everywhere you go.
Meanwhile, in the city of ghettos, some people get trapped in the small world of a single subculture that doesn’t really represent who they are. Without connections and overlap between communities, subcultures that make up the city don’t evolve. As a result, the ghettos breed stagnation and intolerance.
But Alexander offers a third possibility: a happy medium between closed ghettos and the undifferentiated mass of the heterogeneous city. He called it the mosaic of subcultures. In order to achieve this kind of city, Alexander explains, designers should encourage neighborhoods with cultural character, “but though these subcultures must be sharp and distinct and separate, they must not be closed; they must be readily accessible to one another, so that a person can move easily from one to another, and can settle in the one which suits him best.” Alexander’s mosaic is based on two premises about human life: First, a person can only fully become him- or herself in a place where he or she “receives support for his idiosyncrasies from the people and values which surround him.” And second, as the quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests, you have to see lots of ways of living in order to choose the best life for yourself. This is what the best cities do: They cultivate a vibrant array of cultures and allow their citizens to find their way to the neighborhoods and traditions in which they’re most at home.
Alexander was writing about cities, but what’s beautiful about
What Individuals Can Do
Social-media researcher danah boyd was right when she warned that we are at risk of the “psychological equivalent of obesity.” And while creating a healthy information diet requires action on the part of the companies that supply the food, that doesn’t work unless we also change our own habits. Corn syrup vendors aren’t likely to change their practices until consumers demonstrate that they’re looking for something else.
Here’s one place to start: Stop being a mouse.
On an episode of the radio program
But the punch line is that they’re all unnecessary. Woolworth has an easy job, because the existing traps are very cheap and work within a day 88 percent of the time. Mousetraps work because mice generally establish a food-seeking route within ten feet of where they are, returning to it up to thirty times a day. Place a trap in its vicinity, and chances are very good that you’ll catch your mouse.
Most of us are pretty mouselike in our information habits. I admittedly am: There are three or four Web sites that I check frequently each day, and I rarely vary them or add new ones to my repertoire. “Whether we live in Calcutta or San Francisco,” Matt Cohler told me, “we all kinda do the same thing over and over again most of the time. And jumping out of that recursion loop is not easy to do.” Habits are hard to break. But just as you notice more about the place you live when you take a new route to work, varying your path online dramatically increases your likelihood of encountering new ideas and people.
Just by stretching your interests in new directions, you give the personalizing code more breadth to work with. Someone who shows interest in opera and comic books and South African politics and Tom Cruise is harder to pigeonhole than someone who just shows interest in one of those things. And by constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.
Going off the beaten track is scary at first, but the experiences we have when we come across new ideas, people, and cultures are powerful. They make us feel human. Serendipity is a shortcut to joy.
For some of the “identity cascade” problems discussed in chapter 5, regularly erasing the cookies your Internet browser uses to identify who you are is a partial cure. Most browsers these days make erasing cookies pretty simple—you just select Options or Preferences and then choose Erase cookies. And many personalized ad networks are offering consumers the option to opt out. I’m posting an updated and more detailed list of places to opt out on the Web site for this book, www.thefilterbubble.com.
But because personalization is more or less unavoidable, opting out entirely isn’t a particularly viable route for most of us. You can run all of your online activities in an “incognito” window, where less of your personal information is stored, but it’ll be increasingly impractical—many services simply won’t work the way they’re supposed to. (This is why, as I describe below, I don’t think the Do Not Track list currently under consideration by the FTC is a viable strategy.) And of course, Google personalizes based on your Internet address, location, and a number of other factors even if you’re entirely logged out and on a brand-new laptop.
A better approach is to choose to use sites that give users more control and visibility over how their filters work and how they use your personal information.
For example, consider the difference between Twitter and Facebook. In many ways, the two sites are very similar. They both offer people the opportunity to share blips of information and links to videos, news, and photographs. They both offer the opportunity to hear from the people you want to hear from and screen out the people you don’t.
But Twitter’s universe is based on a few very simple, mostly transparent rules—what one Twitter supporter called “a thin layer of regulation.” Unless you go out of your way to lock your account, everything you do is public to everyone. You can subscribe to anyone’s feed that you like without their permission, and then you see a time- ordered stream of updates that includes everything everyone you’re following says.
In comparison, the rules that govern Facebook’s information universe are maddeningly opaque and seem to change almost daily. If you post a status update, your friends may or may not see it, and you may or may not see theirs. (This is true even in the Most Recent view that many users assume shows all of the updates—it doesn’t.) Different types of content are likely to show up at different rates—if you post a video, for example, it’s more likely to be seen by your friends than a status update. And the information you share with the site itself is private one day and public the next. There’s no excuse, for example, for asking users to declare which Web sites they’re “fans” of with the promise that it’ll be shown only to their friends, and then releasing that information to the world, as Facebook did in 2009.
Because Twitter operates on the basis of a few simple, easily understandable rules, it’s also less susceptible to what venture capitalist Brad Burnham (whose Union Square Ventures was Twitter’s primary early investor) calls the tyranny of the default. There’s great power in setting the default option when people are given a choice. Dan Ariely, the behavioral economist, illustrates the principle with a chart showing organ donation rates in different European countries. In England, the Netherlands, and Austria, the rates hover around 10 percent to 15 percent, but in France, Germany, and Belgium, donation rates are in the high 90s. Why? In the first set of countries, you have to check a box giving permission for your organs to be donated. In the second, you have to check a box to say you
If people will let defaults determine the fate of our friends who need lungs and hearts, we’ll certainly let them determine how we share information a lot of the time. That’s not because we’re stupid. It’s because we’re busy, have limited attention with which to make decisions, and generally trust that if everyone else is doing something, it’s OK for us to do it too. But this trust is often misplaced. Facebook has wielded this power with great intentionality—shifting the defaults on privacy settings in order to encourage masses of people to make their posts
