In Search of an Anti-Social Search Engine
Almost every site you visit tries to serve you content it thinks you will like, based on what similar people with similar interests have liked. And that’s terrible.
These algorithms are sealing us in; they’re dropping us into ghettos of similar content and making it harder and harder to find something surprising that no one in your peer group hasn’t already seen, commented on or recommended. Even sites like StumbleUpon, who’s concept is based on newness and surprise, use social algorithms to match like with like.
The problem of course isn’t social data. The problem is the all-consuming nature of this profiling.
More and more social media is becoming our primary news source. The Pew Research Centre found social media has surpassed newspapers and equals TV as the primary daily news source for American under-30s. The Reuters Institute Digital Report finds the same thing in British 16-24 year olds.
We’re consciously sharing news and content with each other, building up a social profile. Then being unconsciously served more of the same based on our profile when we look for something new. The prevalence of these recommendation engines means we’re limiting our exposure to new ideas without even realising it.
At best, we’re reducing the amount of content we’re likely to come into contact with to a carousel of the same content coming round and round again. But at worst, we’re trapping ourselves in a perpetual confirmation bias. As Pauline Kael famously said after Nixon was elected, “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
When come across someone in a comments section, who’s worldview seems so slanted and you wonder ‘How can they think that?’ This is how. Consciously or not they’re surrounding themselves with more articles, opinions and things that reinforce their position. And the worst part is, we’re all those people now.
Of course, you could say this is no different to picking up a newspaper that matches your political slant. Which would be true, if newspapers reedited themselves as you turned each page based on the articles you read and the ones you ignored. But they don’t.
Wasn’t the promise of the Internet that we had access to anything. Isn’t that what made it seem so shiny and impressive all those years ago? If the dream had been sold as rattling round inside an echo chamber I doubt anyone would have taken it up quite so quickly. The Internet shouldn’t be a sycophantic yes-man. Let’s find new ideas. Let’s test our own ideas with contradictory opinions. Let’s make our opinions stronger by testing them.
The best use of the social graph would be to use it to avoid everything your friends are talking about. How about it, Zuckerberg?
We need an anti-social search engine. We need an engine that returns only books that no one we know has talked about yet. We need recommendations of new music that all our friends haven’t listened to. We need videos that haven’t been shared everyone one of our friends and their mum. We need an anti-social search engine. Maybe then we can snap out of endless bouts of recommending box sets of The Wire and Breaking Bad.
