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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.

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.