英語視頻暢談歐美人文風情96：小心網路的”過濾氣泡”

Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed. And the...the journalist was asking him, "you know, why is this so important?" And Zuckerberg said, "a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." And I wanna talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like.

祖克柏，一名記者問他關于動態(tài)通知的問題。然后...這名記者問他：“你知道，為什么這個這么重要呢?”而祖克柏說：“現在，一只你前院里即將死去的松鼠也許比在非洲垂死的人還更和你的興趣有關。”而我想聊聊關于一個建構在那種關聯的理念之上的網站看上去可能是什么樣子。

So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, you know, the Internet meant something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would connect us all together. And I was sure that it was gonna be great for democracy and for our society. But there's this kind of shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible. And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem.

所以當我以前在緬因州一個非常鄉(xiāng)下的地區(qū)長大時，你知道的，網路對我來說意義非凡。它代表著一個和全世界的連結。它意味著一個把我們都連結起來的東西。而且我確信它對于民主及我們的社會將是很棒的。但是在資訊是如何在網路上串流方面，有個這樣的轉變，而且它是看不見的。而如果我們不關注它，它會是個真正的問題。

So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time: my Facebook page. I'm progressive, politically, big surprise, but I've always, you know, gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking about. I like seeing what they link to. I like learning a thing or two. And so I was kinda surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, 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.

所以在一個我花了很多時間的地方第一次注意到這個：我的臉書頁面。我在政治方面是革新派的，很吃驚吧，但是我一直，你知道的，努力去接觸保守者。我喜歡聽他們在想什么。我喜歡看看他們和什么有所聯系。我喜歡學點東西。而因此我有點驚訝，當有一天我發(fā)現那些保守者已經從我的臉書動態(tài)消息失蹤了。結果所發(fā)生的事情是臉書在注意我點過哪些連結，而它注意到了，其實，比起我保守派朋友們的連結，我更常點擊我自由主義朋友們的連結。而沒有詢問過我，臉書就已經將他們的消息給刪除掉了。它們消失了。

So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. Google's doing it too. If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are fifty-seven signals that Google looks at: everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see. You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's.

臉書并不是唯一在做這種看不見的、運用演算法的網路編輯的地方。Google也在這么做。如果我搜尋某個東西，然后你也搜尋某個東西，即使現在、就在同一時刻，我們可能會得到非常不一樣的搜尋結果。即使假如你已經登出了，一位工程師告訴我，有五十七個信號Google會審視：用來量身打造你的搜尋結果的每件事情，從你用什么樣的電腦，到你正在使用哪一種瀏覽器，到你所處位置。想一下：再也沒有標準的Google了。你知道，關于這件事有趣的地方在于它很難發(fā)現。你無法了解你的搜尋結果和別人的有多么不一樣。

But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google "Egypt" and to send me screenshots of what they got. So here's my friend, Scott's screenshot. And here's my friend, Daniel's screenshot. When you put them side by side, you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links, it's really quite remarkable. Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott's results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That's how different these results are becoming.

但幾個禮拜前，我請一些朋友去Google“埃及”，并寄給我他們得到的熒幕截圖。這是我朋友Scott的熒幕截圖。而這是我朋友Daniel的熒幕截圖。當你將它們并排，你甚至不必去閱讀那些連結就可以知道這兩個頁面有多么的不同。但是當你真去閱讀那些連結，它是真的非常引人注意的。Daniel在他第一頁的Google搜尋結果里完全沒有得到任何有關埃及抗議事件的東西。Scott的搜尋結果里滿滿都是它們(抗議事件)。而這(抗議事件)在那時是當天的頭條故事。這些搜尋結果變得那么的不同。

So it's not just Google and Facebook either. You know, this is something that's sweeping the Web. There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized: different people get different things. Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times: all flirting with personalization in various ways. And where this...this moves us very quickly toward a world, in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, "It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."

所以也不是只有Google和臉書。你知道的，這是某件正在橫掃網際網路的事。有一堆公司都在進行這種個人化。Yahoo新聞，網路上最大的新聞網站，現在也個人化了：不同的人得到不同的東西。哈芬頓郵報、華盛頓郵報、紐約時報：全都以不同的方式玩弄個人化。而這個...這非?？焖俚貙⑽覀冞\往一個世界，在那兒網路正在展示給我們看它認為我們想要看到的東西，但不必然是我們得要看到的東西。如同Eric Schmidt (Google董事長)所言：“對于人們來說，去觀看或是去消費在某些感覺上未曾為他們量身訂做的東西，將會是非常困難的。”

So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, if you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is kind of your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out.

所以我的確認為這是個問題。而且我想，如果你用全部這些過濾器，如果你用所有這些演算法，你會得到一個我所謂的過濾氣泡。而你的過濾氣泡有點像是你在網路上所處的，你自己私人、獨特的資訊宇宙。而你的過濾氣泡中有什么，取決于你是誰，也取決于你的所做所為。但重要的是，你并不會決定什么東西可以進來。而且更重要的，你并不會真正看到什么東西被刪掉了。

So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses: they enter the queue; they just zip right out. So "Iron Man" zips right out, right? And "Waiting for Superman" can wait for a really long time.

所以過濾氣泡其中一個問題被Netflix(美國最大DVD影音租售企業(yè))的某些研究人員給發(fā)現了。他們注視著Netflix的影片候選清單，注意到某件我們很多人可能也已經注意到了的有點有趣的事情，那就是，有一些電影就好像立刻被封入信封而送出到我們的家里：它們進入候選清單;它們就立刻封好寄出。所以“鋼鐵人”立刻封好寄出，對吧?而“等待超人(教育紀錄片)”會等上很長一段時間。

What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there's kind of this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. You know, we all want to be someone who has watched "Rashomon," but right now we want to watch "Ace Ventura" for the fourth time. So the best editing gives us a bit of both. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables; it gives us some information dessert. And the challenge with this kind of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that because they're mainly looking at what you click on first. You know, you don't...it can throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food.

他們所發(fā)現的是，我們的Netflix候選清單中，在我們對未來期許的自我跟現在更有沖勁的自我之間有著好像這史詩般巨大的掙扎。你知道的，我們都想當已經看過“羅生門”的人，但現在我們想看第四次的“王牌威龍”。所以最棒的資訊編輯方式兩者都給我們一點。它給我們一點點小賈斯汀和一點點的阿富汗訊息。它給我們一些蔬菜資訊;它給我們一些甜點資訊。而對這種演算法過濾器、這些個人化過濾器的挑戰(zhàn)，是因為它們主要是觀察你首先點擊的東西。你知道，你并不...它是會破壞那平衡的。你最終會被一堆垃圾食物資訊給包圍，而不是個平衡的資訊餐點。

So, what this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong. In a broadcast society...you know, this is how the founding mythology goes, right? In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. And 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. What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're gonna decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important (This is what TED does, right?) other points of view.

所以說，這事實上暗示的是我們關于網路所擁有的真相也許是錯誤的。在一個廣播時代的社會中...你知道，網路興起的神話是就是這樣子流傳的，對吧?在廣播時代的社會中，有著這么一些守門員，編輯，而他們控制著資訊流。然后網際網路來臨了，它將這些人一掃而空，并且讓我們所有人連結在一起，而這是非常贊的。但那其實并不是現在正在發(fā)生的事。我們正在目睹的東西更像是將火把從人類守門員傳遞給電腦演算器守門員。而重點是，演算器尚未擁有編輯者所擁有的那種內建倫常。所以如果演算器要為我們策展這世界，如果它們要來決定我們可以看到些什么、我們不能看到些什么，那我們就必須確保他們不是只朝著關聯性調整。我們必須確保他們也會展示給我們看令人不舒服或具挑戰(zhàn)性或是重要的東西(這就是TED在做的，對吧?)，其它的觀點。

And the thing is, we've actually kind of been here before as a society. In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities. Then people kind of noticed that they were doing something really important; that, in fact, you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of information; that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed. It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century. And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the Web. And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing.

問題是，以社會而言我們其實好像之前已經歷過這些了。在1915年，報紙并不像是很憂心于它們的公民責任。接著人們有點像是發(fā)現了他們正在做某件很重要的事;發(fā)現了，事實上，如果公民得不到有效流通的資訊，你便無法擁有一個起作用的民主;發(fā)現了報紙很關鍵，因為它們扮演著過濾器的角色，于是新聞倫理發(fā)展出來了。它并不完美，但它讓我們渡過了上個世紀。所以現在，我們在網路方面有點像是回到了1915年。而我們需要新的守門員，將那樣的責任編進他們正在撰寫的程式碼中。

You know, I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google (Larry and Sergey), who, you know, people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I'm grateful for that. But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. We need you to make sure that they're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters. And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't. Because I think 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 gonna do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.

你知道的，我知道這里有很多人是來自臉書跟Google (賴瑞跟塞吉：Google創(chuàng)辦人)，這些人，你知道的，那些曾幫忙將網路建構成如今樣貌的人們，而我對此非常感激。但我們真的很需要你們去確保這些演算法在其中有編入公眾生活的概念、公民責任的意識。我們需要你們去確保它們夠透明，以讓我們可以看見決定什么可以通過我們過濾器的規(guī)則是什么。而且我們需要你們給予我們一些控制權，以便我們可以決定什么可以進來，什么不行。因為我認為我們真的需要網際網路成為那個我們全都夢想它實現的那個東西。我們需要它將我們彼此全都連結起來。我們需要它跟我們介紹新的想法、新的面孔以及不同的觀點。而如果它讓我們通通被隔絕在一個單人網絡之中，它將無法做到那樣。

Thank you.

謝謝你們。