The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani

Author:Michiko Kakutani
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

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Long gone are the pre-cable days when many people got their news from one of three TV networks and watched many of the same television shows like All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. New Star Wars movies and the Super Bowl remain some of the few communal events that capture an audience cutting across demographic lines.

As for news, an increasingly fragmented media environment offers sites and publications targeted at niche audiences from the reddest red to the bluest blue. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other sites use algorithms to personalize the information you see—information customized on the basis of earlier data they’ve collected about you.

“With Google personalized for everyone,” the internet activist Eli Pariser wrote in his book, The Filter Bubble, “the query ‘stem cells’ might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and activists who oppose it. ‘Proof of climate change’ might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil company executive. In polls, a huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they’re increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”

Because social media sites give us information that tends to confirm our view of the world—what Pariser calls “an endless you-loop”—people live in increasingly narrow content silos and correspondingly smaller walled gardens of thought. It’s a big reason why liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, find it harder and harder to agree on facts and why a shared sense of reality is becoming elusive. It also helps explain why elites in New York and Washington—including the Clinton campaign and much of the press—were so shocked by Trump’s win in the 2016 election.

“If algorithms are going to curate the world for us,” Pariser warned in a 2011 TED talk, “if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance but that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important, other points of view.”

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