The Filter Bubble
According to Eli Pariser, the filter bubble is “the potential for online personalization to effectively isolate people from a diversity of viewpoints or content.” This filter bubble will most likely affect your internet experience in some way, whether you are using Google, Facebook, or other search engines or social medias. Thanks to the filter bubble, you can search something on Google, and you will get very different results than if your friend were to search the same exact thing.
The filter bubble is trying to personalize your own internet experience so you can find what you are looking for or something you like much quicker. It has good intentions. However, the filter bubble can cause problems for people. It can limit a person’s access to a wide range of information. It is almost like a new form of censorship, except it sensors things it thinks you might not like instead of something inappropriate or unorthodox. Something that may be easy to find for one person may be almost impossible to find for another. An specific example of a problem this could create would be for students. If students are trying to research something online, one might have an advantage over the other and find the information they need easier thanks to the filter bubble.
Back before the internet, the people who regulated information that was shared around the world were the editors of newspapers and magazines. Pariser talks about how since the internet has become such a prominent source of information in the world, there has been a passing of this power from the editors to the internet and its technology. The problem with this is that the internet does not have the capacity, at least not yet, to use ethics in their sharing of information. While the editors were able to be responsible with their information gatekeeping, sites like Google and Facebook are not. They should be responsible in supplying everyone with the same information, but are not doing so.
Facebook and Google need to do a better job in being more neutral in their information sharing, but this is not to say that personalization of a social media or search engine is a completely bad thing. An example of an organization that does a better job of staying neutral, but still personalizing their site for their users is Twitter. Twitter’s news feed mainly consists of just every tweet from the people that the user follows in chronological order. In this way, the information is fair, and everyone can see the same thing if they want to. However, they also do a good job of personalizing the feed to their users, by having a section pop up in the middle of the feed. This section may consist of popular tweets that the user may have missed while not on Twitter, or just recommendations that the user may like. This way, while the Twitter user may see different things from one of their friends, they will still have access to the same information in their Twitter feed. This is a model that Facebook or Google should test out. They could definitely add in a recommendations section instead of just showing a user what it thinks they would like. In doing so, they would become more responsible information gatekeepers and they would make the internet more neutral.
Works Cited
Nguyen, Tien T., et al. “Exploring the Filter Bubble: The Effect of Using Recommender Systems on Content Diversity.” Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web, ACM, 2014, pp. 677–686. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2566486.2568012.
Pariser, Eli. Beware Online “Filter Bubbles.” www.ted.com, https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles. Accessed 20 Jan. 2017.
Pariser, Eli. “Did Facebook’s Big Study Kill My Filter Bubble Thesis?” Backchannel, 7 May 2015, https://backchannel.com/facebook-published-a-big-new-study-on-the-filter-bubble-here-s-what-it-says-ef31a292da95.