Filter bubble


Thinking about media production and ways of developing technologies that underlie social media content and services, personally for me, is impossible not to remember so called media father Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan (1967) claimed that media is an extension of every human being, each medium is a “massage” to our entire body: "they [media] are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered"(McLuhan & Fiore, 1967, p. 26).

Media enables accessibility to the uncountable amount of resources; naturally, such a vast amount of resources cannot be distributed evenly in the society and in each of our lives.Nowadays, when the Internet is soFigure 1. Filter Bubble (Backchannel, 2017).complex and multi-layered, social inequality arises in the way that not everyone recognises the pattern, how algorithms work or simply just do not realise what is hiding behind it. The Internet has an enormous power to categorise people and show them what they want to see. “The new internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble” (Pariser, 2011, p. 6). Furthermore, social media focuses on each user’s customisation and personalisation. These personalised social media feeds become a dominant information flow, as Pariser(2011) highlights “personalised news feeds like Facebook are becoming a primary news source – 36 percent of Americans under thirty get their news through social networking sites” (Pariser, 2011, p. 8).

One could debate whether personalised social media has a positive factor or not. I thought that the ability to choose what or whom to follow in social media delivers some consequences such as place a user in a “filter bubble - which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information” (Pariser, 2011, p.9). The new generation, “Internet 2.0” has enabled algorithms that generate the hypothesis based on what users like. “They are prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what you’ll do next. Together, these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us (Pariser, 2011, p. 9). Every time you use a social media platform you enter this “filter bubble” and you let the underground of the Internet world control your options. “You may think you’re captain of your own destiny, but personalisation can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you’ve clicked on in the past determines what you see next – a Web history you’re doomed to repeat” (Pariser, 2011, p. 16).This leads to being stuck in a loop of narrow and static version of you and people you follow. Ultimately, the “filter bubble” surrounds us with people that have similar interest and opinions creating a social bubble with like-minded people. Therefore, in the area of social media, there is a need for technologies that enables people to break“filter bubble” and presents the world that one should see not the one that the user would prefer to see.

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