MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser has written a surprisingly critical book about the Internet. In The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from Us, Pariser acknowledges that he once bought the “mythology” that the Internet was providing a richer and more balanced view of the world than traditional large media companies. Pariser, however, has changed his mind. If anything, he argues, personalized web filters like Facebook and Google are giving us an even more distorted view of the world than traditional media networks.
So, when Pariser came into TechCrunch’s New York City studio, I asked him to lay out a solution to the filter bubble. And Pariser obliged, laying out three very coherent and practical ways that we can reform the Internet to make it a more transparent and informative medium.
This is the second of a two part interview with Pariser. Yesterday, he explained to me why a squirrel dying on your front lawn isn’t more important that somebody starving in Africa.
Have progressives lost faith in the internet?
On free culture and paying for news
Three solutions to the filter bubble
Shortly after the September 11th terror attacks, Eli created a website calling for a multilateral approach to fighting terrorism. In the following weeks, over half a million people from 192 countries signed on, and Eli rather unexpectedly became an online organizer. The website merged with MoveOn.org in November of 2001, and Eli -– then 20 years old – joined the group to direct its foreign policy campaigns. He led what the New York Times Magazine called the “mainstream arm of...
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