The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

✍️ Eli Pariser

Tags: eli-pariser , data-science , lang-en

Too much of everything is bad, including personalization

A fascinating read on the bubble effect caused by the internet’s personalization filters. It was almost an all or nothing behavior. We went from the newspaper and TV broadcasting model to the 2010s-2020s internet where each site has a different version for each user. The book discusses the problems that this filter bubble can generate. I enumerate some of them here:
1) when we are not exposed to ideas and things outside our comfort zone, we hardly stimulate our creativity.
2) when we receive content that is 100% aligned with our worldview, we increasingly amplify our confirmation bias.
3) there is a bad reinforcement cycle. Initially, our choices shape the content we receive, but over time the content we receive starts to shape our choices.

Finally the book, despite being from the beginning of the 2010’s touches on an interesting point that is the contradiction that we live on the internet today. In the 90s, when it became widespread, the we had the impression that each single user had their own voice, the power to generate content and that user data and information would be extremely dispersed across the network. Nowadays with personalization filters, there are a few giants that hold almost all the data (Google, Facebook and Amazon) and that dominate the flow of information over the internet.

It is an illuminating read and I recommend.