Transcript

Discussing the Book, "The Filter Bubble"

June 28, 2011

MICAH SIFRY: You're listening to an archived version of the PDF Summer Book Club Call featuring special guest, Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, What the Internet is Hiding from You.

The call was recorded on June 28th and is presented here in its entirely. For more information on Personal Democracy Forum call series, visit PersonalDemocracy.com or follow us on Twitter at PDF Team. Thanks and enjoy the call.

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Hi everybody, this is MIcah Sifry and you are listening to the Personal Democracy Forum Conference Call. We are moving into summer mode here and are going to be discussing Eli Pariser's great new book, The Filter Bubble, What the Internet is Hiding from You.

And before we get started with that I just want to thank our call sponsor AT&T for making these calls possible and remind folks who are listening on how we are going to format the call, throughout the whole call if you are interested in Tweeting about the call or raise a question, you can either use the has-tag PDF Network or in honor of Eli who I believe is using the hash tag Filter Bubble, you can also you that and I will try and keep an eye on those comments as they percolate.

About half way through the call we are going to open things up and let folks who are listening ask questions, but for the first half it's just going to be me and Eli talking.

And without further ado, I just want to say it is a pleasure to introduce Eli Pariser, no stranger to Personal Democracy Forum. Eli has an illustrious background as one of the people who helped get Move On going, actually joined MoveOn.org after 9/11 when an online petition that he had posted as a 20-year-old, Eli -- am I right about that?

ELI PARISER: Yes.

MICAH SIFRY: -- took off and the next thing he knew he had something like half a million people had signed this call for rational response to 9/11 that led him eventually into the arms of Wes Boyd and (inaudible) Blades and they joined forces and since then Eli worked for many years on MoveOn's political operations and though he's not as involved on a daily basis with the organization, he's still the President of its Board.

And scarily, he is also now a bestselling author of this new book, The Filter Bubble. I say "scarily" because that's too many amazing accomplishments for someone this young. But all the more reason to welcome Eli to the call.

So, Eli why don't you -- I hope this isn't rote for you by now, but if you wouldn't mind starting us out by describing why you wrote the book and start there and maybe take five to ten minutes, whatever you need to sort of lay out the arguments. And then I'll give you a hint, my first question's going to be 'what have you learned since the book came out that either confirms or complicates the arguments that you're making in it.'

ELI PARISER: Well first of all, thanks to and to PDF, this is sort of long been a network that I found wonderful and supportive and thinking through the issues of democracy and the internet and in particular this argument that became The Filter Bubble book started as a presentation at PDF I think 2009 or 2010.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, I think it was 2010.

ELI PARISER: So, I really appreciate the -- it was sort of the exact group of people that I wanted to test out the set of ideas with and that gave me sort of the encouragement actually go write it.

What the book is about is an invisible but quite forceful trend that's shaping the way that the internet works more and more every day. And the trend is basically that websites have -- are able to use the personal data they've collected to customize themselves to us.

So, Google no longer shows everyone the same search results; it shows different people different results based on what they've clicked on in the past. Facebook obviously -- they've sort of baked into what Facebook does but the newsfeed looks very carefully at all sorts of different behavior on the site and uses that to decide which articles you see and which friends posts you miss.

0:05:00

Twitter which used to not do this at all just announced -- since the book came out -- that it was going to start doing -- when you search for something on Twitter instead of sort of getting the top Tweet overall, you get the top recommended Tweet for you and that's probably a first step in this direction.


And increasingly new sites and all manner of content sites are beginning to sort of bake this in so that it's actually becoming increasingly hard to see a site that's not customized. I'm not obviously alone in sort of highlighting this trend, Cheryl Sandberg says in three to five years – and I think this was a year ago – the idea of a website that’s not personalized in some way is going to be anachronistic. Eric Schmidt from Google says that in the very near future it’ll be very hard for people to seek content that is not tailored to them in some way. And Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook talking about the Facebook news feed says that the power of the thing is it shows you things that are relevant and the quote that sort of in a way got me thinking a lot of this was that he said, ‘a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.’

So, this fixation on relevance is due to something that people on this call will see as pretty relevant in that we have more and more data to sift through and deal with every day and if you can find code that does that work for you it can save a lot of time and it can make – it can focus you on the things you actually need to see.


The danger I think is that because this is happening invisibly, that is we’re not actually in charge of these filters that are deciding what is relevant to us and what is not and because of the way that these companies define relevance because of the way that these algorithms sort of figure out what is going to be relevant, you can end up sort of seeing a distorted view of the world and not even knowing it, you can end up finding it very difficult to get outside your own parochial point of view and in a way that’s sort of – for me that’s really sort of the opposite of what the internet was supposed to do – supposed to connect us to new ideas and new people and new ways of thinking and allow us to collaborate with big, diverse groups of people and the big issues of the day. Instead we’re increasingly trapped in our own bubble.

So, I can talk more about the specific sort of sub concerns I have about that but since it’s a question that comes up often people often say well, really that’s always been the case. We’ve always picked our own media that reinforced our own views.

And I think what’s different about this is three things: first, when you pick up The Nation or you pick up The Standard, you know what the editorial viewpoint is. And that’s actually really important because it means that you understand the rules that decide what you see and what you don’t. In these personalized sites, the way they are constructed now, you don’t really have a sense of the editorial viewpoint and therefore you don’t really know on what basis information is being ruled in or ruled out, you don’t know how far off your view of the world is and anyone who studied science knows that you can infer from a sample what the whole set that it’s taken from looks like without knowing on what basis it’s been selected. So, if you see three red marbles and you know they were picked from a group of 40 marbles, you don’t know whether that means they’re all red or what.

That’s one of the challenges. And then I think there are also some bigger threats for democracy. To your question Mika, about what I learned, it’s actually been totally fascinating and fun to actually get out and talk to people about this.

One of the most interesting conversations that has come up since the book has come out is this conversation of algorithmic journalism. And it’s basically one of the critiques of my argument is that people say, ‘well, you want Google to impose it’s on values on people and that would be paternalistic and who’s Google to say or for you to say what the right values are.’

0:10:22

And I think it highlights a couple really interesting things: one is that the premise there is that Google is neutral, which I think is actually a very dangerous premise. One of the great quotes I found in the research for the book was by this guy Cransberg. Cransberg’s first law and is technology is not good or evil nor is it neutral.

And when you’re doing something like Google where you’re actually trying to create a rank list of the most useful or true or relevant content, there are absolutely lots of value judgments that go into how you make an algorithm to do that.

So, I think the premise is flawed. Anytime you’re doing that kind of work there’s some sort of paternalism or values built in by design. It’s impossible to escape.

But the second piece is the real paternalism happens when sites override your explicit preferences and go with your revealed preferences and I’ll explain what that means quickly. One of the first experiences that got me thinking about all this was that experience I had on Facebook where I had tried to add a bunch of friends who thought about things differently than me politically, some of whom I actually met at PDF. And I found that Facebook was systematically hiding them from me in the newsfeed and it was systematically editing them out because it had noticed that while I wasn’t getting with them somewhat, I was (inaudible) with them less than people with whom I agreed more fully politically.

And what Facebook’s basically doing there is it’s saying, yes, okay, we know what your explicit preference is to hear from these people but we’re going to go with your revealed preference, which is the preference we can read in the data. And your revealed preference says your more interested in these other folks.

That to me strikes me as a more pernicious kind of paternalism than actually trying to sort of be transparent about the editing world that these systems use and incorporated into them, not just sort of some sense of what people click the most or like the most but what’s actually what people broadly find important.

So, there’s a start.

MICAH SIFRY: Great. Well, I have a number of questions. I have just one comment I need to make because it’s interesting to me that you think that in the past or dealing with publications like The Weekly Standard or The Nation that it’s clear what the editorial viewpoint is.

Having been an editor at The Nation magazine for many years, I can tell you that actually the problem is that often it isn’t like there’s a big, red banner on the front page that says, ‘tends towards liberal, socialist points of view.’ There is no obvious labeling. And if anything, the implicit effect of journals of opinion is that they’re mostly for people who are already in the know.

And so if you’re a newbie and you pick up that magazine and you see a column called ‘Minority Report,’ – this is no joke – for many years Christopher Hitchen’s column was called ‘Minority Report,’ and I had friends say to me, ‘I was so surprised to find out he wasn’t black.’ (Laughter)

ELI PARISER: Which he definitely is not.

MICAH SIFRY: The labeling is not necessarily as clear as you might imagine. But I actually want to ask you about some of the questions – the (inaudible) concerns that you raised in the book and some of this is not because I disagree but more just to probe and to give you a chance to articulate some of these core arguments.

So, early in the book you say one of the reason why you’re so concerned about this problem is as you put it, democracy requires that people see things from each other’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts, instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.

So, that is an ideal vision for what democracy might be but I’m wondering if indeed democracy is actually that or rather democracy being a system for reconciling the irreconcilable, which is how our friend John Wonderlich at the Sunlight Foundation – you know after spending a lot of time studying Congress, he’s come to the conclusion that Congress is a system for reconciling things that otherwise can’t be reconciled.

0:15:48

And one might argue that if you believe abortion is murder versus someone who believes it’s a person’s choice but the first trimester it’s not murder, those positions aren’t really reconcilable.

So, is it really that democracy requires us to see things from each other’s point of view? I mean, the ideal vision – do we really have to have that and how do we know that the internet is making it worse, which I think is a concern throughout the book.

ELI PARISER: Yeah, there are a lot of great questions there. This ties in to a bigger argument about what an ideal democracy looks like and what you’re describing with the reconcilable with the irreconcilable is basically what’s called an agonistic democracy, one in which – and I’m forgetting the name, a Columbia University journalism professor, Michael Judson writes about this quite convincingly that – our idea of the ideal citizen has changed a lot and arguably the sort of citizenship that we saw in the 2000s, which was very partisan, which was not that interested in hearing about other’s points of view but which actually meant that you had this big uptick and turnout and you had a big uptick in civic activity and engagement. Maybe that’s actually fine, maybe that’s what a working democracy is looking for. After all, you had more people participating in those circumstances than in the circumstances that preceded it.

Personally I think there’s some element of that that’s true but I – Diane Martz who’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has some great research that this sort of says there’s sort of just a core tension here because basically the more that you know about an issue and the more that you know about an issue and the more steeped you are in it, the less able you are to act as an activist because you’re conflicted because it’s complicated and the less you know the more able you are to act but the more polarized you are and the less open to dialogue and discourse you are. These things are sort of just intention.

I think that some element of that agonistic piece is perfectly useful but I think it needs to be balanced by the discursive piece where people are actually trying to knit these things together to some kind of common understanding.

And I think that that does happen in useful ways. I think the way – the problem that this conversation often gravitates toward are some of the least useful ones because something like climate change or abortion, you know, they are a fairly intractable but I think the concerns that sort of drove the book were more concerns about the things like homelessness or the war in Afghanistan. Issues which are sort of evidently important but which can easily fall out of view if we’re all just focused on the things that are sort of narrowly relevant to us.

You know, homelessness as sort of – the homeless as a constituency is always going to be a very, very small constituency unless you have people able to sort of encounter that experience and have some empathy for it and have some interest in doing something about it. It’s really hard to explain why you would do anything about that politically because out of sight, out of mind for most people.

So, the question for me really is what does this technology do to those kinds of things and I was really struck by a conversation I had with someone who is a web editor as a newspaper and said, yeah, our Afghanistan stories always bomb, they always get very way less clicks than the stories about Anthony Wiener or whatever.

0:20:14

But we run them because well you know, there’s a war on and people need to remember that and know about it because they’re making decisions about people dying there, regardless of whether they’re the most – it ‘s the most clickable thing or not. That’s the kind of thing I think can get easily lost in this new sort of optimized information environment.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. Well, you do argue in the book that you worry that we now have a system that has no ethics or sense of civic responsibility and is just chasing the clicks, right?

ELI PARISER: Right. And actually, here’s another fun thing that has come up after the book that someone mentioned to me that – and take this with a grain of salt because it’s just one source but Facebook had considered having a dislike button which would be useful so you won’t have to be able to send. And basically the problem with the dislike button is that you would have people disliking brands and obviously advertisers wouldn’t really love the idea of possibly being disliked by more people than they were liked by because of something they did.

So, you know whether or not that conversation actually happened it certainly seems like a plausible sort of example of the dynamics that are at work here to have this certain kind of information travel much more easily and quickly based on the sort of financial intent as the (inaudible) networks.

MICAH SIFRY: Sure. Well I mean I don’t think – I mean I certainly don’t disagree and I think most people in the PDF universe don’t disagree that we need to be wary of certain pieces of this brave, new online world where commercial values trump everything else.

At the same time what I struggle with when I read The Filter Bubble is still this question of was it better before we had –

ELI PARISER: No, no –

MICAH SIFRY: -- you know, before we had network communication, right?

ELI PARISER: No, it wasn’t better. Well, you know, one of the most – one of the comments that annoyed me the most and if you know me it’s relatively hard to get under my skin but one way you can do it is by accusing me of being an internet pessimist which I really sort of one of the most important things to me is that this medium be as good as we all hope it can be, want it to be.

I don’t believe that it is inevitable that it will be that good or that it sort of has some sort of magical principles imbedded in it that mean that it will just – like (inaudible) towards justice. I don’t think that’s true, but I do think it’s mutable and incredibly – you know, it’s sort of a medium that can be any medium. And if we take that seriously then that means we really have to work hard to push it in the right direction because there’s certainly a lot of people that have an interest in pulling it in a very different direction.

And so in a way the reason I wrote the book was to both illustrate sort of the (inaudible) going on now but actually try to get a larger group of people engaged and involved with it, with the idea of pushing this think toward our best aspirations for it.

I don’t – I’m not nostalgic for the good old days when editors sat in rooms and decided what people got to know and it was all just a one way of communication. And also personally like spend a lot of time figuring out how to leverage that two-way (inaudible) world that we live in.

But I also think that it doesn’t mean that we should stop – that we should be happy with it as it is, you know? I think in some ways the goal of – the role of this new online world is to push for it to be better and that’s what I want.

MICAH SIFRY: One more question and then I’m going to see if folks who are listening wan to ask some questions. But I don’t know whether you had much chance yet to take the book on the road if you will, outside of the U. S., but how much do the arguments in the book hold for political cultures outside of America?

0:25:14

I mean, one argument you can make pretty strongly – I think there’s probably – I mean the evidence seems to tilt in the direction of where you put it which is that we are starting to polarize around our own partisan view. I mean, (inaudible) keeps putting out the virgin data but it does suggest that people online, news consumers online are beginning to spend more time just reading sites that tend to confirm their political biases or be within their comfort zone and encountering viewpoints different.

For a while we thought it might be that online news consumers sort out or encountered differing viewpoints and I think simply if you’re on blogs that still is the case. But that’s the American context and I’m just wondering to what extent the problems you describe or worry about in the book are equally concerning in Europe or Latin America or elsewhere.

ELI PARISER: Yeah. So, I’ve done – I just got back from a week in the U.K., and I can speak to that. There’s been a lot of interest in it elsewhere but I haven’t had much of a sense of sort of how it was landing or how people received it. I would say there’s sort of two arguments here. I mean I personally find that echo chamber – the sort of political chamber argument important but fairly well-trod ground that’s sort of – it’s not that I disagree that it has that fact, obviously I write about that in the book. But I actually think the issue of the public (inaudible) view is more of where my heart is and certainly that resonated in the UK as well especially because they’re having these huge fights over – you know, Rupert Murdoch is basically trying to de-throne the BBC and defund it and there’s this huge conversation about the role of civically oriented media versus a commercialized media.

So I think it struck the chord there a bit in an interesting kind of way. I think the – that’s sort of one piece. I think the other piece is just – part of what I was trying to do with the book was to reset – was to call attention to the importance of Google and Facebook and these other companies that sort of increasingly do mediate our online – our view of the online world. And I think the companies have been perfectly happy to say, ‘oh, no, no, no, we’re just (inaudible) sitting here trying to help people out.’ That’s a very useful sort of power analysis. You’re in the driver’s seat, we’re just trying to help you.

And I think at times they get really serious about (inaudible). I have been a critic of Facebook for a long time but I’m a critic because I think it’s so important and because I think whether they think so or not. It’s going to change the world for better or worse and maybe for worse, but it doesn’t – that’s not inevitable either.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, okay. Let me do this because I’ve got plenty more questions but I want to make sure that folks who are listening if they want to interject with a question can take advantage of the opportunity.

So, if you do have a question for Eli Pariser, just hit *6 on your phone and that will get you into the call to and then I will call on you and if you don’t have a question you can just sit tight and I’ll ask Eli more questions. Hang on one second here and see if anyone surfaces. People are usually shy is what I found, so –

ELI PARISER: Yeah, I don’t bite.

MICAH SIFRY: Since the book has come out, Eli, has anybody from within those big companies come to you and said, ‘you know what, this is really serious, we need to have a serious conversation with you about this.’ Or are they –

ELI PARISER: Yeah, it depends on the company. I think Google has engaged in a fairly sincere and measured way both publicly and privately and I don’t want to – I’ve had some conversations that are off the record, but my sense has been that even if people that there have not agreed, they really want to explain why they just disagree and have it feel like they’re taking this stuff so seriously.

0:30:37

Facebook has – didn’t respond to any of my requests to talk to them going in through the front door I end up talking to a few people on background and hasn’t responded to any other requests about it at all as far as I’m aware.

I know people at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both made inquiries and literally didn’t get any email back. So, I think they are – they basically feel like they don’t need to do deal with this and they I think as a PR strategy, maybe it’s not a bad one for a month or two but as I think scrutiny on Facebook goes up and up and up, it’s not probably a very good idea to totally alienate the reporters that are covering you.

And generally, other companies – I had a great conversation at YouTube with engineers there about what people were really digging into it and trying to figure out what would you do and how would it work and what would the dynamics be? I’m going to talk to Amazon and Google in the next couple weeks and generally it seems like people want to engage more than they just feel like.

And honestly like the – that group – partly I want to – I hope – one of the great outcomes of the book would be if engineers saw themselves as having this important role in building the future of civic society rather than just cranking out code. So, if it calls that out and a few people – you know, that would be great.

Yeah, that to me is absolutely vital. It’s an open question whether – where the responsibility lies, right? I mean so somebody (inaudible) do have internal cultures where they’ve evolved positions – people who you know it is their responsibility to think about this and evolve company-wide policy and address questions as they arise. And Facebook seems to be the least mature in that process, putting it in a friendly way. Maybe over time they’ll sort of grow up a little bit more. I’m concerned as you to the degree to which the sort of go about whatever they feel like doing and ignore or not respond very well to criticism given that right now their de facto, a huge piece of the public sphere online.

But the hard question back to you would be – but really, how do we know that these affects are that damaging? Can you – other than they just sort of, ‘yes, we do get different search results,’ but does the data show that that is driving some bad affects beyond us getting slightly different search results or slightly different search leads?

It’s actually sort of strikingly under research from a scientific perspective so I think – one of my problems with a (inaudible) study as you referred to is basically what the (inaudible) study does is it looks at online news consumption and it says, ‘well, lots of people are going to Yahoo News.’ And Yahoo News links to all different publications with different political balances therefore people are getting – you know, because Yahoo’s so much bigger than any other online news website, it basically swamps – you know, it swamps the study. And you get a lot of people visiting a lot of different partisan websites.

Yahoo is moving quite quickly in the direction of greater personalization although it’s still not – it’s still relatively modest but there’s no – both from talking to people there and just when you think of this sort of business case –

0:35:32

You know, I think the evidence that this is – I think this will be a few years before we get a really clear view of how sort of a life lived within these filters differs from a life not lived within them. And my bet is that essentially it’s hard to see why it won’t have some of these affects. You tend to see empirically on Facebook that more likeable headlines travel further. That will have consequences when this is a place where a large number of people are getting their news.

So, that is the argument that I would be delighted to be proved wrong by the data because it worries me, but it’s hard to see why that wouldn’t be the prevalences of that system.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, I’m going to take another pause here and see if anybody wants to jump in with a question. We have a bashful audience right now listening. Come on folks, this is your chance to talk to the author of the book that you’re currently reading or have currently read, I hope. It’s very much worth the read, The Filter Bubble.

Hit *6 if you want to ask a question and I will wait a second before I ask another one of mine. But if they don’t, they don’t.

People are filtering their questions to themselves, I guess, Eli. But back to the (inaudible) I mean isn’t it also possible that what we’re really also seeing is just this gap between heavy news users online and low information –

ELI PARISER: Yes.

MICAH SIFRY: -- and I mean the argument that people like Clay Sherkey have made (inaudible) is that what – we’re moving from a society where most of us were passive to one where a small but significant percentage are participating and being involved and so that’s the meta trend to sort of be thinking about and that larger numbers of people deciding either to contribute and edit to Wikipedia or a comment on a blog or share a YouTube video but broadly speaking, anything that moves us from low level of participation, low level of awareness to a higher level is got to be better than what we had before.

And I mean –

ELI PARISER: Well I just don’t think – I think that’s true in some cases and I think that’s not true in others. I think another way of talking about the Afghanistan thing is in a typical newspaper you have an oversupply of news about Afghanistan relative to demand. And we’re now approaching a more efficient market in which actually people don’t seek out information about the war in Afghanistan very much because it’s depressing and complicated and difficult and we’ll get less of it.

And the question you have to ask yourself is, ‘well, is that – where does that go? Where does that lead?’

MICAH SIFRY: Well my son – I’ll give you a counter example just with the Facebook generation via a 17-year-old who’s a heavy Facebook user as everybody else’s age is. And he surprised me a couple years ago when we were sitting at the dinner table right before the election and I said, ‘gee, isn’t it sad that President Obama’s grandmother just passed away. She won’t actually be able to witness the election.’ And my son said, ‘oh yeah, I saw that – I heard about that.’ And I was like, ‘what? How do you know – how would you have known – I mean, that’s not even a major news story.’ And he said, ‘well, you know, I have somebody in my circle of friends who is really into the election,’ and so all of his news feed updates are about politics.

0:40.34

And we recently had the same conversation and now it’s a different kid in his social circle who’s putting lots of political updates in his news feed.

So, there is that thing that if the news is important, it will find me.

ELI PARISER: Yeah, I don’t believe that entirely. I mean I think that’s true for some kinds of things and not true for other kinds of things. Is it true for news about the Obama election? Absolutely. Is it true for – not to harp on homelessness – but is it true for homelessness? Probably not. Will news about homelessness find us on Facebook? I don’t think so.

You know, one way of thinking about this is let’s think about two possible futures; a Facebook future and a Twitter future. And what do each of those mean about what kind of information we get?

Personally the Twitter future appeals to me in many ways and for this (inaudible) I use a lot, maybe too much, got in the way of the writing of the book. But the difference is that Facebook is making a lot of decisions about what you see and what you don’t see and it’s making those decisions on a pretty narrow set of criteria that you don’t really understand or control.

So, luckily your son was engaging with these friends that happen to be politically engaged and active and therefore he serendipitously got this political information. But (inaudible) –

MICAH SIFRY: (Inaudible) not his father’s son.

ELI PARISER: -- and back to my experience early on with Facebook and conservatives, I do see my conservative friends’ Tweets, I do – my Twitter stream fields like a much better source of information than my Facebook stream precisely because it’s not optimized in that way.

So, I think the question really is how you give – a) are people kind of able to critically think about how these filters work and when you want to use what because there are things that Facebook is more useful for and there are things that Twitter is more useful for; and b), do they have some real control so you can actually – you’re in the driver’s seat, you’re deciding how to – I mean, you know, the – deciding how to use this incredible power that we should all have now to be able to manipulate these flows of information. It’s still very rudimentary in a way and the problem is that the – from a business standpoint, going this sort of passive route of let’s just flick this on and optimize the clicks is so much easier and more profitable in the short term than going the more active of let’s build (inaudible) that treat people like adults and educate them about the dynamics of this stuff and help them build that information for themselves.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. I have one more question and then we’ll wind down, but as you were writing the book, did you try to also look at the impact of – I mean the less visible but equally important kinds of social networks that exist around other kinds of communities? I mean, whether it’s a big political website like Daily Coast or online bulletin boards. I mean there are hundreds of thousands of these.

You know, Facebook and Twitter may be our meta because they cut across them all, but there are many other aggregations of people online other than just those. And I’ve long thought that – you know, we wonder whether the internet is spreading power to the edges and moving it to the haves to the have-nots or moving it more just into the hands of the upper class people who are highly literate, have a broadband connection and have the time to –

0:45:17

-- hang out in these places and interact and in effect they are enhancing their social capital and if you think about how power works in America, this may be a good thing if it’s shifting power away from say the top one or two percent who have the most power because they have the most money. You know, shifting it down to the top 20 or 25 percent.

Did you think about that at all in the course of the analysis that you were doing here? Do you see the same affects at work in these kinds of communities or maybe some of them yes, some of them, no?

ELI PARISER: I mean because I sort of was mostly focused on automatic personalization and sort of the algorithmic side of it that I didn’t spent a lot of time looking into the sort of forums on both sides.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, because I’m sort of arguing that on sites like that you are in affect personalizing by choice, right? I mean, I want to talk with other knitters, I’m into guns, I want to talk to other gun owners. And then these online tools have the effect of enhancing your net power because your network is always stronger than an individual.

ELI PARISER: Absolutely. And going back to Diana Muntz one of the interesting pieces of research that she did that totally fascinated me was so there are two places online where really vibrant cross political, cross partisan conversations happen; and the first place is sports websites because basically when you have a common bond around the Yankees or whatever, you somehow it makes possible I mean these really intense addressing conversations about race and whatever else in a way that just doesn’t happen any other places.

And so she saw those sites as quite – as great. And the other totally fascinating place that she saw the same kind of dynamics was on sites for fictional TV series, in particular LOST. And as it turns out, in the LOST sort of fan bulletin boards, there are these incredibly long, deep cross partisan conversations picking apart the philosophy and politics of LOST.

And one of her hypotheses actually was that it’s easier to have a political conversation about a fictional universe that the present one – than the actual real one. You know, it sort of takes the charge out of it or makes it possible in a way.

But there’s no question that that’s sort of how this is supposed to work. I mean the image even on Facebook as a political organizer I really initially hoped that it would – everybody has their uncle who has a different political view from them or their friends from back home or whatever and that actually it would be this really powerful medium for persuasion for that reason. You could reach people who didn’t think the same way as you which is hard unless you’re the (inaudible) those are the dynamics on Facebook.

I think they still could be the dynamics in the LOST community or the –

MICAH SIFRY: Right. In the same way that I always felt that whether I was reading a blog or posting on my own and seeing comments that I’m much closer to people that I disagree with than before because all they have to do to get to me is leave a comment and I’m going to read it or vice versa.

I can leave a comment on their site and they’re going to see it and so like it or not, there’s more cross partisan contact happening. It may not all be friendly than in the days when I was an editor at the Nation magazine and never had a clue even who my counterparts were at say National Review or Weekly Standard or whatever. You know, there was no way for us to bump into each other. So –

0:50.08

ELI PARISER: Yeah, so I think I guess where this goes to is if you build these sort of multi-dimensional – or the four that are sort of bringing people together on one thing and then they can talk about whatever else, I think Twitter ideally does that too, right? You – I subscribe to John Gruber’s Twitter feed about MAC stuff and I get his views on baseball, which wasn’t really what I really subscribed for but I get exposed to that world whether I want it or not.

The challenge is that some engineer at Twitter is going to come along and go, ‘well, that’s easy to solve. We’ll just figure out which things you’re re-tweeting and – ‘

MICAH SIFRY: Well hopefully not after reading your book. Let me switch this to someone who appears to be calling from Microsoft. Let’s see, go ahead and identify yourself and –

CHARLTON GALLESPIE: Hi, this is Charlton Gillespie from Cornell University, I’m visiting Dana Boyd at Microsoft Research.

This may fall on the last question, but I find the book really compelling so I just want to test it a little bit. I wonder if to make the argument as strong as you make it, you have to downplay the places where we encounter the things in the center. So, you’ve got the chapter that indicates that that chapter is going to be a big part of the story. And I guess I’m either thinking about the places that will persist that offer on purpose the kind of range of topics or range of perspectives or what you think might step into that space.

You mentioned Michael Schintzin, he has a sort of mental exercise where you (inaudible) if all the researchers die and then we’ve just got blogs and people posting and Tweeting, what he thinks will happen is that someone will start to develop a site that recommends the best information and basically what he recreates is something like journalism.

So, I guess I wanted to hear what you thought about that service and in two dimensions. So, I think in the conversation we’re talking both about whether we’re exposed to two differently political viewpoints and whether we’re exposed to topics that we wouldn’t search for otherwise.

So, what do you imagine could fill that gap or could you really – does this argument really depend on that thing falling away entirely?

ELI PARISER: I think I get what you’re asking about but if you can just clarify; so is the question what kind of institutions could come up that could play the role that newspapers or journalistic ethics have played? Or –

CHARLTON GALLEPSIE: Yeah, and I imagine and a part of that depends on assuming that the ones that we have have gone away so is that a necessary part of this argument that is true?

ELI PARISER: (Overlapping remarks) Well I guess I think that it’s not that newspapers will necessarily – you know, I wouldn’t be on all newspapers going away although I would certainly bet on a lot of them going away.

But in a way it’s a question of where do you start? Do you start by loading up the New York Times or do you start by going to Facebook and getting Facebook’s kind of aggregated set of links? And I guess it is a bet that if you project five or ten years in the future that the place that people start looks more like Facebook or some kind of personalized feed, then it looks like the New York Times.

And then so the question is sort of like if that’s the case, which incidentally I don’t even think has to be a bad thing. It could be a really good thing. But the question is how do you build that thing so that it’s doing some of the things that newspapers did very usefully at their best?

And in a way I think – I mean this is total conjecture so take it for what it’s worth – but when I look at these down texts and Facebook usage in the US and UK, I can’t help but wonder whether it’s because actually the Facebook news feed isn’t a very satisfying experience? That it’s highly optimized on a day to day basis but you can look back after a year and go – well, what did I really get out of this – if you’re not careful.

And that actually sort of building richer algorithms and tools that allow people to manipulate all this data better actually can lead to better products and more satisfying experiences and (inaudible) people.

You know, the metaphor I used in the book but that has stuck with me just tools that help mediate between the most compulsive (inaudible) self and the more longer term inspirational self feed both of those.

And I think that’s sort of the – the exciting spin on all of this is that there are actually a lot of people that seem to be working on that problem and I’ve gotten emails from a bunch of people are excited about it and think there will be a really –

0:55:44

-- significant benefits to cracking it. But I think it’s personalization to a point, no it’s not just let’s show stuff to make people click more but let’s show people stuff that actually delivers more information value.

Does that answer the questions?

MICAH SIFRY: Just to rip on that a tiny bit as we close out, we are in a transition and the early stages may not be what the final sort of mature stage is going to look like.

You know, Steven Johnson gave a very interesting talk a few years ago in South by Soutwest where he talked about news as an eco system and how the tech news eco system had become this incredibly rich space with the rise of the internet compared to the days of MAC news. Like one magazine that you had to wait for.

And to some degree that’s the case with political news though it’s also clear that the pendulum has swung too far now just in the direction of hyper personalization but I’d say also the incredibly short attention span that we not only have as individuals but as a society.

(AUDIO ENDS)