(via Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles” | Video on TED.com)
As well as being relevent to “information environments”, the nurturing of which form part of my innovation practice, this talk by Eli Pariser made me think of a few other things:
Firstly, I’ve always felt that a cultural solution would emerge to counteract the filter bubble effect, i.e. we would develop a way of describing it in language. I expected phrases to emerge like “how wide is your info?” or terms to refer to people you don’t agree with but have added to your information environment in order to lend balance, etc. Maybe this talk is the start of that process. Or maybe the response from the likes of facebook and google will begin to create ‘architecture’ that drives such cultural terms and behaviour. I hope so.
The other thing it made me think of is a previous TED talk by Ethan Zuckerman, in which he encourages us to “raise voices / go beyond babel / engineer serendipity / build bridges / cultivate xenophiles / rewire”. Both are great talks and encourage us to think more about, and design better for, what Steven Johnson calls “information spillover”.
