In 2010, political organizer and web entrepreneur Eli Pariser introduced a new term with his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You.
That an increasingly personalized web would create vastly different views of the world has felt more prescient over time. Though I’ve been familiar with Pariser and the book’s premise, I only now read this as a foundational text. It’s still worth the read, even to know where we were a decade ago.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” Mark Zuckerberg.
- “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us “Marshall McClellan
- Dec 4, 2009: Google announces personalized search: “on December 4, 2009, the era of personalization began”
- “Your computer monitor is a kind of one way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click”
- Filter bubble: we are alone in it, it is invisible and you find choose to enter it
- Steve Rubel called this the attention crash of too much info
- Cass Sunstein’s 2000 book on personalized media
- Lee Siegel: “customers are always right but people aren’t”
- Larry Lessig “code is law”
- negroponte of MIT Media Lab envisioned “Daily Me” in 1994; inspired by expanding TV stations; Jaron Lanier VR founder called “intelligent agents” “wrong and evil” they’d always have double allegiance to the companies that powered them “Bribable agents”
- Microsoft Bob and Apple Newton fared badly as the first agents because they weren’t actually effective (but today’s AI chatbot feels reminiscent)
- Cybernetic is a Plato term
- PARC collaborative filtering
- Sergey and Brin wanted Google to be nonprofit at first; like the story of PageRank as an academic founding but it’s real early brilliance was how important more data was to strengthen their product; by 2004, it added products like gmail to hoard more data and login insights
- In September 2006, Facebook released the news feed to bring you updates (rather you actively seeking those updates)
- By 2007, Zuckerberg bragged “we’re actually producing more news in a single day for 19 million users than any other media outlet has in its entire existence”
- Edge rank solved high volume of Facebook posts by: Affinity to person, Content type and Timeliness
- Metcalfes Law
- Acxiom had data on 9/11 hijackers
- In 2010, “ the era where you had to develop premium content to get premium audiences, in other words, was coming to a close” shift to users from publications
- Walter Lippman: “ incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic, and ultimate disaster must come to any people which is denied an ensured access to the facts”
- In 2010, Pew and CJR reported that 99% of stories linked to in blog posts came from newspapers and broadcast news and nearly half from wapo and NYT alone
- In 1920: Lippman: “the crisis in western democracy is a crisis in journalism”
- Public opinion emerges when palace intrigue isn’t only politics (beyond business and foreign news)
- John Dewey challenged Lippman (though agreed with his Phantom People argument that people can be manipulated) he thought the full argument would give up on democracy and so “to learn to be human “dewey argued “is to develop through the give-and-take of communication and affective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community”
- Jon Pareles disintermediation decade of 2000s
- Esther Dyson: “ the great virtue of the Internet is that it erodes power”
- Media comes from Latin to mean middle layer
- Krishna Bharat of Google news knows too much personalization is a disaster
- Clay Shirkey maybe trust was artificially high by the broadcast era
- Henrique de Castro: maybe the Super Bowl ad will go away when they’re all personalized; but will they?
- Steve Jobs told Macworld in 2004 that “we think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on”
- Paul Klein: tv is in “least objectionable programming”
- Author writes that “‘give the people what they want’ is a brittle and shallow civic philosophy.”
- “ it is hardly possible to over rate the value… Of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action, unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress” John Stuart mil
- Kathryn Schulz’s “Being Wrong” book: our “predictably irrational” qualities per Dan Ariely and what “Stumbling on happiness” Dan Gilbert point out is true but also come from rational place to navigate the world we evolved in; “ our brains tread a tight rope between learning too much from the past, and incorporating too much new information from the present,” which we do amazingly well
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “information wants to be reduced”
- Doris Graber Processing the News: we group news into “schemata “ like we do objects: “ such leveling, and sharpening, involves condensation of all features of a story.” ((Which makes me think about how the right lede is meant to explain the nut graf))
- Or fall into confirmation bias (experts are especially vulnerable)
- Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget: assimilation and accomodation (baby thinks everything is to be sucked on, and then later assimilates to knowing something Can be used to make noise too)
- George Löwenstein: curiosity comes at “information gaps”
- Picasso: “computers are useless. They can only give you answers”
- Adderall society: filter limits our creativity by limiting “solution horizon” and passive consumption
- Arthur Koestler in sct of creation: it is “bisociation” between two kinds of thoughts: “ discovery is an analogy no one has ever seen before”
- “Blind variation, selective retention” for evolution and creativity
- Richard Wiseman, a University of Hertfordshire researcher focused on the social phenomenon of luck, has run experiments that show people who identify as lucky are more open to new experiences, more interested in strangers and are more easily distracted from tasks.
- “Of Sirens and Amish Children”
- Dean Eckles “persuasion profiles”
- “Sentiment analysis” knows good days from bad ones
- In 2010, Eric Schmidt said the next stage of Google is no search at all
- But media shapes us as much as responding; “experimental demonstrations of the not so minimal consequences of television news“ is a 1982 paper by Shanto Iyengar showing this
- Matt Cohler’s local-maximum problem: solve for immediate problems like clicking on an old friends Facebook page and then that gets extrapolated out far broadly)
- Overfitting: over correcting for a rule (the algorithm decided you don’t hire women for tech jobs)
- Netflix started with CineMatch that uses k-NN (k-nearest-neighbor recommendations), by 2006, it knew within a star how we’d rank a movie (for example, people who liked wizard of Oz frequently also liked Silence of the lambs); the $1m Netflix challenge
- Google: what we click; Facebook: what we say
- Induction and Karl popper: falsifiability, look for black swan, evidence of absence
- Tocqueville: “only way to neutralize newspapers is to have more of them
- Gun rights activists idealize Alfred Flatow, who legally registered his gun with the Weimar Republic but then Nazis found him with those records
- George Gerbner’s research on Starsky and Hutch: TV watching over three hours a day makes you believe in a meaner world; “who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior” he said
- Dean Eckes says we could face a friendly works syndrome where we ignore and filter problems
- Alex Bohm On Dialogues: communicate means to make common
- John Dewey said a challenge with democracy is finding “the means by which a scattered, mobile, and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and recognize its interests”
- “We are as gods “ Stewart Brand famously wrote in his Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, “and we might as well get good at it”
- Fred Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture and Steve Levy’s Hackers each set Silicon Valley’s culture
- Of Facebook Google and a wave of tech startups “They’re social revolutionaries when it suits them in neutral, a moral businessman when it doesn’t.”
- “Do artifacts have politics” 1980 Rolling Stone story on Robert Moses who intentionally built low bridges to keep NYC busses of black kids coming from visiting Jones beach; author asks if that’s different than Facebook choosing the Like button over the “Important” button
- “Advertar “
- Kranzberg first law: “technology is neither good or bad nor is it neutral”
- “If I only get the news from my code and my friends, the easiest way to get my attention might be friends who are code”
- Reality Hunger by David shields; truth obese is future of art
- Gibson: The future is here just not evenly distributed
- AFM: advertiser funded media
- Nabokov said reality Is “one of the few words that mean nothing without quotes”
- David Wright “ambient intelligence”
- Pattern Language from 1975 by Christopher Alexander is important and influential: heterogenous city and city of ghettoes needs an in between, mosaic of subcultures (author notes personalization could lead to city of ghettoes; mass scale leads to heterogenous ; we need a mix)
- Danah Boyd: “psychological equivalent of obesity” with data overload
- Phillip Fosie post argument for the ombudsman role
- Cass Sunstein Republic.com new fairness doctrine (though he later abandoned the idea)
- 1973 Nixon-era Dept of housing education fair information practices
