Cory Doctorow:

Pariser is concerned that invisible "smart" customization of your Internet experience can make you parochial, exploiting your cognitive blind-spots to make you overestimate the importance or prevalence of certain ideas, products and philosophies and underestimate others.

Decius:

This is an important discussion.

Aren't "filters" inherent and inevitable? The filters on the Internet might be different from those on earlier technologies, but we've always had filters and always will. Aren't "smart filters" the founding principle of MemeStreams?

If the filters are more "personal" today, overall there is much more information, and more diversity, than in an era when the entire population shared just a handful of major sources, namely the four broadcast television channels.

In some ways "The Filter Bubble" seems like a media technology-focused variation on the theme of Bowling Alone. Is there really anything here that McLuhan wasn't saying 40-50 years ago? Consider:

Each new form of media, according to the analysis of McLuhan, shapes messages differently thereby requiring new filters to be engaged in the experience of viewing and listening to those messages.

And then:

In social media circles, there has been much discussion about a (dare I say it) paradigm shift in the way messages are processed in today's digital culture. The focus of this discussion is in the nature of publishing and filtering; specifically, the shift from filter --> publish (mass media) to publish --> filter (social media). I'm still chewing on this, but I think our old friend Marshall McLuhan can help here...

The self-reinforcement effect of "filters" has forever been a characteristic feature of American society, and there is no particular dependence on high technology; see Tocqueville:

The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.

I have since traveled over England, from which the Americans have taken some of their laws and many of their customs; and it seemed to me that the principle of association was by no means so constantly or adroitly used in that country. The English often perform great things singly, whereas the Americans form associations for the smallest undertakings. It is evident that the former people consider association as a powerful means of action, but the latter seem to regard it as the only means they have of acting.

Thus the most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have, in our time, carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes. Is this the result of accident, or is there in reality any necessary connection between the principle of association and that of equality?

Among democratic nations, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another. If men living in democratic countries had no right and no inclination to associate for political purposes, their independence would be in great jeopardy, but they might long preserve their wealth and their cultivation: whereas if they never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilization itself would be endangered. A people among whom individuals lost the power of achieving great things single-handed, without acquiring the means of producing them by united exertions, would soon relapse into barbarism.

Consider Wendy Kaminer:

It's not as if the voters are going to go out there, and read the underlying legislation, do the underlying research on the issue. They're just going to decide whose word they take. You know, that's how voters decide these issues.

Zoom way out. The human sensory organs and the associated post-processing mechanisms of the brain are the dominant "filters" -- way more influential than anything Google, Twitter, or Facebook might be doing. Have you seen the gorilla video?

In 2008, Decius wrote:

Noticing is easier in a foreign place because mundane things are unusual. It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

The real story is not subtly malicious "filters". Instead, perhaps it is waning curiosity. Or perhaps the overwhelming variety of information now so easily available has produced a general tendency toward a fleeting, superficial kind of curiosity.

If we were to rank-order the factors that influence how likely a person is to spend a significant amount of time reading a particular book, Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" is pretty far down the list. More than that, anything Amazon might be doing or not doing is pretty far down the list. In fact there is a case to be made that the persistent underfunding of transportation infrastructure in the United States, along with long-term trends in work-life balance, have a greater influence on the probability of someone reading any book than Amazon (or anyone) has on the probability of someone choosing a particular book.

Filtering and attention are not unrelated, but I find the "attention" lens -- and the shifting balance between breadth and depth -- far more informative than the "filter" lens.

Sam Anderson:

Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. Everyone still pays some form of attention all the time, of course -- it's basically impossible for humans not to -- but the currency in which we pay it, and the goods we get in exchange, have changed dramatically.

Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.

The Fallacy of the 'The Filter Bubble'