Personalization and the New Net

The more personalized the Internet becomes, the more we may miss out on important information.

I’m delighted to be joining the Roosevelt Institute team — it’s a true honor to work alongside intellectual giants like Joseph Stiglitz and Elizabeth Warren. My background is in online organizing — I spent the last nine years at MoveOn.org, where I have been thinking about the way the Internet facilitates communication in between campaigns and email blasts.

In his famous Four Freedoms speech, Franklin Roosevelt made clear that freedom of speech and expression was an essential human freedom. Protecting that freedom in the connected world we now live in is going to be the focus of my work here at Roosevelt. And specifically, I’m going to look at the way automatic personalization is monumentally changing how we consume information and communicate as a society.

Here’s an example of the phenomenon I’m thinking about at work:

This spring, I asked two friends to search for the term “BP.” They’re pretty similar — educated white left-leaning women who live in the Northeast. But the results they saw were quite different. One of my friends saw investment information about BP. The other saw news. For one, the first page of results contained links about the oil spill; for the other, nothing about it. Even the number of results returned by Google differed — about 180 million results for one friend, and 139 million for the other. If the results were that different for my two similar friends, imagine how different they would be for, say, my friends and an elderly Republican in Texas.

You can get a sense of my concerns in this short talk I gave at the Personal Democracy Forum.

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues — the rising population in prison, for example, or homelessness — are less likely to come to our attention at all. The experience of marginalized groups will recede further into invisibility for those outside them. When people are not exposed to countervailing evidence, scares based on misinformation, like a link between autism and vaccination, are more likely to spread. Bullish investment analysts Googling for data are more likely to come across positive reports and less likely to make good bets.

In a personalized world, there’s less room for chance encounters. Creativity is driven by association; it’s the spark created by the collision of ideas from different disciplines and cultures. Combine an understanding of cooking and physics, and you get the non-stick pan and the induction stove top. If Amazon thinks I’m interested in cookbooks, it’s not very likely to show me books about metallurgy.

Even the process of learning itself may be at risk. We learn when we’re confronted with what researchers call “meaning threat,” an incident or event that doesn’t fit into our schemas for the world. But a meaning threat is precisely what filters will tend to block out.

The creators of the Internet envisioned something bigger and more important than a global system for sharing pictures of pets. They hoped their creation would bring about a new era of synthesis, connection, and democracy — that it would provide a platform for tackling those problems. The manifesto that helped launch the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the early ’90s championed a “civilization of Mind in cyberspace” — a kind of world-wide meta-brain. But personalized filters sever the synapses in that brain. Without knowing it, we may be giving ourselves a kind of global lobotomy instead.

I look forward to exploring this topic more — and if you have thoughts about my talk, please do comment below. I’m glad to start the conversation, and delighted to be joining the Roosevelt Institute.

Eli Pariser was the Executive Director of MoveOn.org. He joins the Roosevelt Institute as a Senior Fellow.