A Response to “The Filter Bubble”

I try not to find myself becoming nervous or cynical towards the future but then, apropos a reading like this as well as the Ted Talk video, it takes a bit more work to remain positive. If anything, I think the importance of a topic like a “filter bubble” is to keep us grounded.

In the first place, Zeyneb Tufekci in her Ted Talk spoke about how persuasion architecture was becoming more and more personalized. This was a specific point in her talk which I enjoyed, as the turn of a good phrase never goes unmissed by mine self. “Persuasion architecture” like the placement of candy in a grocery store, has become more about the data we inadvertently provide these digital media and retail giants being used to provide us and only us with information and ads. If it were only ads, as Tufekci says, I could personally just maneuver past it all. I already do that online as many people do; I talk about something and the next day I see targeted ads for it on the sides of my web pages. But the issue she was bringing up which was also a large part of the book chapter was the issue of selective information silently nudging your decisions along because you don’t know it’s there. The information you don’t know you aren’t seeing can’t alert you to the practices being done upon you.

One of the interesting points from the book came from page 58 when, to paraphrase, it mentioned how the filter bubble does not have the same “ethical model” that old journalism and specifically newspapers did. Now, this taken with a grain of salt, because as was pointed out, at the end of the day everyone in the position of power that the head of a news organization has some kind of bias and agenda. However, the ethical standard of the medium was to provide stories to anyone and everyone. The filter bubble however, is a program. Humans created it but as Tufekci points out, we no longer entirely understand it. Its “decision making” so to speak has outstripped our ability to follow it, and so it follows little if any original ethical standard. And yet despite this algorithm being used so heavily, it evades the public eye. The examples given in the Ted Talk about the simple changes in formatting done to political posts on Facebook and how they turned out hundreds of thousands of voters points to a frighteningly deep well of possibilities for good or for bad.

There’s a certain phrase I enjoy using: that people sometimes experience a “tyranny of choice.” I believe that’s what the book is pointing to in the shift away from the printed press at the advent of digital journalism. The issue is not that there are too many sources per se, but rather that too many people allow algorithms to determine for them what sources of those to pay attention to. Without taking the extra time to cultivate one’s own set of pages to get news from, we remove ourselves and our agency from the equation and become easier to manipulate. But this is doubled by what the book later points to as well: “More voices, in other words, means less trust in any given voice” (64). We have discussed previously how blogging can be a powerful tool, but that the dissemination of information from several well-read sources to a sea of largely unread sources can prove problematic. Simultaneously what the author here shows is that even if there was an “artificially high” trust in broadcast media, there has now been seen a deflation of trust. And as such, when your attention is cautiously and imperceptibly shifted towards any one voice in whom you put your trust, it can be difficult to unlearn that behavior.