Personalisation has given us something very different: a public sphere sorted and manipulated by algorithms, fragmented by design, and hostile to dialogue.
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble
The internet has been heralded by many as part of the great democratisation of knowledge. Almost anything you want to know can be found on the net, thus ending the great hegemony of governments and the powerful, and their long history of manipulation and control over what information we can and should be exposed to.
However the situation is not quite as neutral as many might think, as is made clear in Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. This is a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in the future of the internet and knowledge. This is one of my ‘standard’ book reviews, as opposed to my intuitive reviews. .
The Filter Bubble begins with the revelation that in December 2009 Google changed its search engine to make it more ‘personalised’, and it is the phenomenon of personalisation that Pariser rail against in this book. The internet is now constructed such that the most dominant sites tend to feed back to us our own worldview, and our own construct of reality.
It is now true that two people doing the same web search will not necessarily get the same results, because the software "knows" your web history, tailors the results, and feeds back to you the information it 'thinks' you want. In recent times Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, YouTube and many other major internet organisations have followed suit.
The top fifty internet sites install an average of 64 cookies and tracking beacons in your computer. This is how these sites keep ‘track of you.
The result is that you are now being fed a less diversified diet of information when you surf the net. The ‘real’ (at least on the net) is beginning to look like a circle of ever-diminishing size. This is not what the internet was supposed to be! Pariser argues that this runs against the spirit of democracy, which requires that we are exposed to ideas and opinions that run counter to our own. Instead, we are becoming enclosed in “the filter bubble”.
There are 'choices' being made which effect what we "perceive" in the world, and they are not being made by human beings. They are increasingly being made by machines, and those machines are owned and operated by gargantuan internet corporations – such as FaceBook, run by 26 year old Mark Zuckerberg.
