About Eli Pariser: Eli Pariser is the chief executive of Upworthy, a website for "meaningful" viral content. He is a left-wing political and internet activist, the board president of MoveOn.org and a co-founder of Avaaz.org.
Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of whic you might not trust your friends with.
It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.
By constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.
A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn.
Personalization filters serve a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar in leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.
Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.
1973 Fair Information Practices: - You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it is used. - You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others. - You should be able t...
Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.
More voices means less trust in any given voice.
Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days
The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.
Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating "compulsive media" to get you to click things more.
In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.
Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line – to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities – is one of human ...
There's the part that I just want what I want, and I don't want to be bothered by anything else, and sort of the short-term more compulsive self. And then that's the longer-term, aspirational self that wants to be informed about the world and wants t...
The important thing to remember with the Internet is that there are large companies that have an interest in controlling how information flows in it. They're very effective at lobbying Congress, and that pattern has locked down other communication me...
If you look at the history of how information flows, there was a time that newspapers were kind of in the place that Google and Facebook are now - how do we get more people to buy a copy? Then there was a shift in the early 20th century. They needed ...
Rather than saying people aren't interested when things don't take off, you should take it on yourself to say, 'I'm not doing a great job of telling the story in a way that makes it interesting.'
To be a good citizen, it's important to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible.
It feels great to have your own views reflected back to you, and you feel so right, but actually it's very dangerous. Because to make good decisions, you need to have a clear view of what all the options are.
