The Filter Bubble

serendipity is often at work. “Blind discovery is a necessary condition for scientific revolution,” they write, for a simple reason: The Einsteins and Copernicuses and Pasteurs of the world often have no idea what they’re looking for. The biggest breakthroughs are sometimes the ones that we least expect.

The filter bubble still offers the opportunity for some serendipity, of course. If you’re interested in football and local politics, you might still see a story about a play that gives you an idea about how to win the mayoral campaign. But overall, there will tend to be fewer random ideas around—that’s part of the point. For a quantified system like a personal filter, it’s nearly impossible to sort the usefully serendipitous and randomly provocative from the just plain irrelevant.

The second way in which the filter bubble can dampen creativity is by removing some of the diversity that prompts us to think in new and innovative ways. In one of the standard creativity tests developed by Karl Duncker in 1945, a researcher hands a subject a box of thumbtacks, a candle, and a book of matches. The subject’s job is to attach the candle to the wall so that, when lit, it doesn’t drip on the table below (or set the wall on fire). Typically, people try to tack the candle to the wall, or glue it by melting it, or by building complex structures out of the wall with wax and tacks. But the solution (spoiler alert!) is quite simple: Tack the inside of the box to the wall, then place the candle in the box.

Duncker’s test gets at one of the key impediments to creativity, what early creativity researcher George Katona described as the reluctance to “break perceptual set.” When you’re handed a box full of tacks, you’ll tend to register the box itself as a container. It takes a conceptual leap to see it as a platform, but even a small change in the test makes that much more likely: If subjects receive the box separately from the tacks, they tend to see the solution much more quickly.

The process of mapping “thing with tacks in it” to the schema “container” is called coding; creative candle- platform-builders are those who are able to code objects and ideas in multiple ways. Coding, of course, is very useful: It tells you what you can do with the object; once you’ve decided that something fits in the “chair” schema, you don’t have to think twice about sitting on it. But when the coding is too narrow, it impedes creativity.

In study after study, creative people tend to see things in many different ways and put them in what researcher Arthur Cropley calls “wide categories.” The notes from a 1974 study in which participants were told to make groups of similar objects offers an amusing example of the trait in excess: “Subject 30, a writer, sorted a total of 40 objects…. In response to the candy cigar, he sorted the pipe, matches, cigar, apple, and sugar cubes, explaining that all were related to consumption. In response to the apple, he sorted only the wood block with the nail driven into it, explaining that the apple represented health and vitality (or yin) and that the wood block represented a coffin with a nail in it, or death (or yang). Other sortings were similar.”

It’s not just artists and writers who use wide categories. As Cropley points out in Creativity in Education and Learning, the physicist Niels Bohr famously demonstrated this type of creative dexterity when he was given a university exam at the University of Copenhagen in 1905. One of the questions asked students to explain how they would use a barometer (an instrument that measures atmospheric pressure) to measure the height of a building. Bohr clearly knew what the instructor was going for: Students were supposed to check the atmospheric pressure at the top and bottom of the building and do some math. Instead, he suggested a more original method: One could tie a string to the barometer, lower it, and measure the string—thinking of the instrument as a “thing with weight.”

The unamused instructor gave him a failing grade—his answer, after all, didn’t show much understanding of physics. Bohr appealed, this time offering four solutions: You could throw the barometer off the building and count the seconds until it hit the ground (barometer as mass); you could measure the length of the barometer and of its shadow, then measure the building’s shadow and calculate its height (barometer as object with length); you could tie the barometer to a string and swing it at ground level and from the top of the building to determine the difference in gravity (barometer as mass again); or you could use it to calculate air pressure. Bohr finally passed, and one moral of the story is pretty clear: Avoid smartass physicists. But the episode also explains why Bohr was such a brilliant innovator: His ability to see objects and concepts in many different ways made it easier for him to use them to solve problems.

The kind of categorical openness that supports creativity also correlates with certain kinds of luck. While science has yet to find that there are people whom the universe favors—ask people to guess a random number, and we’re all about equally bad at it—there are some traits that people who consider themselves to be lucky share. They’re more open to new experiences and new people. They’re also more distractable.

Richard Wiseman, a luck researcher at the University of Hertfordshire in England, asked groups of people who considered themselves to be lucky and unlucky to flip through a doctored newspaper and count the number of photographs in it. On the second page, a big headline said, “Stop counting—there are 43 pictures.” Another page offered 150 British pounds to readers who noticed it. Wiseman described the results: “For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, ‘There are 43 photos. That’s what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?’ We’d say, ‘Yeah, carry on.’ They’d flip some more and say, ‘Do I get my 150 pounds?’ Most of the unlucky people didn’t notice.”

As it turns out, being around people and ideas unlike oneself is one of the best ways to cultivate this sense of open-mindedness and wide categories. Psychologists Charlan Nemeth and Julianne Kwan discovered that bilinguists are more creative than monolinguists—perhaps because they have to get used to the proposition that things can be viewed in several different ways. Even forty-five minutes of exposure to a different culture can boost creativity: When a group of American students was shown a slideshow about China as opposed to one about the United States, their scores on several creativity tests went up. In companies, the people who interface with multiple different units tend to be greater sources of innovation than people who interface only with their own. While nobody knows for certain what causes this effect, it’s likely that foreign ideas help us break open our categories.

But the filter bubble isn’t tuned for a diversity of ideas or of people. It’s not designed to introduce us to new cultures. As a result, living inside it, we may miss some of the mental flexibility and openness that contact with difference creates.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that the personalized Web encourages us to spend less time in discovery mode in the first place.

The Age of Discovery

In Where Good Ideas Come From, science author Steven Johnson offers a “natural history of innovation,” in which he inventories and elegantly illustrates how creativity arises. Creative environments often rely on “liquid networks” where different ideas can collide in different configurations. They arrive through serendipity—we set out looking for the answer to one problem and find another—and as a result, ideas emerge frequently in places where random collision is more likely to occur. “Innovative environments,” he writes, “are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible”—the bisociated area in which existing ideas combine to produce new ones—“because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts— mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.”

His book is filled with examples of these environments, from primordial soup to coral reefs and high-tech offices, but Johnson continually returns to two: the city and the Web.

“For complicated historical reasons,” he writes, “they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.”

There’s no question that Johnson was right: The old, unpersonalized web offered an environment of unparalleled richness and diversity. “Visit the ‘serendipity’ article in Wikipedia,” he writes, and “you are one click away from entries on LSD, Teflon, Parkinson’s disease, Sri Lanka, Isaac Newton, and about two hundred other topics of comparable diversity.”

But the filter bubble has dramatically changed the informational physics that determines which ideas we come in contact with. And the new, personalized Web may no longer be as well suited for creative discovery as it once was.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, when Yahoo was its king, the online terrain felt like an unmapped continent, and its users considered themselves discoverers and explorers. Yahoo was the village tavern where