fare
well in a Filter Bubble world. So here's a list of five of the most
interesting ideas I've come across since I gave my presentation at TED
and published The Filter Bubble: What The Internet is Hiding from You.
1. Who owns the right to infer things about you? According to Marissa
Meyer at Google, some credit card companies can now use your
purchasing decisions to predict whether you're going to get a divorce
with 95% accuracy -- two years out. This raises some interesting
ethical questions: do companies have an obligation to reveal to us the
inferences they make about us? Should you be able to gain access to
the fact that your credit card company is betting against your
relationship? What about in the health sphere -- if Acxiom infers that
you're at high risk of suicide, based on your purchases, does it have
an obligation to let you or someone else know? I haven't found any
satisfying answers to these questions -- but we ought to start
thinking about them more seriously.
2. Transparency's moving in the wrong direction. Imagine a company
where every communication is transparently available to every
employee. While corruption at the top is harder, overall, the effect
would be to empower the bigwigs -- because the kind of private
coordination that people use to organize and aggregate power would be
impossible. Speak ill of the boss, and you get laid off -- that's how
power works.
In an ideal world, I'd argue, transparency would vary with power --
the more powerful you are, the brighter the spotlight on your
activities. But what we're seeing now is the opposite: the details of
most folks' lives have never been more available to more corporate,
governmental or even private citizens. But thanks to the Citizens
United Supreme Court decision, the wealthy and powerful are able to
cloak their political activities, and there are a variety of services
available to scrub private information from the web for a price. We
have transparency for the 99%, but not the 1%.
3. Robot journalism. Mostly, I've been focused on the impact of
code-based editors on how we consume news. But it's worth noting that
drone-like mini-robots are beginning to do some real news gathering as
well. Check out this footage from a tiny helicopter piloted by folks
at The Daily, or this stunning video from a protest in Poland. It
won't be long before every news bureau -- and more than a few amateurs
-- are using these things to push past military lines, look in
celebrities' windows and generally change all of our assumptions about
how video news is gathered -- for better or worse.
4. The difference between curiosity and value. Recently, The
Huffington Post tweeted about an article with the headline to the
effect of "Guess Which Celebrity Got Into a Horrible Accident Today?"
I'll cop to clicking -- HuffPost did an excellent job piquing my
interest. But I couldn't tell you which celebrity it was, because I've
forgotten -- there was very little lasting value in that article.
These kinds of curiosity-driven clicks are one of the primary signals
that sites use to personalize content. But unless they're paired with
something that measures the amount of value we take away from a media
experience, they're only so useful. And they lead toward a world with
curiosity-baiting headlines and no payoff.
What if, in addition to click signals, personalizing websites also
sent folks a list of the 50 articles they'd recently visited and asked
them to mark the three that gave them some lasting value? A
personalized feed that took into consideration not just what we click
on but what we take away from it could help us build information diets
that are both delicious and substantive.
5. Seven Things Algorithms Do That Humans Don't. As we move toward an
algorithmically-edited world, there are still a bunch of things that
human editors do better. This Harvard Business Review piece has a bit
more detail, but here's the short list: Anticipating what people will
be interested in, taking risks in recommendations, giving folks a
sense of the whole picture, pairing stories together in a way that
adds value, highlighting stories of social importance, valuing content
that blows folks' minds and building the kind of trust that leads
audiences to topics beyond their core zone of interest.
Oh, and one more thing: As I've been discussing The Filter Bubble, the
aspect of the problem I've become most focused on is the Information
Junk Food problem. In many ways, the important question isn't just
whether you see a diverse set of political viewpoints, but whether
most people see anything from the political or civic realm at all. I'm
working on a new media project aimed at getting ideas that matter in
front of millions of people -- if that sounds like fun to you, maybe
you should come work with us.