The future of the personalised web – live discussion. Filter bubbles are just one feature of a personalised web, but how can we avoid them?
Photograph: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images "Are we stuck in filter bubbles? " asked Jonathan Stray for the Nieman Journalism Lab site last month. They're a name for anxiety, he explained: "the worry that our personalised interfaces to the internet will end up telling us only what we want to hear, hiding everything unpleasant but important. " It's a fascinating concept. This idea of digital isolation is not an entirely technical issue – algorithms might dictate how different our Google search results pages look, but major publishers have a responsibility as well to provide appropriate perspectives on important issues. So how can publishers and media organisations become more transparent in their content delivery? Is an open content model the answer, or should our journalists and editors (filters themselves) bring more curation into journalism?
Panel (more to follow) Ariel Peled, founder & CEO, PUBLICi. Are we stuck in filter bubbles? Here are five potential paths out. The filter bubble is a name for an anxiety — the worry that our personalized interfaces to the Internet will end up telling us only what we want to hear, hiding everything unpleasant but important.
It’s a fabulous topic of debate, because it’s both significant and marvelously ill-defined. But to get beyond arguing, we’re going to need to actually do something. I have five proposals. If you’re not familiar with the filter bubble argument, start with Eli Pariser’s TED talk. The basic idea is this: All of us now depend on algorithmic personalization and recommendation, such as Google’s personalized results and the Facebook news feed which decides for us whose updates we see. Or maybe not. People have been talking about the dangers of personalized algorithmic filters since the dawn of the web — here’s Jaron Lanier in 1995, and Cass Sunstein in 2002 — and we’re still talking about it. 1. When we look at how people interact on the web, what do we actually see?
2. 3. 4. 5. How is web personalisation affecting the news? Are we stuck in filter bubbles?
Should we worry that the internet will end up telling us only what we want to hear? From Twitter streams to personal news feeds, we've become experts at sourcing only the content that is most relevant to our particular interests, but some commentators worry that our personalised content feeds can only tell us so much of a news story. How can publishers and media organisations become more transparent in their content delivery? How can it be delivered so that we avoid 'filter bubbles' and an unbalance of news? Here are all the best views from the panel in our live Q&A on the topic of the personalisation of the web and how it affects news readers, journalists, publishers and society as a whole. Malcolm Coles, product director, Trinity Mirror – @malcolmcoles Personalisation for publishers: I'm a big fan of personalisation. Transparency: I doubt anyone can explain the algorithms in a way we'd find meaningful.
Content: Do we really know what our content is about?