The Filter Bubble's Everywhere

In the pre-Internet era, one read the same magazines and newspaper all the time. We exchanged views with our friends and co-workers. Few sought diverse opinions. That’s just human nature. On the Internet, the problem got aggravated because we don’t even realize how sites work, as Shane Parrish says:

“Many sites offer personalized content selections, based on our browsing history, age, gender, location, and other data. The result is a flood of articles and posts that support our current opinions and perspectives to ensure that we enjoy what we see.”

Search for “British Petroleum” on Google, and it will throw up either stock analysis or environmental articles at the top, depending on your preferences! Eli Pariser calls this tendency of algorithms to dictate what we encounter online as the “filter bubble”. Even when we click on links shared by our friends, we end up in echo chambers. Why? Because our friends’ views usually align with ours…

Then there’s the advertising that seems to follow us around the Net:

“Most of us have experienced the odd sensation of deja vu as a product we took a look at online suddenly appears everywhere we go online, as well as in our email inboxes.”

It gets worse: search Dictionary.com for the meaning of the term “depression” and you’ll find antidepressant ads as you surf around the Net!

Pariser wrote that the filter bubble is dangerous in democracies:

“Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.”

Of course, this problem isn’t unique to the Net. It is true for newspapers and TV channels as well, which have their own slants on politics.

We can blame the media (pre- and post-Internet) all we want, but the reality is that the problem lies with our nature. As Pariser says:

“Consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult.”

But even if try to find and read opposing/different views, as Seth Godin says, we soon become tempted to give up:

“…to avoid falling into a rabbit hole of wasted time, misogyny and dissatisfaction. This is to avoid the endless clicking, the hateful comments, the mind-numbing noise of the net.”

And yet, as Godin says:

“Tempting to give up, but ultimately worth the effort. The easier the filter is to build, the less it's worth.”