“In my experience, the effects of search personalization have been light,” he told me. Independent analysts aren’t seeing a problem, either. Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard, who studies Web censorship, agrees that Google isn’t doing what Pariser says it is. “We actually have algorithms in place designed specifically to limit personalization and promote variety in the results page,” a spokesman emailed me. Google’s response to this, when I asked for comment, was a statement about the need to balance personal relevance and diversity.
Fred, an old college roommate, who works in transportation and says he’s a “left-of-democrat quasi-socialist”.Pat, a former Slate developer, who is liberal and lives in Chicago.Steven, a moderate Democrat and small business owner in Royal Oak, Mich.Jake, who says he’s an independent and works as an insurance consultant in Dubuque, Iowa.Tom, my Republican cousin-in-law who works on Wall Street.Amazingly, this single anecdote is all he offers by way of support for the central claim of his book.ĭoubting the accuracy of Pariser’s assertion, I asked for a few of my Twitter followers and Facebook friends to search four terms that seemed likely to show ideological fragmentation: “John Boehner,” “Barney Frank,”“Ryan Plan,” and “Obamacare.” My five volunteers were: Last year, he says he asked two women friends, who shared liberal political views, to search the term “BP.” One woman saw investment information about the company. Pariser believes that Google’s 57 varieties include, or amount to, ideological frames. Pariser’s qualms echo those expressed by Nicholas Negroponte and Cass Sunstein,who have warned about the Web turning into everybody’s narcissistic “Daily Me” feed. “It creates the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists.” The loss of an informational commons, he frets, is making us closed-minded, less intellectually adventurous, and more vulnerable to propaganda and manipulation. “The filter bubble pushes us in the opposite direction,” he writes.
Pariser sees these tools undermining civic discourse. Thanks to advances in personalization, we are all getting more of what we like and agree with, and less that challenges our beliefs. In his new book, The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser, the former director of the liberal activist group, argues that an informational dystopia is finally arriving. His second, about the Internet fostering mental rabbit warrens, remains an open issue. Wright’s first concern, about digital technology empowering terrorists and fanatics, has clearly been borne out. Eighteen years later, our lingo has evolved, but the worries haven’t changed much.