The filter bubble is morphing into something new — the agentic interface era

... in the filter-bubble world, there is still action and intent on the part of the media consumer. You had to go out to search, or to social media, with some type of intent — even if that intent was, or led to, doomscrolling. With AI, they caution, we will become more passive recipients of information thanks to AI summaries — both the search kind and the agentic assistant reports ...”

Chad Davis, chief innovation officer, Nebraska Public Media

I spent a recent weekend listening to podcasts. Often, I use weekend time to read and write, but that particular weekend, a large block of ice turned my refrigerator into more of a swamp cooler. As I sat leaning against the struggling appliance, directing the outflow of a borrowed hairdryer into the back of the freezer, I had the perfect opportunity to catch up on my backlog of podcasts.

Listening to Semafor’s “Mixed Signals” podcast, I was surprised to find out that Eli Pariser is back. Many of you may not remember Eli, but you’ve likely heard of “the filter bubble,” the term he coined in 2011 to describe the algorithmic isolation that was shaping our media consumption. Those were slightly more utopian times, and algorithms seemed like they could be a force for good — helping us reconnect with friends and more easily find the media we all wanted.

Pariser is a creature of politics. He founded MoveOn.org and Upworthy, so he’s intimate with the social media space. Of course, social media ain’t what it used to be, and how we interact online is shifting again thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).

More recently, Pariser founded New_Public, and he has a new take on algorithmic media — where information becomes increasingly mediated by AI. New_Public argues we are entering the “agentic interface era” (AIE). In many ways, the idea is an extension of the filter bubble, where AI scopes down all of the world’s information to just the information that supports your beliefs and tastes, both positive and negative.

The difference, as I see it, is that in the filter-bubble world, there is still action and intent on the part of the media consumer. You had to go out to search, or to social media, with some type of intent — even if that intent was, or led to, doomscrolling. With AI, they caution, we will become more passive recipients of information thanks to AI summaries — both the search kind and the agentic assistant reports, like the Gemini Daily Brief, which companies like Google want to provide you.

Check out the New_Public deck, “After the Feed: Trust, connection and the next era of social technology” on the newpublic.org site. And here’s some food for thought about that deck:

• AI allows for overwhelming harassment of individuals at scale. How do we protect our journalists, producers and staff from those types of attacks?
• In the AIE, we’ll increasingly create content for agentic (bot) consumption, so that agents will summarize for consumers. We will need to format our content differently to reflect that.
• The trend of people fleeing social media for group chats and Discord servers was only accelerated by AI-slopified social platforms. That means we need more focus on inboxes, messaging apps and alternate ways to connect online.

The filter bubble was defined by online activity and reflected your online identity, but in the AIE, the additional context of your inbox, your calendar and your documents will be included, mashing up work-life identities. That step-up in the feeling of surveillance will trigger a societal reaction. As we experiment with AI, we should anticipate that.

Chad Davis is the chief innovation strategist at Nebraska Public Media, where is he the founder of the Public Media Futures Lab and co-founder of the Public Media Innovators Peer Learning Community. Prior to that he was the inaugural head of Nebraska Public Media Labs, and led teams responsible for published experiments with AI, video games, virtual reality, 360-video and podcasting. He speaks regularly about the intersection of public media and emerging media and publishes a semi-regular newsletter under the Public Media Innovators banner.