We must stop thinking of the new filters and algorithmic practices promoted by the new digital intermediaries (and their digerati cheerleaders) as unproblematic, objective, and naturally superior to the filters and practices that preceded them. These new filters might be faster, cheaper, and more efficient, but speed, cost, and efficiency are only peripherally related to the civic roles that these filters and algorithms will be playing in our lives. Without subjecting these faster, cheaper, and more efficient filters to the close ethical scrutiny they deserve, we risk committing one of the many fallacies of solutionism and celebrating improvements related to less important problems while completely neglecting more burning, but less obvious, issues.

Turow draws a rather depressing conclusion from all of this, but it’s hard to disagree: “We are entering a world of intensively customized content, a world in which publishers and even marketers will package personalized advertisements with soft news or entertainment that is tailored to fit both the selling needs of the ads and the reputation of the particular individual.” [...]

The implications of such shifts for our public life are profound: the kind of personalization described above might destroy the opportunities for solidarity and informed debate that occur when the entire polis has access to the same stories. But it’s even more important to keep certain modes of debate about these issues alive; we cannot just give in to the temptation to view such problems from the perspective of efficiency alone. Under the old system, where there was no way to measure the audience’s reaction to particular articles, the advertisers were engaging in practices that were terrifically inefficient—they had to place their ads in the newspaper without seeing the breakdown of how many people read each article—but this inefficiency was rather beneficial.