To the RSA's Great Room in 2011, to hear Eli Pariser warn of a “filter bubble” – our own unique information universe, where all the news we will see will be defined by where we live, what we earn and who our friends are. Pariser, who has also spoken at the LSE and TED was reviewed by leading commentators, believes that the personalisation of the web could give people warped views of world events, that our computer monitors are becoming one-way mirrors, reflecting our interests and reinforcing our prejudices, that the internet is no longer a free, independent space and that the "hidden web" is starting to control our lives.
Fast forward to the dawn of the 2020s, and there is is little to suggest, in our increasingly atomised world, that Pariser got it wrong.