Personalization: a blow against innovation

COMMENTARY Personalization is supposed to be everything on the Web: See what would interest you, and avoid anything else. Not only do you get the information you specifically want, but marketers can serve up ads for products and services you'd be most interested in, otherwise known as making your personalization pay for them. 

It's difficult to overstate how fundamental the concept has become in high tech and on the Web. Google (GOOG) has filed another patent application in the area of personalized searches. Facebook is trying to ride personalization to a $100 billion valuation. But there are major problems with personalization. Aside from privacy and the effect that filter bubbles, which Eli Pariser described in his book The Filter Bubble, there is another danger that personalization offers: a diminution of innovation.

Too good to be true

The promise of personalization is strong. We all have inclinations and interests. The more you know about someone, the better, you might reasonably think, you could answer their questions or satisfy their interests. For example, if you want to find a restaurant and the search engine knows where you live and that you're a vegetarian, it could offer suggestions of local places that had a good selection of appropriate dishes.

But few things are wholly positive or negative. Privacy can fall victim to personalization. Companies could easily conclude that there should be no end to what they should know about consumers. Google, Facebook, Apple (AAPL) and many others have felt the blowback from consumers and watchdog groups concerned about the level of information these companies obtain and keep. 

Another criticism, raised by Pariser, is that personalization becomes a form of insulation. When an information service such as Google, Yahoo or Facebook algorithmically chooses what you will see based on what they think you might want to see, it also decides what you won't see.

Soothing and innovation don't mix

Pariser's point is that perfect personalization becomes soothing and eliminates the information that you might not want to see, but that you should. News that you might need as a citizen could be shunted away from you -- not because of some entity's desire to manipulate you but from the logical conclusion of a form of automation designed to direct you only to that which you'd want to see.

However, citizenship issues aside, this tend toward insulation will begin to have a profound effect on innovation and creativity. According to researchers, creativity is the process by which people bring together ideas and concepts not previously paired. In innovation, a person or group manifests creativity in a way that proves interesting or useful to someone.

What fuels creativity and innovation is the conscious and unconscious gathering of disparate concepts, thoughts, feelings, observations and ideas. As researchers have told me, the best way to create creativity is to expand the range of things to which you are exposed. However, the opposite would also be true: The smaller the range of stimuli, the more difficult it will be to exercise creativity and, hence, innovation.

That's why personalization is such a potential problem for creativity. You become polarized by focusing ever more on a smaller range of intellectual activity. Chances are you've seen this happen in political discussions on social networks, where people of defined beliefs become more entrenched in them.

To be creativity, you need to stumble across things that you'd never have thought would interest you or concepts that are counter to your beliefs and assumptions. The more people depend on personalization, the less stimulus they get and the less creativity and innovation society and industry will have available.

Erik Sherman

Erik Sherman is a widely published writer and editor who also does select ghosting and corporate work. The views expressed in this column belong to Sherman and do not represent the views of CBS Interactive. Follow him on Twitter at @ErikSherman or on Facebook.

Twitter Facebook

Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.