Eli Pariser's Presentation on The Filter Bubble

Here is an excellent video of Eli Pariser himself giving a presentation on his book and his findings.

Also Eli Pariser has his website about the filter bubble here and his book can be purchased here.

Works Cited:

"Eli Pariser: Beware Online "filter Bubbles"" TED: Ideas worth Spreading. Web. 21 Dec. 2012. <http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html?quote=927>.

Reviews on The Filter Bubble

Press Reviews for The Filter Bubble:

“The Filter Bubble — a compelling deep-dive into the invisible algorithmic editing on the web, a world where we’re being shown more of what algorithms think we want to see and less of what we should see.”

—’10 Essential Books for Thought-Provoking Summer Reading’, Maria Popova, The Atlantic

“On the Web, we often see what we like, and like what we see. Whether we know it or not, the Internet creates personalized e-comfort zones for each one of us… And what’s wrong with that? Plenty, according to Eli Pariser, the author of ‘The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.’ Personalization on the Web, he says, is becoming so pervasive that we may not even know what we’re missing: the views and voices that challenge our own thinking.”

—Natasha Singer, The New York Times

“Through interviews with influential Internet experts including Google News chief Krishna Bharat, Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd, Mr. Pariser exposes the problem with personalization: It’s hard enough for an army of researchers to create algorithms that can match each of us with things we like. It’s nearly impossible, by contrast, to craft a formula that will show us something we wouldn’t seek out but really ought to read—and will be glad we did. Beyond throwing random links onto a screen, it’s hard to model serendipity on a computer.”

—Paul Boutin, The Wall Street Journal

“Eli Pariser is no enemy of the Internet. The 30-year-old online organizer is the former executive director and now board president of the online liberal political group MoveOn.org. But while Pariser understands the influence of the Internet, he also knows the power of online search engines and social networks to control exactly how we get information—for good and for ill.”

—Bryan Walsh, TIME

“It’s not just the large number of search variables, or the intervention of marketers, that shapes the information we’re shown by bringing certain pages to our attention while others fall far enough down in the rankings to be kept out of view. As Eli Pariser documents in his chilling book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, since December 2009, Google has aimed to contour every search to fit the profile of the person making the query.”

—Sue Halpern, The New York Review of Books

“Better known (so far) as the executive director of the progressive political action committee MoveOn.org, Eli Pariser is making noise these days as the author of ‘The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You.’”

—Daniel Terdiman, CNET

“Eli Pariser’s new book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You is a thoughtful, often alarming look at the dark side of Internet personalization.”

—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“”The Filter Bubble” is a nuanced critique of how most of us are now getting our information: through algorithms. His argument is simple, elegant and spot on.”

—Matthew Creamer, Ad Age

“Eli Pariser’s new book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You is a must-read for pretty much anyone who uses the Internet.”

—Jonathan Matthew Smucker, AlterNet

“Eli Pariser, former executive director at MoveOn.org, warns in his fascinating and even-handed book that the rise of such ‘personalization’ comes at a steep price. By sealing every individual inside a bubble of relevance, personalization works to erode the public sphere and to minimize exposure to new information, both on the left and on the right.”

—Harold Parker, The Daily

Advance praise for The Filter Bubble:

“Eli Pariser has written a must-read book about one of the central issues in contemporary culture: personalization.”

—Caterina Fake, Flickr co-founder

“You spend half your life in Internet space, but trust me—you don’t understand how it works. Eli Pariser’s book is a masterpiece of both investigation and interpretation; he exposes the way we’re sent down particular information tunnels, and he explains how we might once again find ourselves in a broad public square of ideas. This couldn’t be a more interesting book; it casts an illuminating light on so many of our daily encounters.”

—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth and The End of Nature, and founder 350.org

“The Filter Bubble shows how unintended consequences of well-meaning online designs can impose profound and sudden changes on politics. All agree that the Internet is a potent tool for change, but whether changes are for the better or worse is up to the people who create and use it. If you feel that the Web is your wide open window on the world, you need to read this book to understand what you aren’t seeing.”

—Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

“For more than a decade, reflective souls have worried about the consequences of perfect personalization. Eli Pariser’s is the most powerful and troubling critique yet.”

—Lawrence Lessig, author of Remix, Free Culture and Code


“Eli Pariser isn’t just the smartest person I know thinking about the relationship of digital technology to participation in the democratic process—he is also the most experienced. The Filter Bubble reveals how the world we encounter is shaped by programs whose very purpose is to narrow what we see and increase the predictability of our responses. Anyone who cares about the future of human agency in a digital landscape should read this book—especially if it is not showing up in your recommended reads on Amazon.”

—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life Inc. and Program or Be Programmed


“In The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser reveals the news slogan of the personalized internet: Only the news that fits you we print.”

—George Lakoff, author of Don’t Think of an Elephant! and The Political Mind


“Eli Pariser is worried. He cares deeply about our common social sphere and sees it in jeopardy. His thorough investigation of Internet trends got me worried, too. He even taught me things about Facebook. It’s a must-read.”

—David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect


“Internet firms increasingly show us less of the wide world, locating us in the neighborhood of the familiar. The risk, as Eli Pariser shows, is that each of us may unwittingly come to inhabit a ghetto of one.”

—Clay Shirky, author Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus


“‘Personalization’ sounds pretty benign, but Eli Pariser skillfully builds a case that its excess on the Internet will unleash an information calamity—unless we heed his warnings. Top notch journalism and analysis.”

—Steven Levy, author of In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives


“The Internet software that we use is getting smarter, and more tailored to our needs, all the time. The risk, Eli Pariser reveals, is that we increasingly won’t see other perspectives. In The Filter Bubble, he shows us how the trend could reinforce partisan and narrow mindsets, and points the way to a greater online diversity of perspective.”

—Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist

Works Cited:

"Press/Praise." The Filter Bubble PressPraise Comments. Web. 21 Dec. 2012. <http://www.thefilterbubble.com/presspraise>.

My Analysis of The Filter Bubble

     Pariser succeeded pulling me into this book. Throughout it he used many examples from numerous credible outside sources to introduce these topics, ideas, problems, benefits, and solutions of the filter bubble. Having the variety of background stories and well-described introductions allowed myself to understand this subject, what with its engaging tone with many moments of humor and interesting stories while avoiding technical jargon that Pariser could have easily used from being educated on the subject and having a background on internet algorithms, formatting, and website management. Pariser managed to lure me into the book using not only this tone and easy to follow wording, but also because the subject of personalization and filtering of the internet was a new concept to me, being one of the many people that originally thought we had almost unlimited access to anything on the internet. Since this day and age seem to revolve around technology and internet use, the book appealed to me even more.

     The concepts in the book overall proved to be fairly convincing, too. While it is true that personalization of the internet can be useful, especially in some areas of what advertisements we see and whose stories pop up on our Facebook newsfeed that we would actually be interest in, there also poses the huge problem of what we are not seeing as a result, hindering a more diverse knowledge of what is going on around us and other information that could create and spread new ideas that would help people to progress technologically, socially, intellectually, and so much more. In Lev Manovich’s article “Trending: The promises and challenges of big social data”, he creates a vision of using the vast amount of data the internet provides to conduct research on humans and their societal relationships. However, he shows that not everyone has accessibility to the data needed to do this research as well as not having the expertise to actually understand the data, proving that Pariser has a point in want the general public to have some knowledge and understanding of algorithms that filter our internet as well as that there are hindrances to not having the access to data needed for research made only harder by the personalization of the web.

     To further back up Pariser’s outtake on the personalized internet, Natasha Singer, author of the article “Secret e-scores chart consumers’ buying power”, delves into the transparency of the filter bubble and what problems may come from it. With e-scores, they take users’ data to find out your spending habits, your income and other related information and sell it to companies that can place advertisements on websites that would appeal to whatever stereotypes of what socioeconomic class you fall into and products or services that generally are wanted by those in that class. This is just one example of how the internet is a scary place as you do not know what information websites are taking note of and what privacy you actually have and that people may actually be getting bypassed by companies and not having the same opportunities as other individuals for certain products based solely on the discriminatory algorithms that Pariser earlier stated that poorly represents ourselves.
     In the end, Pariser made a convincing argument, one credible and verified by sources in his and outside of his. Hopefully knowledge of the problem of the filter bubble can then spread so that internet users may not be hindered but rather be able to have more access to an internet that could help change the world as we know it.

Works Cited:

Manovich, Lev. "Trending: The promises and challenges of big social data," in Matthew K. Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012. Print.

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Singer, Natasha. "Secret e-scores chart consumers' buying power". New York Times. August 18, 2012. Print.

A Summary of the Last Chapters 6 through 8

     Pariser’s last three chapters, “Hello, World!”, “What You Want, Whether You Want It or Not”, and “Escape from the City of Ghettos”, then conclude the problems of a personalized internet as well as offer solutions and show who and what will affect the future of what information we can see on the internet. Here it is discussed how systematization is great for constructing functional software yet can also pose as a risk of taking this method to extreme levels and putting in the hands of unpredictable humans who could use it for harm and putting such power in the hands of a small group of programmers and engineers who are “in a position of remarkable power to shape the future of our society” (188). The future of personalization may also not even be limited to just the internet and most likely become a part of the real world through the combination of reality and virtualization, making it even harder to escape this filter bubble. In the last chapter, Pariser concludes that the internet is important, it provides a place where “new ideas and styles and themes and even languages get formed and tested” and since it has such importance, over personalization could confine us and all the benefits that come from an enriched and accessible internet (222). To then obtain such a place then, it was suggested that people should have at least a basic understanding of algorithms and reading and creating them, have more transparent filtering systems, have filtering systems that allow more exposure to things outside of one’s filter bubble, be protective of the information of the data we provide, and have some government control over how our personal data is used.

Works Cited:

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

A Summary of Chapters 3 through 5

     Chapters three through five, “The Adderall Society”, “The You Loop”, and “The Public is Irrelevant”, further delve into the problems posed by a filter bubble.  Like the medicine Adderall, used to help those with Attention Deficit Disorder, the filter bubble allows its users to cut out what may be distracting and unhelpful but rather help focus on what is important.  But also like the medicine, too much of either could result in a single-minded focus and eliminate one’s creativity, a horrible result as creativity is important for the advancement and development of new, important ideas and diversity, especially on the Web.  In “The You Loop” it is addressed how these algorithms that are supposed to find out who we are actually provide poor representations of ourselves and can actually “be even more discriminatory than people would be”, something that could be avoided more if these algorithms left more room to give people the benefit of the doubt (129).  Lastly, Pariser brought attention to that from the censorship of the internet, “Some of the biggest and most important problems fail to reach our view at all” (149).  What news brought to us will be things that we find more interesting while leaving out other outside opinions, which can only be avoided if we look beyond our “narrow self-interest” and welcome in other worldly views and stories.


Works Cited:

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

A Summary of the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2

     In Eli Pariser’s introduction and first two chapters, “The Race for Relevance” and “The User is the Content”, he begins to explain how the filter bubble works and was formed and how Pariser’s interest in the subject began.  Noticing on his Facebook newsfeed that certain stories were more often popping up that he was more likely to click on than ones that he otherwise would not have was what first notified him how the internet was becoming a more personalized place and jumpstarted him to research more about this phenomenon.  What he then found was that websites were able to take your personal data and use this data to learn about you and then filter your results to what computer algorithms thought to believe reflected the real you and sell this information to companies to also advertise to your tastes.  It became important for the websites that used such information to then find what was personally relevant for internet users and using that information to offer a more personalized way of processing news and information.


Works Cited:

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Introduction to the Blog

     Presented in this blog is a summary and analysis of the book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, by Eli Pariser, an internet activist and author.  In it he explores solutions and suggestions, some benefits, and numerous problems that come from this filter bubble, in which algorithms guess what information people would like to see based on history, what is clicked on, and other personal data provided, personalizing the information you do see while also leaving out information that it assumes you might not want to see.

Works Cited:

"Eli Pariser." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Dec. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Pariser>.

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.