Back in the days going online on the Internet means a connection to the world, a way to connect individuals together. However, there has been a shift in how information is circulating online. Most people are aware that our web experience is in some way customized for us by our browsing history and other factors. We do all this skimming, sharing and clicking on the Internet and many of us are uninformed about or uninterested in the forces that are controlling what we see online and how these contents might affect us in return.
The concept “filter bubble’’ is first introduced by Eli Pariser and refers to what we encounter online as results of algorithms. According to Eli Pariser (2011), the filter bubble is “your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online.” Algorithms make use of filter bubble to alters the way we encounter information. Eric Schmidt from Google once said: “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.’’
Nowadays, many websites offer personalized content selection based on our browsing history, location, gender, age, and other data about you. This result in information or feed that match our current opinions and perspectives to make sure we enjoy what we see. Which is to say, even if two people look up for the same term on Google at the same time, the result will differ. This is because Google personally tailors our search queries.
Some people might think that it’s a good thing since we can make sure that every piece of content we encounter is something we are interested in. However, we tend to forget that the filter bubble creates different categories and filter out things they think is unnecessary. We as human have the tendency to think that what we see is all there without realizing that what we see is actually being filtered by these innocent algorithms called filter bubbles.
Barack Obama also voiced his concerns regarding the danger from the social media filters in his farewell speech “[We] retreat into our own bubbles, especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.” (Obama, 2017). Filter bubbles can cause cognitive biases to manifest while amplifying the negative impact on our thinking ability in a logical and critical way. According to Eli Pariser (2011), the filter bubble is designed to consume information that conforms to our ideas of the world which tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias. Consequently, we constructed a world from the familiar from which there is nothing to learn from.
The question now arises: are we manipulated by the filter bubbles and actually become more narrow-minded because of the internet?
References
Obama, B. (2017) Read the full transcript of President Obama’s farewell speech. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-obama-farewell-speech-transcript-20170110-story.html
Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin UK.
I definitely think that you have a great point here.
I feel that we’re more and more surrounded by only the things that we want to see due to channels such as Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. These channels become echo chambers in which we’re constantly (and want to be) reminded that our beliefs are right.
This is only re-inforced by a confirmation bias which creates this never-ending cycle of the feeling ‘I’m right, they’re wrong.’
The most important way to combat these echo chambers should be to inform citizens to remain critical and sharply question their own beliefs and the beliefs presented to themselves.