Top 35 Eli Pariser Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

2. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

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

— Eli Pariser

4. “A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there’s nothing to learn.”

— Eli Pariser

5. “The personalized environment is very good at answering the questions we have but not at suggesting questions or problems that are out of our sight altogether. It brings to mind the famous Pablo Picasso quotation: “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

— Eli Pariser

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

— Eli Pariser

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

— Eli Pariser

8. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

9. “The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.”

— Eli Pariser

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

— Eli Pariser

11. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

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

— Eli Pariser

13. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

14. “Personalization filters serve a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar in leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”

— Eli Pariser

15. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

16. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

17. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

18. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

19. “More voices means less trust in any given voice.”

— Eli Pariser

20. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

21. “We bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.”

— Eli Pariser

22. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

23. “Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.”

— Eli Pariser

24. “If you only have one shot at writing a headline, there’s a lot of pressure.”

— Eli Pariser

25. “Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating “compulsive media” to get you to click things more.”

— Eli Pariser

26. “The most serious political problem posed by filter bubbles is that they make it increasingly difficult to have a public argument.”

— Eli Pariser

27. “The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There’s a big difference between “you are what you click” and “you are what you share.”

— Eli Pariser

28. “Google is great at helping us find what we know we want, but not at finding what we don’t know we want.”

— Eli Pariser

29. “Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line – to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities – is one of human cognition’s most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close.”

— Eli Pariser

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

— Eli Pariser

31. “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.”

— Eli Pariser

32. “But what’s troubling about this shift toward personalization is that it’s largely invisible to users and, as a result, out of our control. We are not even aware that we’re seeing increasingly divergent images of the Internet. The Internet may know who we are, but we don’t know who it thinks we are or how it’s using that information. Technology designed to give us more control over our lives is actually taking control away.”

— Eli Pariser

33. “Partisans are more likely to consume news sources that confirm their ideological beliefs. People with more education are more likely to follow political news. Therefore, people with more education can actually become mis-educated.”

— Eli Pariser

34. “Try to throw a rock through a virtual storefront, and you just get an error.”

— Eli Pariser

35. “Without sitting down next to a friend, it’s hard to tell how the version of Google or Yahoo News that you’re seeing differs from anyone else’s. But because the filter bubble distorts our perception of what’s important, true, and real, it’s critically important to render it visible.”

— Eli Pariser

36. “In a provocative article in Wired, editor-in-chief Chris Anderson argued that huge databases render scientific theory itself obsolete. Why spend time formulating human-language hypotheses, after all, when you can quickly analyze trillions of bits of data and find the clusters and correlations? He quotes Peter Norvig, Google’s research director: “All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.”

— Eli Pariser