sailors would gather to swap tales about what strange beasts and distant lands they found out at sea. “The shift from exploration and discovery to the intent-based search of today was inconceivable,” an early Yahoo editor told search journalist John Battelle. “Now, we go online expecting everything we want to find will be there. That’s a major shift.”
This shift from a discovery-oriented Web to a search and retrieval–focused Web mirrors one other piece of the research surrounding creativity. Creativity experts mostly agree that it’s a process with at least two key parts: Producing novelty requires a lot of divergent, generative thinking—the reshuffling and recombining that Koestler describes. Then there’s a winnowing process—convergent thinking—as we survey the options for one that’ll fit the situation. The serendipitous Web attributes that Johnson praises—the way one can hop from article to article on Wikipedia—are friendly to the divergent part of that process.
But the rise of the filter bubble means that increasingly the convergent, synthetic part of the process is built in. Battelle calls Google a “database of intentions,” each query representing something that someone wants to do or know or buy. Google’s core mission, in many ways, is to transform those intentions into actions. But the better it gets at that, the worse it’ll be at providing serendipity, which, after all, is the process of stumbling across the
To some degree, the sheer volume of information available mitigates this effect. There’s far more online content to choose from than there was in even the largest libraries. For an enterprising informational explorer, there’s endless terrain to cover. But one of the prices of personalization is that we become a bit more passive in the process. The better it works, the less exploring we have to do.
David Gelernter, a Yale professor and early supercomputing visionary, believes that computers will only serve us well when they can incorporate dream logic. “One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add ‘drift’ to the net,” he writes, “so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you’re tired) into places you hadn’t planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.” To be truly helpful, algorithms may need to work more like the fuzzyminded, nonlinear humans they’re supposed to serve.
On California Island
In 1510, the Spanish writer Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo published a swashbuckling
On the right hand from the Indies exists an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it was populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons. They had beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong. Their island was the strongest of the World, with its cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons were golden and so were the harnesses of the wild beasts that they were accustomed to domesticate and ride, because there was no other metal in the island than gold.
Rumors of gold propelled the legend of the island of California across Europe, prompting adventurers throughout the continent to set off in search of it. Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador who led the colonization of the Americas, requested money from Spain’s king to lead a worldwide hunt. And when he landed in what we now know as Baja California in 1536, he was certain he’d found the place. It wasn’t until one of his navigators, Francisco de Ulloa, traveled up the Gulf of California to the mouth of the Colorado river that it became clear to Cortez that, gold or no, he hadn’t found the mythical island.
Despite this discovery, however, the idea that California was an island persisted for several more centuries. Other explorers discovered Puget Sound, near Vancouver, and were certain that it must connect to Baja. Dutch maps from the 1600s routinely show a distended long fragment off the coast of America stretching half the length of the continent. It took Jesuit missionaries literally marching inland and never reaching the other side to fully repudiate the myth.
It may have persisted for one simple reason: There was no sign on the maps for “don’t know,” and so the distinction between geographic guesswork and sights that had been witnessed firsthand became blurred. One of history’s major cartographic errors, the island of California reminds us that it’s not what we don’t know that hurts us as much as what we don’t know we don’t know—what ex–secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld famously called the unknown unknowns.
This is one other way that personalized filters can interfere with our ability to properly understand the world: They alter our sense of the map. More unsettling, they often remove its blank spots, transforming known unknowns into unknown ones.
Traditional, unpersonalized media often offer the promise of representativeness. A newspaper editor isn’t doing his or her job properly unless to some degree the paper is representative of the news of the day. This is one of the ways one can convert an unknown unknown into a known unknown. If you leaf through the paper, dipping into some articles and skipping over most of them, you at least know there are stories
In the filter bubble, things look different. You don’t see the things that don’t interest you at all. You’re not even latently aware that there are major events and ideas you’re missing. Nor can you take the links you do see and assess how representative they are without an understanding of what the broader environment from which they were selected looks like. As any statistician will tell you, you can’t tell how biased the sample is from looking at the sample alone: You need something to compare it to.
As a last resort, you might look at your selection and ask yourself if it
We’re never able to experience the whole world at once. But the best information tools give us a sense of where we stand in it—literally, in the case of a library, and figuratively in the case of a newspaper front page. This was one of the CIA’s primary errors with Yuri Nosenko. The agency had collected a specialized subset of information about Nosenko without realizing how specialized it was, and thus despite the many brilliant analysts working for years on the case, it missed what would have been obvious from a whole picture of the man.
Because personalized filters usually have no Zoom Out function, it’s easy to lose your bearings, to believe the world is a narrow island when in fact it’s an immense, varied continent.
4
The You Loop
I believe this is the quest for what a personal computer really is. It is to capture one’s entire life.
You have one identity,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told journalist David Kirkpatrick for his book
