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the filter bubble is invisible

from within the bubble, it's nearly impossible to see how biased it is

you don't choose to enter the bubble

the filter bubble can affect your ability to choose how you want to live. To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you're letting the companies that construct it choose which options you're aware of

You can get stuck in a static, ever- narrowing version of yourself – an endless you-loop.

Bowling Alone, his book on the decline of civic life in America, Robert Putnam

major decrease in "social capital" – the bonds of trust and allegiance that encourage people to do each other favours

our virtual neighbours look more and more like our real-world neighbours, and our real-world neighbours look more and more like us.

We're getting a lot of bonding but very little bridging

It's easy to push "Like" and increase the visibility of a friend's post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It's harder to push the "Like" button on an article titled "Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years".

"It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest," technology journalist Clive Thompson told me.

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

Starting that morning, Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.

With Google personalised for everyone, the query "stem cells" might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem-cell research and activists who oppose it.

on 4 December 2009 the era of personalisation began

What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone – where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you're a dog – is now a tool for soliciting and analysing our personal data.

"You're getting a free service, and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that pretty directly into money."

Acxiom alone has accumulated an average of 1,500 pieces of data on each person on its database – which includes 96% of Americans – along with data about everything from their credit scores to whether they've bought medication for incontinence.

Erasmus, in his 1512 textbook De Copia, stressed the connection between memory and reading. He urged students to annotate their books

He also suggested that every student and teacher keep a notebook, organized by subject, “so that whenever he lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.”

kinds of flowers

To him, memorizing was far more than a means of storage

Far from being a mechanical, mindless process, Erasmus’s brand of memorization engaged the mind fully

“We should imitate bees,” Seneca wrote, “and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it is apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state.”

Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container.

“commonplace books,”

Francis Bacon

“a gentleman’s commonplace book” served “both as a vehicle for and a chronicle of his intellectual development.”

The arrival of the limitless and easily searchable data banks of the Internet brought a further shift, not just in the way we view memorization but in the way we view memory itself.

Clive Thompson, the Wired writer, refers to the Net as an “outboard brain”

David Brooks

“I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more,” he writes, “but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants—silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.”

Peter Suderman

“it’s no longer terribly efficient to use our brains to store information.”

“Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored.”

Don Tapscott, the technology writer, puts it more bluntly. Now that we can look up anything “with a click on Google,” he says, “memorizing long passages or historical facts” is obsolete.

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking,” he was stating the obvious.

the surreal and delightful experience of Googling a topic only to unearth an old post that I don't even remember writing

it's what author Cory Doctorow refers to as an "outboard brain."

There's another type of intelligence that comes not from rapid-fire pattern recognition but from slowly ingesting and retaining a lifetime's worth of facts.

You read War and Peace.

Then you let it all ferment in the back of your mind for decades, until, bang, it suddenly coalesces into a brilliant insight.

We've come to think of human intelligence as being like an Intel processor, able to quickly analyze data and spot patterns. Maybe there's just as much value in the ability to marinate in the seemingly trivial.