Physical filters work by removing that which doesn’t make it through the filter, whether it’s the manuscripts that get sent to publishers or journals that never see the light of day, or books that don’t make it into the library, or coffee grinds.
Digital filters don’t remove anything; they only reduce the number of clicks that it takes to get to something.
In the digital age we filter forward instead of filtering out. As a result, all that material is still available to us and to others to filter in their own ways, and to bring forward in other contexts.
That is a very significant difference. You may filter those 10 articles, but all the other ones will still show up in a search, or tomorrow you may get them in an email from a friend or Google+ recommending that particular link.
– "Are we on information overload?", Salon (2012).
I think the interviewee overstates the difference between the physical-world act of filtering out and the digital age’s filtering in. After all, one implies the other.
But this led me to think about an imbalance in the way we design online experiences.
Websites and apps make it easy to filter content when we seek something: Twitter surfaces top hashtags. When you tap on one of them, you’re implicitly filtering (in) all posts that contain it. Likewise, e-commerce websites use filters as a central part of the buying experience. Sections on online newspapers are also filters.
It’s much harder on those same websites and apps to filter content in order to keep things out of our attention. Search, Topics, Hashtags are all top-level features on Twitter, but Mute and Block accounts are less easy to access. Muting keywords is harder still. I’m not sure it’s even possible to block keywords and sellers on most e-commerce websites.
In general, online publications and services are biased towards indulging distraction over preserving attention. And this is especially interesting because most of them rely on revenue from ads – for which a less stressed, more focused visitor ought to be more valuable.