The Current Content Filter Debate Lacks Context
Mathew Ingram wrote a thoughtful post on Gigaom yesterday Do We Have Too Many Filters, Or Not Enough? In it, he does a nice job of covering the discussion framed around Eli Pariser’s new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You.
While Ingram, Pariser and several others who are participating in this “Filters Good/Filters Bad” debate make compelling arguments for and against, there is one missing link for me in all of this back and forth.
Context.
The needs of someone reading the news for current events has vastly different needs than the cancer researcher battling to stay current in their field of research. In the case of research and researchers, there is tremendous value in focusing their attention on the material that matters to them — leaving them more time for analysis and innovation.
At Attensa, we think about filters a great deal. So do our customers. Our enterprise customers need to know the internal activities at their respective companies and the Web-based news or information that impacts their accounts, prospects or areas of expertise. Automated filters reduce that fire hose of information and, frankly, the incessant interruptions that come with it, into a trickle. What’s more that trickle is personally relevant and gets more so over time.
In his recent book, Overload: How Too Much Information is Hazardous to your Organization, Jonathon Spira notes that there are 78.6 million people in the U.S. alone who are knowledge workers. I would argue that the vast majority of them have more to gain from intelligent filtering than they would lose.
Contrast the knowledge worker focused on professional information needs with someone seeking perspective on current news and events. In this context, filters have the potential, in Pariser’s words, to leave us sealed off in our own personalized online worlds. Certainly, there is risk in that. This mirrors the challenges presented by the philosophical alignment, particularly political, of news media brands in their quest for audience attention.
In another very thoughtful post, “On Firehoses and Filters: Part 1,” JP Rangaswami provides three guidelines for information filtering that are worthy of including in the discussion on how to use filters for the greatest possible benefit.
What stands out for me in these recommendations is his call to avoid filtering the information that flows to you if you can, and, if you must filter, place that filter on the edge next to the information consumer rather than upstream at the publisher. By placing the filter at the edge it can be highly personalized to the information consumer.
This is exactly how the Attensa StreamServer handles filters. As noted they can be mechanical (e.g. Use this fire hose, filtering for information by particular terms and topics; or algorithm-based, using the content attention profile of the information consumer.). Filters have the capacity to concisely deliver dashboards of important information that empower information consumers to maintain awareness of crucial issues, with far less effort — leaving more time for analysis and informed action. And, if nothing else, with that extra time, the knowledge consumer now has more ability to explore the vast amount of information available today on the periphery of their areas of focus.
In the context of the business enterprise, filters are essential. Innovation of communications technology has far out-paced our physical and mental capabilities as human beings to find the right information at the right time and do something with it that improves business results. The filter-free world being advocated has significant consequences for knowledge workers and the organizations that need them to intelligently guide the flow of information so it doesn’t get ignored.
I hope the debate regarding filters continues, but as we discuss these issues we also need to consider the importance of context for the information being consumed, who is consuming it, and how filters help or hurt the information consumer in all of us.