Internet Filtering Is More Useful Than Insidious

There’s a book out this week—which I haven’t read—entitled, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. But I did watch a ten-minute talk given by its author, Eli Pariser, and I found his thesis somewhat self-evident and at the same time alarmist.

I hope all of us already effectively deal with the filtering Pariser is talking about. For example, the filtering of friends on Facebook example he cites is a simple options setting, and the moment it was introduced, people felt it and let each other know about it, which is the way the internet deals with unwanted filtering.

If you go to a wide variety of sites, and create intelligent, drill-down searches, unwanted filtering is not going to be a factor. You should also “search” using a variety of search engines and employ other tools as well. I often search on Amazon, as just one example, to find what’s been written, when, and who wrote it.

Filtering can only successfully direct you to choices if your choices are directed. The more you cast about in many directions for distinctly different, unrelated items, the less unwanted filtering has any relevance at all, while each new search you make creates filtering you’ve actively chosen.

Pariser says human editors have been replaced by algorithmic gatekeepers. Algorithms are necessary for the internet to function—and they don’t have the last word. Editors and journalists always and will forever serve a function, whether the model is the past where the power was vested in a trusted few, or today on the internet where we all have more gate-keeping options. Most of us would still rather trust a professional whose job it is to keep the gate than to rely solely on our own vetting of everything—of course we trust sources. The fact that we can choose among many more sources, and even find obscure bits of information ourselves, is surely a good thing—provided we are responsible enough to make some effort to discover the truths we need to know. It’s still far easier in our filtered internet universe in which the filters are easily removed or bypassed than in the old world in which they were opaque and unavoidable.

The internet is like Wikipedia, astonishingly self-correcting. We have far more power to get the straight story than any generation before ours. Filters, understood properly, are useful tools, not blinders.