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The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. Eli Pariser. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 304p. $25.95 (ISBN 978-1-59420-300-8)
The development of the World Wide Web inspired the kind of utopian dreaming that often accompanies technological revolutions. In the 1990s, it seemed to many pundits that a perfected democracy, unbridled freedom, and the end of authority were right around the corner. In his introduction to The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, Eli Pariser, former executive director of MoveOn, recalls his own dreams: "To my preteen self, it seemed clear that the Internet was going to democratize the world, connecting us with better information and the power to act on it." (p. 3)
Nearly twenty years hence, Pariser is much more cautious about the promise of the Internet. In The Filter Bubble, he addresses a development that seems to be turning the promise of unfiltered access to information on its head. The filter bubble is Pariser's term for the rapidly advancing wave of online personalization that serves to isolate individuals and groups in information bubbles. Led by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook-but becoming fairly ubiquitous online-the filter bubble limits information access by personalizing search results, advertisements,...