All the News that Fits You, We Print

Today I caught a little bit of Eli Pariser on NPR, talking about his book, The Filter Bubble. His point is that internet algorithms—he focused on Google and Facebook—invisibly tailor your internet experience to bend you toward choices you will like. That’s where the faux-NYT slogan comes from: “all the news that fits you, we print.” Google and Facebook work hard to create a custom-made universe for you—custom-made to provide, based on your internet profile, what you will like, and to hide all the rest. You don’t have a choice in it. It all happens invisibly.

In the extreme case, you will search for opinion pieces and only find those that agree with you. Or you’ll think that the only music in the universe is the type you enjoy. You can be shielded from the cruel world of difference—and you won’t really know that you are.

Of course, a lot of life is already like that, without the assistance of Google. I live on a street of people who are relatively similar to me in taste and income and education. My choice of a California residence shields me from some of the horrors of life in, say, Minnesota. (Also, from the horrors of life in Bangladesh.) I attend a church peopled by white Presbyterians, not Latino Pentecostals. I hardly know any poor people, except the children I meet when I volunteer. I’ve created a bubble of my own, and I don’t think about it very often.

Google has only managed to do for me what I would do for myself.

Whither Facebook?

I found “The Social Network” a very thought-provoking movie. Its interpretation of Facebook is quite negative, portraying founder Mark Zuckerberg as a socially inept dweeb with a ferocious juvenile longing for acceptance by the Harvard inner circle.

Whether or not this is an accurate portrayal of Zuckerberg, it is an intriguing explanation of Facebook’s astonishing success. Essentially the movie says that Zuckerberg’s longings were so crass and urgent, so undisguised, that he alone penetrated to the core of other people’s crass longings and saw how to exploit them through the Internet. Facebook, according to this interpretation, works because it offers a sense of exclusivity and acceptance (you can only go where someone who “friends” you lets you go).  It also provides you with information you can mine to make more friends and even partners. (“Relationship status” is portrayed in the movie as Zuckerberg’s flash of insight that caps off his creation.) Thus Facebook is all about social striving, a desire to make it with the in crowd, have a lot of friends (and let other people know it), and get desirable partners. A dweeb like Zuckerberg can fulfill his longings without actually caring for anybody. Facebook enables a virtual life for those who find the real thing too hard.

Is that really what makes Facebook so successful?  There may be something to the theory, but let me offer a more benign possibility. I think Facebook replaces two American institutions with a better, Internet-powered approach. One is the phone book. You can find people, and now institutions, on Facebook. (It is becoming both white pages and yellow pages.) At first it was fellow college students—and of course, college students most of all want to contact fellow college students. Now it is virtually everybody on the planet. If you want to reach somebody, you used to try the phone book. Now you use Facebook. It’s not perfect but it’s very helpful.

The second institution is the Christmas letter. Millions of Americans, myself included, depend on once-a-year letters, complete with photos, to bring the world up to date on their lives. It’s not particularly personal, but it keeps you in touch, enables you to update addresses and phone numbers, gives a short summary of family news, and lets friends assess the state of your bald spot and your waistline. You aren’t required to respond to Christmas letters; you don’t even have to read them. Some you read, some you skim.

Facebook does that, and does it better: frequent, effortless updates, multiple photos. It’s a better way to keep in touch. You can read what you want and skip the rest.

In neither of these institutions do I sense the ardent striving that “The Social Network” suggests. Of course, one must explain the hours some people spend on Facebook. I suggest that people spend those hours because they like gossip. Spending hours on Facebook is a time waster, but it is fueled by mindless curiosity and the desire to be in the know—not some craving for social acceptance and one-up-man-ship.

If my interpretation is correct, it means that Facebook will not transform the world. Phone books and Christmas letters are not revolutionary; neither is gossip. On the other hand, Facebook is not a great malignant cancer on society. Its future, this interpretation suggests, will be limited but secure. It will flourish as long as it fills these mundane functions better than the next new thing.

Twitter Revolution

Malcolm Gladwell has a good article in the latest New Yorker (here) in which he contrasts the much-discussed revolutionary potential of social networks with the 1960 lunch counter protests. Internet social networks are good at spreading word fast, he says. But the ties between Twitter co-revolutionaries are very weak—they have usually never met. Commitment to sacrifice and disciplined action are correspondingly weak. Real revolutions against established powers require sacrifice, and only deep friendships and committed social ties make that possible. The protests of the civil rights movement spread like a fever, took terrible risks, and endured great privations, because they sprang out of churches, where people met weekly face to face. The first courageous lunch counter protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina, lived together and had spent many hours discussing civil rights together.

The point of this is not so much to criticize Twitter and its kin, but to suggest that real change requires more than meet-ups. None of the activist movements of our time—whether Greenpeace or the Obama election campaign or the Tea Party—have that sort of sacrificial determination. And, it’s not clear where in the America of today one would find the social capital to build such commitment. Not in churches, by and large. Not in the political parties.  And certainly not in the vague, enthusiastic communities that find a home on the internet.

That is why we sit in the squalor of this dispirited time. Columnists (David Brooks and Thomas Friedman) contend that the real future in politics lies with a leader who can paint a vision demanding sacrifice and commitment. To which any savvy politician will answer: and get handed your rear end. There’s no constituency for sacrifice and vision more far-reaching that forwarding a petition to your ten best friends.