Is the Yahoo, Google, Facebook filter bubble damaging our creativity?

A couple of weeks ago I watched a really inspiring TED talk from Eli Pariser titled ‘Beware the Online Filter Bubble’ – I breathed a huge sigh of relief and thought ‘finally someone else that sees through the smoke of the personalized world’.

I’m not in anyway against personalized content, I have used it in projects myself and in a lot of cases (if used correctly) it invaluably enriches experiences online and offline. However, I am a little wary that in some cases we are slowly being cut off from our informational 5-a-day and in the long run this could be detrimental to our creativity.

Here’s a couple of quotes from the people in power to get your brain lubed up, is this really what we want?:

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa” – Mark Zuckerberg, Facbook

“It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not, in some sense, been tailored for them” – Eric Schmidt, Google

A Balanced Informational Diet

Like nutrition, to grow as rounded healthy individuals we need nourishment from many different sources. Like we need to balance our diet between vegetables and desserts, we need to expose our minds to things in the world that are shocking, challenging, exciting, disturbing and inspiring.

For example, only eating one type of food is bad for you. Even if it’s pineapples. As yummy and healthy as they are, eventually you’re going to develop some deficiencies if all you eat is pineapple. So what do you think will happen if Google, Yahoo and Facebook are all feeding you only pineapples and nothing else? 

A Tunnel Full Of Mirrors

Content based on content that you’re already looking at – you end up in a loop of only one kind of informational nourishment. It’s like when you hold a mirror in front of another mirror to create a never ending tunnel. Google, Yahoo and Facebook are projecting reflections of ourselves, back on to ourselves. Instead of giving us content that challenges our morals and opinions to create new trains of thought and ideas, we are in danger of constantly reaffirming our own opinions with similar opinions, just from other sources.

How This Will Effect True Innovation

The internet is our greatest tool. It’s a research trip to ancient Egypt when you have no funding, it’s a trip back in time to the mesozoic era until we can invent time machines, it’s a university course in design when you don’t have enough money to go back to school. Most of all, it’s a piece of social technology that allows ideas to spread faster and further than ever before. It allows you to implant a thought from your mind, into the mind of someone else and alter the way they think forever.

Creativity is the greatest tool I have. But I don’t come up with new ideas by reading or watching things that I already know about. New ideas appear when researching areas I know nothing about. The greatest feeling is when two completely unrelated areas of knowledge and experience suddenly collide in your mind. It’s the true ‘lightbulb moment’. The birth of something truly innovative.

So if the internet is most peoples first choice research tool, how are we supposed to encourage more of these ‘lightbulb moments’ if we’re always surrounded by familiar content? I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this, so if you have an opinion please leave a comment. Maybe you’ll change the way I think forever.

**Free Stuff Alert**

Read this free e-book on ‘The Medici Effect’ to understand more about cross-sections of global culture colliding to create the Renaissance.

Facebook Faux pas and failures

Another quality infographic from Mashable. This one is all about the secret and not-so-secret failures of Facebook. See the full image here on Mashable’s website.

On a tediously related point, did you know that we share more data in a week than Hubble computed in it’s first 20 years? If you like that little factoid, you’ll pee your pants at this content sharing infographic from Smashing Magazine, here.

Go on, add to the statistic and share this page around!

You Should Follow Me on Twitter

Yeah you should. Here, all you have to do is push this link with your cursor/finger/stylus-type interface device.

Now to reward your self for your good deed of the day, you should watch this rather fantastic video on called ‘The internet is my religion’.

Ta ta for now.

1 year old thinks a magazine a broken iPad

Having been born in 1985, and pretty much known the internet since being about 11 years old, I have always considered myself to be a Digital Native.

Raised in a time when the World Wide Web and digital technology have had their biggest boom, all of my teen and adult life has been spent online.

I remember the days when only one of my friends could afford a computer so we’d all gather around their house, listen to the screech of the dial-up modem and talk to boys from across the globe on Teen Chat*.

But no matter how many friends I have on Facebook, how many devices I have in ‘the cloud’, whether or not I can make Siri Tweet for me, it doesn’t matter that I’m part of a generation that shares more data weekly than Hubble processed in the 1st 20 years because, I’m not really a Digital Native. I’m about 10 years too early. However, naturally assuming you can pinch-adjust the sizes of images on the pages of magazines before you can even say the word ‘iPad’ definitely gets you in the club.

Old Fuddy-Duddy Warning: If you’re born before 1995, it will make you feel old.

* If any of you remember this website, in hindsight, don’t you think it was was really creepy how many times you’d enter a chatroom and be asked if you wanted cyber? – thank goodness for internet security now-a-days.

Source Plug: The video was originally found on Buzzfeed.com

If I said ‘click here’ would you jump off a cliff?

Like water and electricity, the internet has become a utility. We use it everyday and so, naturally, we are becoming more conscientious about using our time and resources wisely. We’re more considered now about what videos we watch on YouTube, who we follow on Twitter, what emails we open and what links we click. Because of this, more and more emphasis is being placed on User Centric Design.

I love User Centric Design, it’s a big part of my job, but I do think it’s too easy to get caught up in the word ‘user’. Makes it sound like users are a special breed of human only found online, somehow different to people in the offline world. I prefer to call it ‘people centric design‘ – because, as humans, we base our decisions on past experience. Offline experiences definitely influence online behavior.

What the brain does when confronted with your content

Something I think we, as digital marketing people, wrongly assume a lot of the time is that the choices we make are always conscious. Everyday the brain gets bombarded with thousands of different stimulus (from adverting alone) and tries to make sense of it all, regardless of the medium. But, as clever as we humans are, the brain can only process one stimulus at a time (yes people can multitask, but it’s essentially how quickly your brain can move between stimulus making it seem like multi-tasking) and within a millisecond the stimulus has been put into one of two boxes a. needs more attention b. irrelevant at this current time. How the brain makes that choice is based on all the information it can gather in that millisecond before.

A stimulus can be anything from a new email in your inbox, a call to action to ‘click here’ or someone asking you to jump off a cliff. The brain doesn’t treat offline and online differently when making this decision. Online stimulus are ignored just as instantaneously as stimulus in the real world.

So. To get people to do stuff online, we need to tell the brain, in a millisecond, why it needs to pay attention before it has chance to put the stimulus in box b.

Why ‘click here’ will get you in box b.

Here is an example of why using only ‘click here’ and adding a hyperlink will get your carefully crafted content in box b.

E.g. 1. Hyperlinking is essentially the same as bolding. It tells the brain ‘hey, look at me’. So it does. And by having only ‘click here’ as your call to action you’re limiting the information the brain can get quickly from the text.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Click here to Find out why jumping off a cliff is bad for your health Proin ut blandit ipsum. Morbi augue nulla, viverra non mollis id, pretium eget tellus. Maecenas adipiscing leo convallis nunc iaculis in pharetra lacus laoreet. To see the common injuries as a result of jumping from cliffs, click here. Donec erat neque, vulputate in mattis eget, interdum non ligula. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Nunc porta posuere arcu, non posuere nisl viverra sed. Jump from cliffs safely – to find your nearest parachute club, click here. Sed aliquet risus non nulla rhoncus suscipit. Sed sem ante, molestie nec feugiat id, blandit at neque.

E.g. 2. This example gets the brains attention right away. Telling it instantly what the text is about without having to actually read it.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Find out why jumping off a cliff is bad for your health Proin ut blandit ipsum. Morbi augue nulla, viverra non mollis id, pretium eget tellus. Maecenas adipiscing leo convallis nunc iaculis in pharetra lacus laoreet. Common injuries as a result of jumping from cliffs Donec erat neque, vulputate in mattis eget, interdum non ligula. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Nunc porta posuere arcu, non posuere nisl viverra sed. Jump from cliffs safely – find your nearest parachute club. Sed aliquet risus non nulla rhoncus suscipit. Sed sem ante, molestie nec feugiat id, blandit at neque.

So you’ve made it to box a. What now?

Should the stimulus make it to box a. the brain then takes a number of steps to decide the appropriate reaction.

1. It breaks the stimulus down in to a number of questions depending on the complexity i.e. Email = who is it from? What do they want? Will it benefit me if I open it? Jump off a cliff = Why? How far is it down? What are the chances I’d die?
2. One-by-one your brain searches through all the years of experience you’ve had and tries to find a similar, first-hand, past experience that will help you solve your current problem. If it finds one, bingo. Problem solved.
3. However, if there is no similar past experience to draw upon, your brain will then move to second-hand experience given to you by friends, family, magazines or even the telly.
4. Failing that, this is when the search for an appropriate reaction moves outside your own body and experiences. This is when most people move to the internet for answers.

Ok. Lets say I ask you to jump off a cliff. What would you say? Well hopefully you’d say no. Why? Because some kind of past experience tells you it’s a bad idea. So why should it be any different if someone asks you to ‘click here’. As a person in the digital world, when you see example 1. and are asked to ‘click here’, questions arise: ‘Why?’ and ‘Where will it take me?’. Then you have to devote time to reading to the text before the link to find out why you should ‘click here’. Then it’s too late, attention lost.

People will spend an average of 4 seconds scanning a webpage to find information of relevance to them. You know how many milliseconds there are in 4 seconds? 4 million.

That’s 4 million chances for the brain to disregard your content. Fact.