Barely eight months ago, I was on Facebook wanting to connect with an old friend that I was already a friend with on Facebook. I never saw her status updates, or profile picture changes on my news feed. I searched for her, wrote on her wall and then left. Later that day when I checked Facebook again, I saw her latest status update in my feed. Coincidence, I thought. Until I noticed it would happen every time that I would reach out to an old friend.
This is the Filter Bubble at it’s finest, but, also its worst. While I was seeing more content that I wanted to see the majority of the time, I was never seeing the content that I want to see some of the time. The Filter Bubble is a way to describe websites efforts to analyze the signals you give off when on the web so that they can give you more of what you are (or may be) interested in and less (or in my case, none) of what you don’t want.
I bought a new pair of shoes roughly four months ago. Naturally, before my purchase, I visited a handful of websites, Zappos being one of the more prominent ones. After bookmarking a few pages to return to later, I carried on with the rest of my work. However, though I wasn’t focused on shoes anymore, I saw ads for the pairs of shoes I was interested in and other ones similar to them at every page I went to. Pandora, NYT, blogs – anywhere I went, the shoes followed. I was infiltrated and while I would like to think that I bought the shoes that showed most commonly on the ads because I simply liked them and cut the other options, I’m not so sure I can say that.
These two examples make me feel victimized by “behavioral retargeting” – persistent personalized advertising. Outside of the simply profound marketing tactic, the efforts to personalize everything you see on the web carries many significant problems. Two in particular truly stick out to me.
Objectivity
A serious problem is that we are becoming less and less objective. And to think, it used to be a goal of journalists to be objective. Now, “for and against” articles have become harder to write because we are never exposed to views that oppose our actions. Nicholas Negroponte puts it perfectly, “on one end of the spectrum is sycophantic personalization – ‘you’re so great and wonderful, and I’m going to tell you exactly what you want to hear.’ On the other end is the parental approach: ‘I’m going to tell you this whether you want to hear this or not, because you need to know.” While the efforts to produce both content are there, the market is not. And that’s a serious problem.
Creativity
Pariser notes that “by definition, ingenuity comes form the juxtaposition of ideas that are far apart.” I agree with every note of Pariser’s that the Filter Bubble is crumbling creativity. Often times, the most creative content is produced in opposition to someone else’s idea, but if an artist never sees an opposing idea, the creative process is much more difficult to kick start. In essence, while the Filter Bubble can connect you with ideas to build on in a creative sense, it prevents you from reaching your fullest creative potential.
Personally
Do I believe that I live in a Filter Bubble? Yes, I have to. However, the real question lies in whether the Filter Bubble still exists if you are aware of it, observe the changes, stretch for objectivity in opposition to the specialization efforts of the web, and overall, attempt to control your Filter Bubble. It seems to me that Pariser says the Filter Bubble owns us, whereas, I would argue that. The world (and web!) may change, but we always have the power to leverage whatever it is we are faced with.
