Internet Miscommunication Part 2

I watched a video the other day. It described a phenomenon that is called a Filter Bubble.  The phenomenon is, put simply, that your view of the world is slanted by the fact that the posts you see are filtered by what a web site knows about your preferences. For instance, Facebook selects items to show you based on people that you have selected as your friends. As such, they probably have similar tastes and opinions to yours. If you support a particular point of view, either your friends do too or you get annoyed by there rants and mute them. Consequently, over time you hear only one side of the story. Then, when something like an election or a referendum happens, you are surprised that it goes the way it does. You are blind sided by the fact that you have self selected just the parts of the story that you want to hear.

What can be done to remedy this problem? One thing that comes to mind is to actively seek information from diverse sources. Another suggestion is to seek information from diverse types of media, for instance, news papers, magazines, radio, and television.

The sad thing is that we have been so indoctrinated by the convenience of the internet that we have become lazy. It takes too much effort to read magazines and news papers. It is work to sort through them and decide what we are interested in. There is no Google for the physical world. There isn’t even an easy way to search media like film and television. YouTube is a start I suppose. Note that YouTube is owned by Google.

The important thing is, no matter where you look for information, look for as many different sources as you can. No one channel is going to give you the entire range of ideas on a given issue. And for goodness sake, don’t depend on Facebook as your primary source of news.