Obsessive Personalization

When we first started talking about this subject of the “Filter Bubble,” I didn’t truly understand it. After more reflecting I feel that I am definitely guilty of creating a filter bubble around strictly, the material I want to observe. In the world we live in, more and more people are only being educated through one medium, social media. There are many reasons for this, but mainly it’s because the personalization of it. Creating “your” profile, following pages “you” want to hear form. The problem with this is it allows us to further our partial ways. Now days there is no such thing as simply identifying yourself as an American. Now we have to be either conservative or liberal. Social media’s customizability has allowed people to see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, whether fact or fake.

This customizability creates this bubble around people’s profile keeping them from seeing neutral information. In a way, these filter bubbles are killing democracy. The internet used to be a global platform for people to find unbiased information. Now it seems impossible to find any website with an unbiased point of view. I fault filter bubbles. Society as a whole is guilty of creating them. Personally, I identify as conservative and there are definitely pages I follow and pages I would not dare to come across. This is a very dangerous path that we are on because, according to Pew Research 61% of millennials use their Facebook as the main source of their news on government and politics. (El-Bermawy) This statistic indicates that the majority of young people are receiving biased news from outlets that belong that are biased to their own party. 

 Personally, I have a lot of liberal and conservative friends. Both sides tend to over post about their party while slamming the opposition. I will be honest, I have a few friends that are posting ridiculous posts once a day. These posts tend to put down the opposing party and the opposing party’s candidate, without any objectivity. Too many of these young people believe they are above conversation and debate and these filter bubbles are only strengthening their beliefs. As far as following and unfollowing people I agree or disagree with, I have never been one to unfollow anyone for having an opinion, again, no one is above conversation. I do know many people that will unfollow someone for posting something that goes against what they believe. Now there are always exceptions to this. I have unfollowed people before, only because of an excessive amount of political posts. When it gets to the point where someone is posting once per hour, agree or disagree with that person, I don’t want to hear about it. Overall, everything in moderation, personalization is a good thing, but not if it hinders people from receiving unbiased informational facts.  

Work Cited:

https://www.wired.com/2016/11/filter-bubble-destroying-democracy/

https://www.google.com/search?q=personalization&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjtiu3zvInTAhUmj1QKHQh8CPoQ_AUIBygC&biw=1126&bih=634#imgdii=-O3FFZeWNW6eAM:&imgrc=7a6TapBIhDprtM: