Here’s a scary thought — the internet is a system of control that is increasingly designed to present a myopic view of the world, using your personal data against you to ensure you get exactly what you want, fulfill all your desires and interests in exchange for ensuring you never encounter any material that is challenging or presents a counter narrative to your preferences.
Currently, the range of preferences seems limitless, but inevitably myopia will result in tunnel vision and the fear is that rather than being a force to unite people, the internet will be an alienating force, dividing people, quantifying them into digital groupings and tribes who only interact with themselves and the information they wish to consume. You may already be trapped in a ‘filter bubble’ on Google or Facebook without knowing it, or perhaps knowing it and loving it, but left woefully devoid of perspective. To quote Mark Zuckerberg here: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa”.
Sounds ridiculous? Let me play the devil’s advocate and take a look at the philosophy that drives The Express Tribune’s website: social friendly, give the consumers what they want, let them have a say in what is important. We have a most popular, most commented and most emailed box, telling others what everyone is interested in. Our blog site is designed so that the top five blogs displayed are automatically chosen based on algorithms around the number of comments on a post. The third party widget at the bottom of each blog that offers other stories “you might like” is built to display related blogs, but its algorithms also aim to show the blogs that get the most clicks. Increasingly, you will see the same blogs appearing in this widget again and again and again. It’s all automated. The editorial selection is, therefore, made by clicks and algorithms, not editors. I freely admit that a fair amount of editorial decision-making on the website is based on real time analytics data that indicates what trends are catching the audience’s attention.
How about taking a look at Google, which is increasingly attempting to make search tailor-made to your user profile. To quote an anecdote by political and internet activist Eli Pariser from his TED talk: “I asked a bunch of friends to Google ‘Egypt’ and to send me screen shots of what they got … when you do read the links, it's really quite remarkable. Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott's results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That's how different these results are becoming”.
Being a fierce internet advocate of the idealistic ‘the internet can do no wrong’ bent, I find it hard to accept that the online space will become a place where we only see what we want to see, not what we need to see; a world where freedom is an illusion maintained by new centres of control. In the battle over the draconian Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act, I was firmly on the side of Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, Reddit et al. in believing the legislation was aimed at systematically curbing freedom of the internet, but I had to pause for a second when I read the Recording Industry Association of America’s response to the online onslaught that effectively killed the legislation: "It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information, intentionally skew the facts to incite their users and arm them with misinformation … it’s very difficult to counter the misinformation when the disseminators also own the platform”.
So if online companies — news or otherwise — have political will and are ready to act on it, using it to sway public opinion in their favour, is this the shape of things to come? Will assumed oases like the The Express Tribune website provoke and challenge, or feed into the illusion of a Pakistan based on the profiles of the users visiting the site. It’s definitely not such a black and white online world right now, but it is worth pondering what will happen when we move from organic, human gatekeepers of information to digital algorithms — The Matrix, anyone?
Published in The Express Tribune, April 20th, 2012.
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@Antebellum
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” -George Orwell (1984)
You mean those who control Pakistan Study Text Books control everything else?
Apt quote though.
Thought-provoking!! ........... just marvelous! .............. let the mind conquer the machine! ............ let the common wisdom prevail over the elitist theory of control, command and conquer!
Nice one - good point acctualy :)
The Matrix - Like a virtual reality for us all
It is judicious to be alert about filtering, but silly to become paranoid. There is no big brother doing something somewhere. This is a very very old bogeyman of the US (starting from the days when FBI came into being) which never really materialized. In the present day, the accuracy of search results delivers more clicks for the website, so the filtering techniques are geared towards that. Its a pendulum which will swing back with time. Eventually the market opportunity will lie in diversifying results, when the algorithms will be geared towards that objective. I will not believe for a second that any or all algorithms are being put in place to orient/disorient populations from the reality. This is a market opportunity, and it is being utilized. As for ET, in my case I always look for articles away from the most commented, most viewed and so on. News is valuable when it is not well known yet. If you cannot fathom that, you are on ET simply for entertainment.
True, but the issue could become really serious and the bubble may even actually burst one day. The websites may tend to give the user what he wants, but the want itself may not be what the user actually want, as the want is accomplished by mere click of a button. This is actually where the devil lye. Most of the time, the user would click intuitively or inadvertently to begin with. Since, the website keep delivering him the contents he clicks unmindful of what he really wants, the contents so delivered will slowly dictate what the reader actually wants. This tactical social engineering power of the content provider would shape the future world. The author rightly said, we are already trapped by the "filter bubble", but I would further caution. our minds too are already shaped by it. It is frightening indeed!
The internet is becoming a more personalized experience for users, because literate users and others have unique needs, uses and they also vary by existing location, users are heterogonous and will have different needs. For example if I google plumbers on google, i would want listing for plumbers not only in Pakistan but those close to my real time location, browsing history and location services are making the online experience more complete, let's not forget most search results on google are still organic net search results.
The Matrix? Btw fancy way of advocating media bias... Gotta give you that one...
Jahanzeb - Simply brilliant. I have wondered about this issue for a while now. The issue we are beginning to see with information on the web is that it is caught in the midst of multiple business models. And the good part and bad part of all business models is that they adjust to the contours of targeted customer segment over time, which essentially prevents an information consumer from stepping out of his / her comfort zone and therefore perpetuates a person's biases albeit in a sophisticated manner.