This is one of the most interesting video clips I’ve seen in a long time. I’m shocked but not surprised to learn that the algorithms and filters employed by sites such as Google, Facebook and more and more of our news outlets actually control our internet experience. Those sites mine data from your search history in order to learn what you like and don’t like. They then filter out things that you may not typically see, showing only the kind of results you like to see. Eli Pariser from the video says, “The internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” These internet filters cause you to live inside your own little bubble, what Pariser calls a “filter bubble.” “What’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do, but the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in, and more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out.”
The challenge this presents to anyone who gets most of their information and news on the internet is incredibly important. No longer are living breathing editors with some sort of ethical/moral formation filtering our news. Algorithms are helping us to “If algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they are going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they are not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable, or challenging, or important.” We need to demand that the algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the common good & the need to understand and hear from more than one point of view. We need to demand that they be more transparent and that we can control them instead of being controlled by them.
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