Eli Pariser, the author of the hot new book, "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You." Eli welcome to Tech Crunch TV.

Thanks for having me on.

So, Eli what is the internet hiding from us?

Well, it's hiding a lot. Increasingly because there's so much information these personalized filters are really taking off.

What is a personalized filter?

Well a personalized filter is what Google does, what Facebook does. Reading information about you and using it to shape what you see and what you don't. And it's the stuff that you don't, that's hidden from you. And increasingly this is how a lot of the major web sites on the internet work. Not just you know Amazon showing you products that you might be interested in but actually showing you content that is targeted to you in some sense.

Yahoo News is doing this. The Washington Post and the New York Times have both invested heavily in start-ups that are doing this. This is kind of the way that a lot The online experience is going is to provide not the internet that everybody sees. But a unique world of information for each person and that's what I call the filter bubble.

So it's a personalized page which reflects our own interests and passions.

That's right. I mean, it shows you the things that it thinks are, you're going to want.

What you want.

What you want, what you want to click, and the challenge here is that what you want is actually a complicated idea. We all want a lot of conflicting things. We want to eat cake, and we want to be thin. We want to read celebrity news and we want to be good citizens and so...

And speak for yourself. I don't read celebrity news.

The challenge is it becomes easier and easier just to see the sort of information junk food and not get a broader picture of the world.

So are you and when I enter Eli Pariser onto Google, that I would see something different from you?

Yeah. I mean actually this is, in particular that, you often get a widely divergent view between your own view of your own Google search, and other people's view of your Google search. It's a funny thing, because people often try to, like, optimize their own, spend a lot of time worrying about which link comes up first.

And it turns out, that's a totally subjective thing. It comes up very different for you than for anyone else.

But this is also happening with more important queries like Egypt or BP. I did both of these experiments, and actually one person gets a lot of information about the political angle - "What's going on in Egypt? or the environmental consequences of the BP oil spill." Another person may get results that are totally devoid of any kind of political content - BP investment,the, you know, stock information and, you know, on the Egypt side take us to Egypt.

So are you saying that the Google algorithm then what makes judgments on us based on our previous browsing history. Is that how it works?

That 's right, yeah, not just our browsing history, but all sorts of different variables, you know, what kind of computer we're logging on from, what the font size is, you know, what browser we use. And, it's trying to get a sense of what kind person we are and show us the links that people like us have clicked on in the past.

The challenge here is, you know, for a lot of things, you don't just want to see the world that people like you tend to inhabit. You want to get beyond that.

But isn't that Eric Schmidt's great dream? In fact, I think you told the Financial Times a couple of years ago. He said he wants Google to knows us better than we know ourselves.

Right, Well, and that goes along with the dream that Larry Pagehad from the beginning of giving us one, you know, the perfect search engine, he says, would give us one result: the right one. And I think, you know, this is a... that makes sense when what you're Googling for is "my dentist's phone number," you know.

It doesn't make sense when you're trying to get a sense of the lay of the land, when you're Googling "climate change," or you're Googling "Obama birth certificate." You want to get a... you don't just want to have your own views reflected back to you.

So what you're say really saying, then, is that these search engines, for example, are simply confirming, or trying to at least confirm, what we already think. So if we entered "Obama's birth certificate," and we were a Republican, it might validate the fact that he was born in Kenya, vs. a Democrat, saying that this is just a figment of right wing paranoia.

I mean those links might come up higher and in the news context, I mean Google News does this a lot, but all So increasingly Yahoo News and the New York Times has a little bar on the side that does this. You can miss things that are very important but not the most personally clickable. So, this is one of the challenges, some of the things that are most important for us to know about if it's homelessness or it's the war in Afghanistan may not perform that well as far as these algorithms are concerned.

They're not getting a lot of clicks yet there are some of the things that we, you know, with a war in Afghanistan we owe it to the people who are there to know better about what's going on.

Eli Periser, the author of a fascinating new book, "The Filter Bubble." Eli, are you arguing that there is such a thing as objective news?

No. I am arguing that, you know, the best editors give a sense of the lay of the land.

And who would be an example of an editor, who in your mind, at least, is a paragon of this?

Well, I think, you know, the best newspapers often --

New York Times? Wall Street Journal? Washington Post?

Sometimes they miss the mark, but they have a system of ethics that determines, you know, a lot of what's on the front page. It's not just the stuff that's going to sell the most copies. And the danger of this kind of personalized route it that, it, you can see how lucrative it would be just to show people stuff that's the stuff they're most likely to click, they most, they're most likely to like on Facebook, and there's a whole bunch of things that are missing from that equation when that's all that you're seeing is stuff that, you know, that, that makes you feel good about your views.

I'm probably going to get fired for this next comment but at least it will be public. We're in the AOL offices and of course Huffington Post is a more and more important part of the AOL empire.

Is the Huffington Post an example of a website that is doing exactly what you're saying, simply telling people what they want to hear?

Well, I don't know how much the Huffington Post is actually, you know, doing this kind of individual personalization. They have been doing it certainly on the left hand, on the right hand bar. You get a kind of recommended news for you.

But as a web site that was begun as a way of validating the progressive version of the universe.

Well, certainly, it does tell progressives what they want to hear, and that's a lot of their audience. I think.

And you're of course a progressive your Unashamedly one.

That's correct. But the different is at least when you go to the Huffington Post you know what the editorial sensibility is. You understand that I am going to look at the world through eyes of someone who has that prospective. The danger with these personalized filters is you don't know what the editorial sensibility is, you don't know who Google or Facebook thinks you are.

What they think you're interested in. Therefore you don't really know what's being edited out. You don't know what's being left on the side and that you're not seeing.

So the really important question is, why is Goggle and Facebook doing this?

Well, for a simple reason. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg sort of unwittingly put his finger on it when someone was asking him about the News Feed and he said, "Well, a squirrel dying in your front yard maybe more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. And to him the point was let's have news that is relevant.

Let's have more squirrels. I think --

Or at least more dying squirrels.

More dying squirrels. I won't, you know, I don't know what that means. But, you know, let's bring people's attention to the things that are right around them that are very relevant in their lives.

But why?

Because --

Not because, not because he' s --

He's not squirrel --

-- an intellectual relativist. It's because that makes him money, right?

That's right. No, I mean, it keeps people coming back, because, you know, it gives them these little bursts of information that are very salient. And I'm not saying, I think some of that is necessary, but I think the best media knows how to balance the squirrels with the people dying in Africa. It knows how to show us a bit of both.

Inknows us, you know, knows how to keep us engaged enough, that we learn things about the world that we might not otherwise, and not just show us the stuff that everybody likes, or that is most compulsively clickable.

But isn't it also a fact to say that whilst Google and Facebook don't claim to be in the editorial business, they actually are. And they're using commercial reasons to provide headlines to make more money.

Right. I mean this is the core thing. They say, we have no values. We are just building tools here. But the tools are editorial tools. They decide in very much the same way that the New York Times editors or any other editors decide, you know, what you see and what you don't. What you know about the world.

They are making ranking decisions and prioritization decisions and those are value judgements. And as it happens there's a particular setup value judgements that they are making about what people should see. Facebook has decided that what people should see is stuff that they like and like has a very particular valance.

It's not important . It is not recommended. It is "like" and that is what propogates on Facebook. Things that people like. I ran a marathon. I baked a really great cake. That's easy to hit like on. There is a civil war breaking out in Congo, not that easy to hit like on, it doesn't move across Facebook.

Eli Pariser, the heir or author of "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You". Eli, your critique is a very important one but does it also speak of a broader cultural or political malaise in the West that we really are now increasingly going on the internet to read or hear what we want to read and hear.

It's got - you can't really blame it on the internet. The internet is itself ideology and reflects more deeply rooted cultural and social phenomena.

Well, yeah. There's definitely other things at play here as well. The personalization trend is amplifying something that's already going on which is probably a function of a lot of us, you know, my generation certainly, growing up, you know, being told two thousand times a day through advertisements that we're the center of the world, that the price for the -

You're not blaming the advertisers for this, are you?

I am blaming, you know. I'm blaming this culture that reinforces this idea that the way to express yourself is through and that, you're sort of the center of the universe, it's...

But you're blaming, but I'm not...

...it's more uncomfortable...

Right.

...you know, to get outside of that world. We are not accustomed to being confronted with really different ideas. We grew up in increasingly homogenous communities. And the hope, I would have hoped that the internet would be taking us off that path. Yes, I live in world a bigger view of the world and something different.

And actually it's like we're taking our neighborhood on line with us. You can't get outside of that narrow point of view.

But I personally don't buy this Why don't people have more of a thirst for knowledge about the world? You just can't blame it on Coca-Cola or McDonald's.

Oh no, I mean, I think education also plays a role.

So we're blaming the teachers now?

Well, I'm not blaming the teachers, but I'm saying to use media is a critical part of how we then experience it. We don't have a very good media literacy curriculum in most schools. People don't know how to actually use media well, or find their way around it. And as, you know, this becomes embedded in everything we do.

We see the world through our cell phone or through our online experience. You have this compounded problem because people don't know how to think about the to people's attention you don't know that you're viewing the world through a kind of distorted lens.

So it's like Brave New World, we're not really even aware of what's going on. But, I mean, we could walk past a newsstand and pick up The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal and the physical papers aren't personalized.

Well the physical papers aren't but,This is the trend for the simple reason, which is that if you can do it with an algorithm that's a lot cheaper than having an editor. And I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing as an emulator. I think, I don't think the human editors are...I 'm not nostalgic for that time, but I do think that if we're going to make that shift, then the algorithms better be up to the task.

And they better not just show us sort of the most compulsively click-able stuff. They better show us what we need to know. Show us a diversity of ideas. Show us things that are a hard slog at first but then change our lives. All of those things are important as well.

So you still have faith in the idea of the algorithm?

Yeah. Well I think for better or worse that's the way that it is going. And I think probably for the near future it's some mix of human editors or human curators and algorithmic ones. I think, There are a lot of things at this point that algorithms just can't do very well. They don't anticipate the future very well.

They don't know that something is going to be news in three days. They don't pair information, pair different articles together very well.

There is a bunch of things that algorithms just are not up to yet, but I think that you really want these algorithms that so many of us are viewing the world through to be showing us what's really going on actually.