The Filter Bubble summary

It’s not unusual to feel overwhelmed by the seeming infiniteness of the internet.

After all, there is a mind-boggling amount of data out there.

Here are some numbers that’ll give you a sense of what’s going on: Over the course of a typical day, 900,000 blog posts are created, 50 million tweets are sent, 60 million updates are logged on Facebook and 210 billion (that’s right, billion!) emails are sent. And this is just the tip of the internet iceberg.

If that’s still difficult to comprehend, here’s another way of looking at it. As the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, puts it: To record and store the two thousand years of human communication prior to 2003, one would need five billion gigabytes of space. Yet this amount of storage would only hold two days of communication in 2011.

This overwhelming amount of data is the main reason people have embraced the personalization of the internet. Filters such as the recommendation features that many sites offer simply make the internet a more navigable place.

Media analyst Steve Rubel even has a term for what people experience when faced with the unfiltered vastness of the internet: the attention crash.

Today, it’s so easy and cheap for people all around the world to communicate and create content that there’s no way to catch it all. People jump from an email to a YouTube clip to a news site and so on without any focus or capacity to identify what’s relevant.

This is why the giants of the internet – companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon – started offering personalized filters that uniquely match results with a person’s individual tastes and preferences. With these filters in place, scrolling through the data becomes less overwhelming and finding and identifying relevant information is a whole lot simpler and faster.

Imagine if Netflix, Amazon or iTunes offered no personalization features. You’d have to scroll through hundreds of thousands of titles, categorized alphabetically or by genre alone, making it the type of daunting task that you’d be loath to undertake at all.