The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Eli Pariser’s New York Times best-selling new book, has been applauded by net skeptics like Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov as well as digital optimists like Clay Shirky and Craig Newmark. It’s an important book which argues that leading websites like Google and Facebook are delivering personalized information to us, thereby shielding Internet users from the broad news and ideas that traditional newspapers delivered to us.
Pariser, who is the President of the Board of MoveOn.org is concerned that the Internet isn’t living up to its original promise. And the Filter Bubble is a passionate polemic against Facebook and Google algorithms that simply serves up information that it believes the user wants to see. For Pariser, this is creating a less and less well informed public and compounding the ghettoization of contemporary intellectual and political life.
This is the first part of a two part interview with Pariser. Check in tomorrow to hear whether Pariser believes that progressives have lost faith in the Internet.
What is the internet hiding from us?
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