To Burst the Bubble or not? That is the Question…

Come one… Come all… to read this mess of what I call a blog post.

So, the question that I plan on tackling today is “Should Social Media companies burst filter bubbles?”

By now we all know what a filter bubble is. So should Social Media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc burst those bubbles? Personally I don’t really know what I think. Like after the last lecture I felt guilty using my phone for something other than a phone call. I ended up getting the PDF for “Amusing Ourselves to Death” onto my phone so I felt like I was actually learning something instead of falling victim to this dopamine binge that Social Media gives. This stuck with me for a few days up until I realized I needed to post something to Instagram to adjust my feed and create a new a e s t h e t i c. Once I did that I fell back down the rabbit hole. I found myself going to Facebook and mindlessly scrolling down hundreds of memes and saying to myself “I’ve already seen these”. I’d have moments where I’d try to go back to the book but the notifications of Instagram telling me somebody just went Live kept distracting me.

I think a major part in why I lost the will to keep reading was because it’s something unfamiliar to me. Not like reading is unfamiliar just the idea of reading a book on my streetcar ride home instead of going on Instagram or Facebook. It wasn’t until I got home where I found myself again on Facebook but this time on both my phone and laptop…. both! Why would I do that? Because this Filter Bubble that I’m in is comfortable. It’s something that distracts me from the world around me. It keeps me from Googling Trump’s policies or the situation in Syria right now or any of the thousands of real world issues going on. My filter bubble is memes and cool photography and hip hop culture, it’s what is comfortable for me.

So going back to the question “Should Social Media companies burst filter bubbles?”

If you read through my anecdote you’d probably think I’d be against the idea of bursting the bubble but in all reality I’m not. I don’t believe we should burst the bubble that we are in but expand it. Try to broaden our reach when it comes to information we are presented. If we can’t do that then Let’s try to change what the algorithm thinks of us… Let’s change the way it perceives us. Because in all actuality filter bubbles aren’t necessarily bad, what’s bad is when one becomes lost in the sauce. So let’s raise awareness to what filter bubbles are because I had no idea what they were before this class.

Let’s be WOKE! #RTA902