Bursting the content filter bubble?
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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This week at the RSA, an organisation dedicated to finding innovative and practical solutions to all sorts of social challenges, presents a talk from Eli Pariser, founder of Avaaz.org, on personalisation in the online world.

Is personalisation such a bad thing online and why can it be bad for us as consumers but also for the communities and world we live in?

Personalisation is a key trend in content delivery and acquisition for most of us.  As a VIP product reviewer it is also one of the key areas I look out for in a product.  Many users want to create their own unique content collecting and sharing platforms, and why not?  The biggest problem we have is in fact information overload so staying focused on what you think you need could be real problem solver.

As we visit websites or use products the questions we are asked, and the content collected from us, allows our visits to be shaped in ways that may be limiting our intellectual development by excluding certain content.  You will have experienced this in many ways already.  In the products I review many search results features include "see more like this" or "you may like to connect to this person".  These are handy features but they can be dangerous too.

I have been a researcher for many years now – I find information, synthesise and in many cases present trends and gaps in evidence in order for people to make decisions.  I am an experienced user of online products and general web searching but, in recent years, I have found that personalisation techniques may be hindering my ability to think beyond the microsphere in which I am working in.  Thinking beyond your immediate surroundings, community and indeed industry norms has always been the route into a more innovative and rewarding life. 

Going back to Eli – are we living in a "filter bubble"?  Will our news feeds and connections be defined by where we live, what we do, how we earn our money and who are friends are?  Therefore by accepting the boundaries of the content providers and their suggestions could we be doing more harm than good in the longer run?  These content processes shape what we know and who we know and that keeps us all at a certain level and place in society – sounds like a digital divide to me.

Eli thinks it has severe implications for democracy.  At the very least I think it could be making us more passive in the learning and interacting process and that is very bad news in a knowledge economy.

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