Akademik

n.

Search results, recommendations, and other online data that have been filtered to match your interests, thus preventing you from seeing data outside of those interests.

Those same kind of surprises don't seem to happen to me the same way with online information. In the digital world, I find myself tending toward existing in a self-selected filter bubble. It's the difference between getting too much of what I like and not enough of what I need.

—Kevin Griffin, " Front: Your Former Vancouver Art Magazine: http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/cultureseen/archive/2011/06/24/front-your-former-vancouver-art-magazine.aspx," The Vancouver Sun, June 24, 2011

The real danger, right now, is losing engagement due to people finding themselves in a filter bubble, where people are never challenged by viewpoints that oppose what they already think.

—Duncan Geere, " Clicktivism's assault on dictators, politics and NGOs: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-06/23/guardian-activate-2011," Wired UK, June 23, 2011

Eli terms this phenomenon a "filter bubble" — a special sort of echo chamber. The better our filters get, the less likely we are to be exposed to something novel, unexpected, or uncomfortable.

—Ethan Zuckerman, " Eli Pariser on Filter Bubbles: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/06/03/eli-pariser-on-filter-bubbles/," My heart's in Accra," June 3, 2010

The phrase filter bubble was coined by Eli Pariser, the president of MoveOn.org, in a June 3, 2010 talk at the Personal Democracy Forum:

All this personalization creates a unique information ecosystem for every person. Let's call it a filter bubble.

I'm glad someone finally coined a term for this. I'd been sending emails to Alta Vista yonks ago (then Google) about putting this exact idea into their search engines from the start.