My Small but Present "Filter Bubble"

During lecture this week I was introduced to the idea of a filter bubble. A “filter bubble” being the result of an algorithm created to better tailor social media to fit a particular person. I’m not linked in with Tumbler, Twitter, and Instagram, but I personally think I spend a little too much time scrolling through Facebook. Looking at my own Facebook newsfeed, which happens to be set to most recent, I noticed that my feed is kind of all over the place in terms of topics. I did notice that a large amount of the posts contained memes or BuzzFeed videos for recipe ideas, stress, and other topics. Among all the meme posts, kitty pictures, and photos of family and friends are buried, seemly random ads. Now that I was actively looking for ads I noticed one of the first ads I saw scrolling through my feed was an ad for Disneyland’s World of Color. This ad might have been there due to my liking of the Disney Facebook Page. As for the ads for LG and the Pink Lily Boutique these two were recent searches in my Google Chrome history. Now I can admit that I’ve gotten pretty lazy over the past couple years when it comes to creating new profiles for websites, especially on a shopping site. Many times because it was simply faster to link my profile through Facebook than to type in my email and create a new password. I found that there were not many political post floating around my feed in the past week. I did notice that I spend a lot of time scrolling through in agreement on Facebook. My filter bubble has made it so that not many post that are in disagreement with my logoi or morals are overly present on my feed. I can’t attribute this completely to my “filter bubble” because I am slightly cautious about who I friend on Facebook.

From my observations of my own Facebook I would say it is entirely possible that the decline of dissoi logoi is due to the entanglement with media like Facebook or Google Chrome, and how it can intern be causing the larger scale of polarization we see in society today. Polarization in our society is problematic because of the challenges the world faces today. We could apply this to the stances you see with republicans and democrats and there continued and growing unwillingness to compromise. In the Ted Talk we watched in class one of the conclusion drawn was that it seems where the Internet was supposed to bring us all together and help the world collaborate has become a place where we do nothing but close ourselves off in our own space and exist casting out what doesn’t follow our logoi. One way to counter this, which was also introduced in the Ted Talk, is to take the time once in a while and look of the other side of your perspective. 

Nadria Beale