Review of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, by Eli Pariser, Penguin USA, 304 pages, 2011 $25.95

The Filter Bubble is a salvo fired over the epistemological challenges wrought by Internet filters. Overwrought is more like it.

Upon reading The Filter Bubble, I was reminded of the equally overwrought Zager and Evans single from the 1960s, “In the Year 2525,” in which the singer laments, “In the year 5555, your arms hanging limp by your side/Your legs got nothing to do/Some machine’s doing that for you.” Pariser’s updated but similarly exaggerated complaint is about creativity atrophying as a consequence of Internet search filters.

Pariser—former executive director of the big-government advocacy group MoveOn.org—portrays a dystopian future in which every Internet user plunges unawares into an echo chamber of his or her respective ideology because personal information collected through profiles, cookies, and memories of previous searches may end up doing all the thinking for the user.

This may be acceptable if Pariser agrees with your worldview, but he warns against “birthers,” “truthers,” and the pesky “pajama” media that brought about Dan Rather’s downfall. In this latter instance, Pariser strains credulity by insisting “it took print and broadcast media to fan the flames into a career-burning conflagration” after blogger Harry MacDougald proved the CBS icon employed doctored military documents to disparage President George W. Bush’s military career.

Constrained View of Creativity
Pariser presents a constrained view of creativity as an external influence rather than an internal, private, and quite personal mechanism.

The Filter Bubble is rife with such unsubstantiated qualifiers as “could” and “may,” which appear as commonly as clove cigarettes and bad metaphors at a coffee shop poetry reading.

For example, “The Internet could promote the same kind of intense, narrow focus you get from a drug like Adderall,” writes Pariser, name-checking the commonly used medication prescribed for attention-deficit disorder. “Personalization can get in the way of creativity and innovation,” he adds, before launching into perhaps his book’s biggest howlers:

First, the filter bubble artificially limits the size of our ‘solution horizon’—the mental space in which we search for solutions to problems. Second, the information environment inside the filter bubble will tend to lack some of the key traits that spur creativity. We’re more likely to come up with new ideas in some environments than in others; the contexts that filtering creates aren’t the ones best suited to creative thinking. Finally, the filter bubble encourages a more passive approach to acquiring information, which is at odds with the kind of exploration that leads to discovery. When your doorstep is crowded with salient content, there’s little reason to travel any farther.”

Pariser follows this paragraph with a lengthy discussion of the nature of creativity, employing pre-Internet thinkers such as Arthur Koestler and Friedrich Kekule to bolster his argument. Nowhere, however, does he present evidence to support his assertions that the potential to limit creativity by Internet filtering actually occurs, only that it might happen if continued unabated.

Newton Minow Redux
It seems Pariser succumbs to the logical fallacy that any new technology poses inherent threats to creativity. This sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing is reminiscent of former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton M. Minow’s infamous 1961 quote that “commercial television is a vast wasteland.”

Then, as now, the correct response is “pish-tosh!” In 1961, television was yet in its nascent stages. Every banal Gilligan’s Island (a program featuring an unseaworthy boat satirically named the U.S.S. Minnow) was matched by episodes of sublime drama, culture, and, yes, humor as witnessed by Rob Petrie dodging that darned ottoman and engaging in witty repartee with his gorgeous wife and quirky coworkers, Archie Bunker doing battle with the Meathead and the encroachment of civil rights and feminism, and Hawkeye Pierce and his skirt-chasing, chronically tippling military hospital buddies eliciting guffaws while depicting the horrors of war.

Creativity Cannot Be Filtered
These examples may not be everyone’s cup of cultural tea, but television—much like Internet searches—is hardly the passive exercise Minow warned against and Pariser depicts. Don’t like a television program? Turn the channel—there are now hundreds of them. Conducting a search on the U.S. Civil War and Howard Zinn appears at the top of your Google list? Refine your search and read what Shelby Foote wrote about it.

Creative people are just that—creative—and no amount of search-engine filtering will destroy that. It’s curious that Pariser would quote Koestler in discussing creativity. The Hungarian-born author’s most famous work, Darkness at Noon, is a novel that shows what occurs in a society (specifically, the 1930s Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin’s notorious show trials) where it’s Leviathan rather than media that stifles the human spirit.

Minow wanted television to supply a steady diet of Shakespeare, classical music, and dancing men in tights—to be ensured by pumping taxpayer dollars into a public broadcast enterprise. Similarly, Pariser asserts government as a remedy for the follies of the great unwashed public too silly and easily led like sheep by so-called “passive” personalized searches.

Minow titled his speech “Television and the Public Interest,” and Pariser seems equally hell-bent on “protecting” us from the Internet, under the same guise of what society’s blinkered micro-managers deem best for the rest of us. I suggest we just hit “delete” when he shows up.

This review originally appeared in The Heartland Institute’s Infotech & Telecom News.