When the Internet thinks for you!
Here is an interesting Op-Ed in today’s NYT, which touches on the point I made in my earlier post entitled “Ignorance is Bliss”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/opinion/23pariser.html
I have been harping on this for a while, but Eli Pariser (of MoveOn.org) puts it very eloquently: “There is a new group of gatekeepers in town, and this time, they’re not people, they’re code.”
In Jon Crowcroft’s talk at BU earlier this month, I hinted to this issue — getting information through a social network reduces entropy — and alluded to the need for better “personalization” technology and algorithmics. Pariser’s point is that we should not trust editorial responsibility (the control of information flow) to code. If we do, then the Internet would have turned things around 360 degrees — by allowing us to bypass “an elite class of editors”, only to let code decide what people would see and hear about the world.
Related to (and influencing my thinking about) the above is the long-held position that “Code is Law” by Lawrence Lessig.
Computer Science is quickly becoming a social science!
2 Responses so far
John Byers
May 31st, 2011
4:55 pm
I missed the original article, but saw the connected article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/technology/29stream.html
which also points to the worthwhile read: Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”. While the NYTimes is no doubt a paradigm of journalistic excellence, it (and comparable oligopolistic news sources) already serve as sophisticated and highly optimized echo chambers. I’d argue that algorithms are not necessarily making the situation materially worse: indeed, good learning algorithms might well identify that a user is interested in multiple viewpoints. Generating a print edition for such a user is impractical (thus the polarization of Washington Post vs. Washington Times), but producing a differentiated feed is child’s play, or will be.
Bottom line: the authors’ positions assume that users are single-minded and that algorithms will use the greedy algorithm to maximize click-through rates, but nothing intrinsically prevents sophisticated algorithms from catering to users who prefer multiple viewpoints.
Azer Bestavros
May 31st, 2011
5:18 pm
Yes, you are right that “old media” like the NYT introduce and nurture echo chambers of their own, but when you or I check the NYT, we see the same exact thing. Personalization (however good) takes that away.
This is the point I was making in the previous “ignorance is bliss” post: “There is something to be said for having crowds have consistent views of the world…” or of their chosen echo chambers for that matter.
As to what objectives personalization algorithms may have — I agree they can and are likely to be more nuanced. I recall working on a “contrarian” personalization algorithm back in the late 1990s when I was part of the OpenSesame startup (now part of Adobe). The issue is not what objectives they may have, but rather the fact that they take away (or make it hard) for us (users) to have a consistent view of the world,
BTW, I only read news these days using the “InPrivate” setting in IE. It makes a real difference.
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