Pariser是社会机构MoveOn.org的负责人，也是一本新书《过滤器泡沫：互联网把什么藏起来了》（The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From Yo）的作者。在《纽约时报》最近的一篇文章中，他表达了对个性化服务，谷歌和微软必应在其服务中添加各种过滤器，以及《纽约时报》和《华盛顿邮报》这样的发布商使用推荐工具（它们会根据读者以前的浏览记录推荐他们可能会喜欢的故事）的担心。
Eli Pariser is the board president and former executive director of MoveOn.org, which at five million members is one of the largest citizens' organizations in American politics. During his time leading MoveOn, he sent 937,510,800 e-mails to members in his name. He has written op-eds for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and has appeared on The Colbert Report, Good Morning America, Fresh Air, and World News Tonight.
Author Q&A with Eli Pariser
Q: What is a “Filter Bubble”?
A: We’re used to thinking of the Internet like an enormous library, with services like Google providing a universal map. But that’s no longer really the case. Sites from Google and Facebook to Yahoo News and the New York Times are now increasingly personalized – based on your web history, they filter information to show you the stuff they think you want to see. That can be very different from what everyone else sees – or from what we need to see.
Your filter bubble is this unique, personal universe of information created just for you by this array of personalizing filters. It’s invisible and it’s becoming more and more difficult to escape.
Q: I like the idea that websites might show me information relevant to my interests—it can be overwhelming how much information is available I already only watch TV shows and listen to radio programs that are known to have my same political leaning. What’s so bad about this?
A: It’s true: We’ve always selected information sources that accord with our own views. But one of the creepy things about the filter bubble is that we’re not really doing the selecting. When you turn on Fox News or MSNBC, you have a sense of what their editorial sensibility is: Fox isn’t going to show many stories that portray Obama in a good light, and MSNBC isn’t going to the ones that portray him badly. Personalized filters are a different story: You don’t know who they think you are or on what basis they’re showing you what they’re showing. And as a result, you don’t really have any sense of what’s getting edited out – or, in fact, that things are being edited out at all.
Q: How does money fit into this picture?
A: The rush to build the filter bubble is absolutely driven by commercial interests. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that if you want to have lots of people use your website, you need to provide them with personally relevant information, and if you want to make the most money on ads, you need to provide them with relevant ads. This has triggered a personal information gold rush, in which the major companies – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the like – are competing to create the most comprehensive portrait of each of us to drive personalized products. There’s also a whole “behavior market” opening up in which every action you take online – every mouse click, every form entry – can be sold as a commodity.
Q: What is the Internet hiding from me?
A: As Google engineer Jonathan McPhie explained to me, it’s different for every person – and in fact, even Google doesn’t totally know how it plays out on an individual level. At an aggregate level, they can see that people are clicking more. But they can’t predict how each individual’s information environment is altered.
In general, the things that are most likely to get edited out are the things you’re least likely to click on. Sometimes, this can be a real service – if you never read articles about sports, why should a newspaper put a football story on your front page? But apply the same logic to, say, stories about foreign policy, and a problem starts to emerge. Some things, like homelessness or genocide, aren’t highly clickable but are highly important.
Q: Which companies or Websites are personalizing like this?
A: In one form or another, nearly every major website on the Internet is flirting with personalization. But the one that surprises people most is Google. If you and I Google the same thing at the same time, we may get very different results. Google tracks hundreds of “signals” about each of us – what kind of computer we’re on, what we’ve searched for in the past, even how long it takes us to decide what to click on – and uses it to customize our results. When the result is that our favorite pizza parlor shows up first when we Google pizza, it’s useful. But when the result is that we only see the information that is aligned with our religious or social or political beliefs, it’s difficult to maintain perspective.
Q: Are any sites being transparent about their personalization?
A: Some sites do better than others. Amazon, for example, is often quite transparent about the personalization it does: “We’re showing you Brave New World because you bought 1984.” But it’s one thing to personalize products and another to personalize whole information flows, like Google and Facebook are doing. And very few users of those services are even marginally aware that this kind of filtering is at work.
Q: Does this issue of personalization impact my privacy or jeopardize my identity at all?
A: Research psychologists have known for a while that the media you consume shapes your identity. So when the media you consume is also shaped by your identity, you can slip into a weird feedback loop. A lot of people see a simple version of this on Facebook: You idly click on an old classmate, Facebook reads that as a friendship, and pretty soon you’re seeing every one of John or Sue’s posts.
Gone awry, personalization can create compulsive media – media targeted to appeal to your personal psychological weak spots. You can find yourself eating the equivalent of information junk food instead of having a more balanced information diet.
Q: You make it clear that while most Websites’ user agreements say they won’t share our personal information, they also maintain the right to change the rules at any time. Do you foresee sites changing those rules to profit from our online personas?
A: They already have. Facebook, for example, is notorious for its bait-and-switch tactics when it comes to privacy. For a long time, what you “Liked” on Facebook was private, and the site promised to keep it that way. Then, overnight, they made that information public to the world, in order to make it easier for their advertisers to target specific subgroups.
There’s an irony in the fact that while Rolex needs to get Tom Cruise’s permission to put his face on a billboard, it doesn’t need to get my permission to advertise my endorsement to my friends on Facebook. We need laws that give people more rights in their personal data.
Q: Is there any way to avoid this personalization? What if I’m not logged into a site?
A: Even if you’re not logged into Google, for example, an engineer told me there are 57 signals that the site uses to figure out who you are: whether you’re on a Mac or PC or iPad, where you’re located when you’re Googling, etc. And in the near future, it’ll be possible to “fingerprint” unique devices, so that sites can tell which individual computer you’re using. That’s why erasing your browser cookies is at best a partial solution—it only partially limits the information available to personalizers.
What we really need is for the companies that power the filter bubble to take responsibility for the immense power they now have – the power to determine what we see and don’t see, what we know and don’t know. We need them to make sure we continue to have access to public discourse and a view of the common good. A world based solely on things we “Like” is a very incomplete world.
I’m optimistic that they can. It’s worth remembering that newspapers weren’t always informed by a sense of journalistic ethics. They existed for centuries without it. It was only when critics like Walter Lippman began to point out how important they were that the newspapers began to change. And while journalistic ethics aren’t perfect, because of them we have been better informed over the last century. We need algorithmic ethics to guide us through the next.
Q: What are the business leaders at Google and Facebook and Yahoo saying about their responsibilities?
A: To be honest, they’re frustratingly coy. They tend to frame the trend in the passive tense: Google’s Eric Schmidt recently said “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them,” rather than “Google is making it very hard…” Mark Zuckerberg perfectly summed up the tension in personalization when he said “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” But he refuses to engage with what that means at a societal level – especially for the people in Africa.
Q: Your background is as a political organizer for the liberal Website MoveOn.org. How does that experience inform your book?
A: I’ve always believed the Internet could connect us all together and help create a better, more democratic world. That’s what excited me about MoveOn – here we were, connecting people directly with each other and with political leaders to create change.
But that more democratic society has yet to emerge, and I think it’s partly because while the Internet is very good at helping groups of people with like interests band together (like MoveOn), it’s not so hot at introducing people to different people and ideas. Democracy requires discourse and personalization is making that more and more elusive.
And that worries me, because we really need the Internet to live up to that connective promise. We need it to help us solve global problems like climate change, terrorism, or natural resource management which by their nature require massive coordination, and great wisdom and ingenuity. These problems can’t be solved by a person or two – they require whole societies to participate. And that just won’t happen if we’re all isolated in a web of one.
Pariser是社会机构MoveOn.org的负责人，也是一本新书《过滤器泡沫：互联网把什么藏起来了》（The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From Yo）的作者。在《纽约时报》最近的一篇文章中，他表达了对个性化服务，谷歌和微软必应在其服务中添加各种过滤器，以及《纽约时报》和《华盛顿邮报》这样的发布商使用推荐工具（它们会根据读者以前的浏览记录推荐他们可能会喜欢的故事）的担心。
过去你也许听到过类似的故事：有可能源自保守派博主格伦•雷诺德（GlennReynolds）——博客是摧毁“把关人”的技术，抑或源自进步派博主马科斯•莫里萨斯(Markos Moulitsas)——他写了一本名为《冲破牢笼》（Crashing the Gate）的著作。这是对这种媒介的革命性力量的美好愿望，作为早期在线政治的践行者，我们就是这样经营MoveOn.org的。但是，我越来越认为我们最终都错了，而且还可能错得比较危险；在我们周围，还存在一群新的“把关人”，并且这一次执行的不是人，而是代码。
(CNN) -- With little notice or fanfare, the digital world is fundamentally changing. What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone -- where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you're a dog -- is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data.
According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top 50 Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like "depression" on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants.
The new Internet doesn't just know you're a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.
新兴的互联网应用不仅仅知道你是一只狗，而且知道你的品种，并且还打算将一碗粗磨粉狗粮卖给你。
The race to know as much as possible about you has become the central battle of the era for Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. As Chris Palmer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained to me, "You're getting a free service, and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that pretty directly into money."
While Gmail and Facebook may be helpful, free tools, they are also extremely effective and voracious extraction engines into which we pour the most intimate details of our lives.
As a business strategy, the Internet giants' formula is simple: The more personally relevant their information offerings are, the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy the products they're offering.
And the formula works. Amazon sells billions of dollars worth of merchandise by predicting what each customer is interested in and putting it in the front of the virtual store.
Up to 60% of Netflix's rentals come from the personalized guesses it can make about each customer's movie preferences -- and at this point, Netflix can predict how much you'll like a given movie within about half a star. Personalization is a core strategy for the top five sites on the Internet -- Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft Live -- as well as countless others.
It would be one thing if all this customization were just about targeted advertising. But personalization isn't just shaping what we buy. For a quickly rising percentage of us, personalized news feeds like Facebook are becoming a primary news source. Thirty-six percent of Americans under 30 get their news through social networking sites.
And personalization is shaping how information flows far beyond Facebook, as websites from Yahoo News to the New York Times-funded startup News.me cater their headlines to our particular interests and desires. It's influencing what videos we watch on YouTube and a dozen smaller competitors, and what blog posts we see.
It's affecting whose e-mails we get, which potential mates we run into on OK Cupid, and which restaurants are recommended to us on Yelp -- which means that personalization could easily have a hand not only in who goes on a date with whom, but in where they go and what they talk about. The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.
The basic code at the heart of the new Internet is pretty simple. The new generation of Internet filters looks at the things you seem to like -- the actual things you've done, or the things people similar to you like -- and tries to extrapolate. Together, these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us -- what I've come to call a filter bubble -- which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information.
Of course, to some extent we've always consumed media that appealed to our interests and avocations and ignored much of the rest. But the filter bubble introduces three dynamics we've never dealt with before:
First, you're alone in it. A cable channel that caters to a narrow interest (say, golf) has other viewers, with whom you share a frame of reference. But you're the only person in your bubble. In an age when shared information is the bedrock of shared experience, the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart.
Second, the filter bubble is invisible. Most viewers of conservative or liberal news sources know when they're going to a station curated to serve a particular political viewpoint. But Google's agenda is opaque. Google doesn't tell you who it thinks you are, or why it's showing you the results you're seeing. You don't know if its assumptions about you are right or wrong -- and you might not even know it's making assumptions about you in the first place.
Finally, you don't choose to enter the bubble. When you turn on Fox News or read The Nation, you're making a decision about what kind of filter to use to make sense of the world. It's an active process, and just as you would if you put on tinted glasses, you can guess how the editors' leaning shapes your perception. You don't make the same kind of choice with personalized filters. They come to you -- and because they drive up profits for the websites that use them, they'll become harder and harder to avoid.
The consequences of living in a bubble are becoming clear. Left to their own devices, personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar, and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.
In the filter bubble, there's less room for the chance encounters that bring insight and learning. Creativity is often sparked by the collision of ideas from different disciplines and cultures. Combine an understanding of cooking and physics, and you get the nonstick pan and the induction stovetop. But if Amazon thinks I'm interested in cookbooks, it's not very likely to show me books about metallurgy. It's not just serendipity that's at risk.
By definition, a world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there's nothing to learn. If personalization is too acute, it could prevent us from coming into contact with the mind-blowing, preconception-shattering experiences and ideas that change how we think about the world and ourselves.
It's not too late to make sure that personalization avoids these traps. But to shift its course, we need more people to become educated about how and why the Web is being edited for them, and we need the companies doing this filtering to show us not just what we'll click most, but what we need to know. Otherwise, we could each find ourselves trapped in a bubble for one.
最近互联网正因其固有的“民主情结”成为一个热门话题，尤其是在所谓的“阿拉伯之春”中，它同时为争斗的双方提供了助力。在1月份出版的《网络错觉》（The Net Delusion）一书中，作者尤金·莫罗佐夫（Evgeny Morozov）批判了将争取解放和获取权力寄望于网络的行为，他将这些称做“虚拟乌托邦”，他指出网络很容易被反过来用作镇压工具。与莫罗佐夫先生激烈的“破除网络迷信”主张相反，帕里瑟先生的论点很值得关注，他是从一个开放进步的角度批评互联网的。
