Eli Pariser Quotes

We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.

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

Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.

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.

Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don't decide what gets in - and more importantly, you don't see what gets edited out.

The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.

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

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.

We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves.

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.

It feels great to have your own views reflected back to you, and you feel so right, but actually it's very dangerous. Because to make good decisions, you need to have a clear view of what all the options are.

If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible.

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

In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.

I think it's easier than ever to hear only what you want to hear. That doesn't make a good citizen.

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

In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. Along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now.

Democracy actually requires that the whole public be able to see common problems and address them and step outside of their own sort of narrow self-interest to do so.

Whether it's Facebook or Google or the other companies, that basic principle that users should be able to see and control information about them that they themselves have revealed to the companies is not baked into how the companies work. But it's bigger than privacy. Privacy is about what you're willing to reveal about yourself.

It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.

We've always believed that popular culture and populist politics go hand in hand. It's an honor to be working with so many respected and influential artists, and we're indebted to them for having the courage to speak out at a time when our country so desperately needs change. For our 2.5 million members and far beyond, the Vote for Change tour will have a seismic cultural impact.

We bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.

There's the part that I just want what I want, and I don't want to be bothered by anything else, and sort of the short-term more compulsive self. And then that's the longer-term, aspirational self that wants to be informed about the world and wants to be a good citizen. The best media basically helps us strike a balance between those two things.

Rather than saying people aren't interested when things don't take off, you should take it on yourself to say, 'I'm not doing a great job of telling the story in a way that makes it interesting.

If you only have one shot at writing a headline, there's a lot of pressure.

There's the idea that people should be able to control how the information that they're giving to websites is used and monetized in a more clear and powerful way. That's something that probably will need government action.

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

More voices means less trust in any given voice.