With East Africa facing its worst drought in 60 years, I wince more than ever at a quote by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”
What Zuckerberg’s assertion means on a societal level—such as during a regional famine overseas—is the topic of my August 2011 video clip of the month. It features Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, giving a TED talk on the unintended consequences of web companies tailoring search results to our personal tastes.
“[Personalization] moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt [of Google] said, ‘It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them,'” he says.
Pariser argues the growing array of personalizing filters could ultimately prove to be bad for us, bad for democracy, and bad for humanity. But he ends on a positive note. He says just as journalistic ethics improved in the early 1900s to better inform us over the last century, algorithmic ethics could improve to help guide us through the next.
Anyone who cares about the future of democracy and humanity should definitely watch this video.
Your turn! Do you think things like homelessness or genocide, which are not highly clickable, should disappear from search results?
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