The Filter Bubble

In case anyone wondered about the book entitled “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, written by Eli Pariser, I wanted to share some of the things I noticed from it and thought were pretty interesting. I believe no one else was reviewing it.

·         The Filter Bubble is an interesting book because it is a little eye-opening. It shows the readers how this “filter bubble” is created based on how people use the Internet and Pariser is bringing out that people will become very close-minded towards new things on the Internet.

·         Search Engine blogger Danny Sullivan pored over the items on Google’s blog looking for clues about where Google was headed next. Google made an interesting post on December 4, 2009 that Sullivan noticed. After seeing it, he wrote that it was “the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines.” The headline? “Personalized search for everyone.” Google would use fifty-seven signals to determine where you were logging in from, what browser you were using, etc. to make guesses about who you were and what kind of sites you like.

·         Being Wrong author Kathryn Schulz points out human beings may be a walking bundle of miscalculations, contradictions, and irrationalities, but we’re built that way for a reason: The same cognitive processes that lead us down the road to error and tragedy are the root of our intelligence and our ability to cope with and survive in a changing world. We pay attention to our mental processes when they fail, but that distracts us from the fact that most of the time, our brains do amazingly well. This part comes directly from the book. It is interesting because people do pay more attention to failures more than they do successes. It must be in our nature to do this. I found this to be relevant to the quote that is said in the beginning of the chapter because learning from our mistakes is what is always pointed out, instead of our success. It is still our primary source of progress as people to learn from mistakes.

·         Personalization requires a theory of what makes a person—of what bits of data are most important to determine who someone is—and the major players on the Web have quite different ways of approaching the problem.

·         Seeing how companies try to figure out who “You” are, it reminded me of the NSA and how they were crucified for what they do, but reality is, other companies have been doing it forever. It is how NSA uses the data that infuriated people.

·         “People are actually quite free to talk about [democracy],” Google’s China point man, Kai-Fu Lee, told Thompson in 2006. “I don’t think they care that much. Hey, U.S. democracy, that’s a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that’s a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.” China would say it is alright to talk about such a thing, and yet, they would censor it. The public seems more irrelevant here than anything. The government wishes to control their people’s use of the Web.

·         Different people who have major influence in some of the tools that we commonly use today had to learn how to use the things they do. There are some mistakes to be learned from, but these “new programmers” are shaping our society.

·         Pariser also says that personalization is causing us as people to lose control and privacy in our lives.

·         Pariser says that people should “stop being a mouse.”

These are some things I liked from the Filter Bubble and stood out to me. It is good book to show how society is changing to filter us to what we want, but at the same time, not promoting anything new to us.