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Vendredi, 04 Mars 2011 15:23

TED 2011: Junk Food Algorithms and the World They Feed Us

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TED 2011: Junk Food Algorithms and the World They Feed Us

TED 2011: Junk Food Algorithms and the World They Feed UsLONG BEACH, Calif. — With the birth of the internet came the promise — or so the myth goes — of broadened horizons and fantastic new ways to connect people and viewpoints in ways we could not have imagined.

But in reality, political activist Eli Pariser told he Technology Entertainment and Design conference on Wednesday, the internet has quickly encased us in personalization bubbles where increasingly the only people and ideas we encounter are the ones we already know rather than expanding our worldview.

Pariser, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action, said the Facebooks and Googles of the internet are tweaking their algorithms to personalize user experience, filtering content that shows us only what it thinks we want to see rather than all we could see — and should.

‘We all want to be someone who has watched Rashomon,’ Pariser says, ‘but right now we want to watch Ace Ventura for the fourth time.’

“It’s your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online,” Pariser said. “What’s in it depends on who you are and what you do. But the thing is, you don’t decide what gets in, and you don’t see what gets edited out.”

Take his Facebook page, for example. Pariser used to receive comments and links from readers on both sides of the political spectrum. Then one day he noticed his conservative friends had disappeared; only links from his liberal friends remained. Facebook, without asking him, had seen that he clicked more often on links from left-leaning friends and simply edited out the rest using an algorithm which hides from view the kinds of content with which, by past behavior, it has determined you are less likely to interact.

Facebook isn’t alone in doing this kind of personalization, of course. Two people in different regions with different interests will receive different Google results when typing in the same search terms. To test it, Pariser asked friends in different locations to search on the protests in Egypt and send him screenshots of their results. While his friend Scott’s results were full of links about the protests, Daniel’s results were not.

Google’s algorithm considers 57 different elements in catering its search results for you, and as a result, “there is no standard Google search anymore,” said Pariser, who is writing a book on the political and social effects of web personalization.

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