| Eli Pariser speaks at the PdF conference "How Personalization is Changing the Web" |
If you were to ask people if they feel that the Internet is broadening their world, they instinctively respond a resounding ‘yes’. However, as we discussed in our recent Future Sign ‘Skim Culture’, it would appear that for most of us the Internet isn’t so much a World Wide Web, as much as it is a World Narrow Web.
This is specially the case when considering online media. We are all familiar with personalization, whether that is your Google homepage or Facebook page. What we might not be so aware of is how Google and Facebook, through complex algorithms, are filtering everything you search or receive through a personalized algorithm that uses as many as 57 markers to decide what a search result is.
For example these markers include your search history and location. These imposed filters inherently play to what the algorithm thinks you will like most, meaning that the opportunity to search ‘out of the box’ or find new sources of information is becoming narrower. Eli Parser has coined the phrase ‘Filter Bubbles’ to describe this phenomenon.
If this is the shifting tide of the way in which the Internet is utilized on information and entertainment fronts, what you’re looking down the barrel at is a generation of consumers and thinkers consuming and thinking within self-imposed vacuums. And nary a brilliant marketing strategy will do much to penetrate the force field of comfort, safety and familiarity.
Links to consider: