“FilterBubble” Reaction

The “FilterBubble” article was incredibly informative, but a lot more frightening than anything else. I’ve noticed for years that I meet more and more people my age who know a broad amount of information but only on a select few topics or facets. I believe this is a consequence of the personalized internet phenomena. Every time we touch a computer we are giving someone else a better picture of who we are. Correction: who we SEEM to be. By organizing and preferring the information that a user has shown to carry an interest in, regardless of opinion, internet companies extrapolate this data to the max: it overloads you on similar interests, predicts your next interest, and discriminates you by associating you to others who seem to be similar to you.

I do not support the internet personalization phenomena. It places, and better yet- keeps individuals in their own little box of interests so that I only see 20 different people when I log onto Facebook(limiting my communication), every article that is shown to me on Google has a predisposed viewpoint (limiting the ability to be unique in my opinion). This concludes a vicious cycle of never having to step outside one’s own boundaries but getting more brought into them, driven by imaginary notions such as a “like” and a “+1”. The idea of internet personalization is based on the same underlying theme that we have learned about media all year in class: it’s being compacted. The varying opinions are shrinking, the ability to be inoformational-ly unique is going out the window, and will continue to with the personalization phenomena.

The belief that the personalization of every web-users information feed will help the people of our society to become more efficient consumers, while saving the individuality of the user, is highly improbable. To me, this is the summation of our grim outlook for the future, where people indulge in what they enjoy (or what they are told they should enjoy) and tune out everything that would be more difficult to ingest. This has had, and will increasingly have a negative effect on our society’s already-tarnished value system, but thats a post for another day…