Eli Pariser

A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn.

The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There's a big difference between "you are what you click" and "you are what you share.

To be a good citizen, it's important to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible.

The important thing to remember with the Internet is that there are large companies that have an interest in controlling how information flows in it. They're very effective at lobbying Congress, and that pattern has locked down other communication media in the past. And it will happen again unless we do something about it.

Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.

1973 Fair Information Practices:- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it is used.- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.- Your data should be secure...while it's illegal to use Brad Pitt's image to sell a watch without his permission, Facebook is free to use your name to sell one to your friends.

Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of whic you might not trust your friends with.

The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.

More voices means less trust in any given voice.

Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating "compulsive media" to get you to click things more.

Personalization filters serve a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar in leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.

Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.

Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days

By constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.

Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line _ to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities _ is one of human cognition's most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close.