Book Review - The Filter Bubble

Following my previous post I thought it was on topic to mention a book I read recently called “The Filter Bubble”. The book, authored by Eli Pariser, discusses the several applications of personalization filters in the digital world. As several books I have read in the past couple of years, I found it via a TED talk where the author neatly summarizes the most important points. Even if you are not too interested in technology it is worth watching it. I am usually very optimistic about the impact of technology on our lives but Pariser raises some interesting potential negative consequences of personalization filters.

The main premise of the book is that the digital world is increasingly being presented to us in a personalized way, a filter bubble. Examples include Facebook’s newsfeed and Google search among many others. Because we want to avoid the flood of digital information we willingly give commercially valuable personal information that can be used for filtering (and targeted advertisement). Conversely, the fact that so many people are giving out this information has created data mining opportunities in the most diverse markets. The book goes into many examples of how these datasets have been used by different companies such as dating services and the intelligence community. The author also provides an interesting outlook for how these tracking methods might even find us in the offline world a la Minority Report.

If sifting through the flood of information to find the most interesting content is the positive side of personalization what might be the downside? Eli Pariser tries to argue that this filter “bubble”, that we increasingly find ourselves in, isolates us from other points of view. Since we are typically unaware that our view is being filtered we might get a narrow sense of reality. This would tend to re-enforce our perception and personality. It is obvious that there are huge commercial interests in controlling our sense of reality so keeping these filters in check is going to be increasingly important. This narrowing of reality may also stifle our creativity since so often novel ideas are found at the intersection between different ways of thinking. So, directing our attention to what might be of interest can inadvertently isolate us and make us less creative. 

As much as I like content that resonates with my interest I get a lot of satisfaction from finding out new ideas and getting exposed to different ways of thinking. This is way I like the TED talks so much. There are few things better than a novel concept well explained - a spark that triggers a re-evaluation of your sense of the world. Even if these are ideas that I strongly disagree with, as it happens often with politics here in the USA, I want to know about them if a significant proportion of people might think this way.  So, even if the current filter systems are not effective to the point of isolating us I think it is worth noting these trends and taking precautions.

The author offers an immediate advice to those creating the filter bubble – let us see and tune your filters. One of the biggest issues he tries to bring up is that the filters are invisible. I know that Google personalizes my search but I have very little knowledge of how and why. The simple act of making these filters more visible should make us see the bubble. Also, if you are designing a filtering system, make it tunable. Sometimes I might want to get out of my comfort zone and see the world from a different lens. 

Book Review: The Visual Miscellaneum

After watching David McCandless's TED talk "The beauty of data visualization" I was sufficiently curious to go ahead and buy his most recent book "The Visual Miscellaneum". As expected, it is a very easy to "read" book containing interesting and beautifully presented trivia. The main idea behind the talk (and I assume the book) is to present information in a visual way to make data more tangible. McCandless complains that the information that is given in the news is hard to grasp without context and shows, through his infographics, how it can be improved. He keeps a website where some of the visualizations are freely available and if you enjoy them and the talk then the book is worth a look too.

What is interesting about these visualizations is that they occupy a space between art and data presentation. When I was going through the book I was considering if they could serve as a source of inspiration for research data. Is there room for more artistic visualizations in scientific articles ? Should we try to make data beautiful or does the primary objective of conveying the result totally overrides any artistic intention ? In a recent referee report a reviewer asked us to change some of the figures because he/she thought that there were redundant elements in them. The figure was not even about data but about the workflow of the project. This is not a complaint, just an example that probably illustrates well what is the current culture in academia. We are trained to be skeptical and constantly looking for tweaks or additions that obfuscate the results (i.e. weird scales, exploded pie charts). Maybe in our effort to be accurate we forget how important it is to make an image intuitive and pleasant.

Review - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

On a never ending flight from Lisbon back to San Francisco I finished reading the latest book from Nicholas Carr: "The Shallows - What the Internet is doing to our brains". The book is a very extended version of an article Carr wrote a few years ago enteitled "Is Google Making us stupid" that can be read online. If you like that article you will probably find the book interesting as well.

In the book (and article) Carr tries to convince the reader that the internet is reducing our capacity to read deeply. He acknowledges that there is no turning back to a world without the internet and he does not offer any solutions, just the warning. He explains how the internet, as many other communication revolutions (printing press, radio, etc), changes how we perceive the world. In a very material way, it changes our brain as we interact with the web and learn to use it. He argues that the web promotes skimming the surface of every web page and that the constant distractions (email, social networks) are addictive. This addiction can even be explained by an ancient species need to constantly be on the look out for changes in our environment. So, by promoting this natural and addictive shallow intake of information, the internet is pushing aside the hard and deep type of reading that has been one of mankind's greatest achievements.

After reading all of this I should be scared. I easily spend more than ten hours a day on these interwebs and my job as a researcher depends crucially on my capacity to read deeply other scientific works, reason about them, come up with hypothesis, experiments etc. So, why I am still writing this blog post instead of sitting in some corner reading some very large book ? Probably because I do not share Nicholas Carr's pessimist view. I actually agreed with a lot more things that I was expecting to before reading the book. I certainly believe that, like any other tool, the internet changes our brains as we used it. I agree also that reading online promotes this skimming behavior that the book describes. I observe the same from my own experience. What I find hard to believe is that the internet will result in the utter destruction of mankind as we know it (* unless saved by The Doctor).

It is just a personal experience but, despite my addiction to the internet, I haven't stopped reading "deeply". Not only is it a job requirement, I enjoy it. One of my favorite ways to spend saturday mornings is to get something to read and have long breakfast outside. At work I skim through articles and feeds to find what I need and when I do I print to read deeply. That is why I have piles of articles on my desk. This just to say that I found a way around my personal difficulty with deep reading on the computer screen. In other words, if it is required, we will find a way to do it. The internet habits that might be less conducive to deep thought are not worse than many any other addiction of our society and we have learned to cope with those.

I cannot imagine going back to a time when I would need to go to a library and painfully look for every single scientific article I wanted. Not to mention the impossibility of easily re-using other people's data and code. So even if a small but significant number of people can't find a way to cope with the lure of the snippets the advantages still overwhelmingly outnumber the disadvantages.

This topic and book have been covered extensively online. It is almost even evidence in itself that Carr is wrong that such a wealth of interesting and diverse opinions have shown up on the very technological platform that Carr is criticizing in the book (granted that some of these are also newspapers :). Examples:

Mind Over Mass Media (by Steven Pinker)
Carr's reply

Interview with Nick Carr and New York Time's blogger Nick Bilton

and for a different take on the topic here is an interview with Clay Shirky

Books: long tails and crowds

I read two interesting books recently that relate to how the internet is changing businesses and society in general.


“The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson ends up suffering from its own success. I was so exposed to the long tail meme before reading the book that there were very few novel ideas left to read. The book describes the business opportunities that come from having a near-unlimited shelf space. While physical stores are forced to focus on the big hits, long tail businesses sell those big hits but also all the other niche products that only a few people will be interested in. There is a big challenge in trying to guide the users to those niche products that they will be interested. Anderson provides examples of recommendation and reputation engines from several companies (ie. Amazon, iTunes, eBay) that by now most of are familiar with. Even for those well exposed to log normal distributions and long tail businesses the book is still worth getting as a resource and for the very interesting historical perspective on the origins of long tail businesses.

“Here Comes Everybody” is an excellent book by Clay Shirky that describes the huge decrease in cost of group formation that we are currently living. Through a series of stories Shirky demonstrates how the internet facilitates group formation and how collective actions that before were impossible are now become the norm. His stories touch on ideas as simple as the photo collections in Flickr to the coordination of regime opposition in Byelorussia. I appreciate the somewhat neutral stance on the phenomena. The book covers cases where online groups almost change to a mob like mentality and others were groups of consumers were able to stand up to corporations to guarantee their rights. The outcome of easy group formation for the future of society is not easy to predict and this is well conveyed in the book.

The subjects and stories from these books are interesting for scientists also because they can influence the way we work. Science is a long tail of knowledge with many niche areas that only a few people in the world care about. The recommendation and reputation engines described could help us navigate the body of knowledge to find those bits that interest us the most. Also, easy group formation might one day shift the way we work so that the innovation and research is not determined by physical location but instead focused on the research problems.