Clicking around in circles

In The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser argues that excessive personalisation of the internet is beginning to keep us in the familiar and comfortable, closing off discovery, new information, and alternative perspectives

In 2006, at an event called Google Press Day, CEO Eric Schmidt laid out Google's five-year plan. One day, he said, Google would be able to answer questions such as "Which college should I go to?" He added, "It will be some years before we can at least partially answer those questions. But the eventual outcome is... that Google can answer a more hypothetical question." What the Google CEO was talking about, and the subject of a new book, The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You, by Eli Pariser, is 'internet personalisation'. Our online experience is changing, with websites we visit becoming tailored to suit us, our tastes and our interests. As a result, each of us is increasingly living in our own customised information universe, what Pariser calls a 'filter bubble'. It's in the books Amazon recommends to you, in the order of the news feed Facebook shows you, and even the search results Google returns. This might seem to be a pretty useful turn of events; it is after all virtually impossible to sift through all that the internet has to offer, so a little help couldn't hurt. But personalisation means that companies now have inordinate amounts of information about you. Pariser writes, "What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone — where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you're a dog — is now a tool for soliciting and analysing our personal data... Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots... The new Internet doesn't just know you're a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble." Pariser's bigger worry is that that the excessive personalisation will keep us in the familiar and comfortable, eventually closing off discovery and new information. He says, "Politically, I lean to the left, but I like to hear what conservatives are thinking... But their links never turned up in my Top News Feed. Facebook was apparently doing the math and noticing that I was still clicking my progressive friends' links more than my conservative friends'...The personalised environment is very good at answering the questions we have but not at suggesting questions that are out of our sight altogether." The bubble can affect your choices, without you even knowing. LinkedIn, by comparing your resume with that of others in the same field, can forecast where you could be in five years. Sure, it might be useful to have an idea of your career trajectory. But, Pariser says, "imagine if LinkedIn provided that data to corporate clients to help them weed out people who are forecast to be losers. Because that could happen entirely without your knowledge... you'd never get the chance to argue, to prove the prediction wrong..." And all of this is even more alarming, as he points out, because, one, you're alone in your bubble, two, the filters are invisible, and, three, you didn't choose to enter it. And if things progress this way, there could be a day, says Pariser, when there are signals and sensors tracking everything you do, when the data is computed in a matter of seconds, and this information is available dirt-cheap (Picasa, Google's photo-management tool is already able to do basic face recognition). Personalisation could become a merging of the real and the virtual, and even if you turn off your computer, you may never truly leave the filter bubble. Pariser deals with several complex concepts in the book, but breaks them down into clear and concise thoughts. He writes with conviction and has infused the book with engaging anecdotes. However, his arguments falter a bit when he talks about solutions — transparency from companies, control by the government and greater vigilance from people — and how to balance personalisation with randomness, or how to counter relevant links with useless information. But he admits that it's not too late to change the course of things. The Filter Bubble addresses some very important issues about the internet and the growing power of the invisible intermediaries. While many of us are aware of the personalisation to some degree, such as recommendations of books or movies, most of us probably don't know that it extends to the news items we see or the choices we have. It is an education for those of us in our bubbles — and we all are — to pay attention to how we use the internet and what we can do about it.