It is amazing how again and again we are surprised to know the amount of control other people have over things we considered to be free with. The internet is seen as a place where all kinds of information is at your fingertips, ready to be discovered by us. However, companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc are invisibly controlling the flow of information that we receive. How? Through the use of “filters”. These filters or algorithms are designed to monitor our browsing to determine our interests and therefore determine what information to show us. For example, I tend to scour the gaming sites, looking for updates on the latest Nintendo games. Now if I log into facebook, suddenly all the advertisements at the side are mostly relevant at what I had search and read in the sites I chose before. Google “video games” and chances are that the majority of the results I get will be related to Nintendo. In short, these filters personalize our experience of the internet to our wants, but not our needs.
I do believe these “filter bubbles” are becoming a danger to our online lives. At first, it may sound quite nice to have the web personalized to what we'd like to see… but is what we like to see always a good thing? We also need to see and know about things that aren’t necessarily are pleasant or very interesting to us. Certain things such as issues or conflicts happening around the world could be easily accessible, but if these filters determine what we should see, then we can be seriously lacking in knowledge. As the saying goes “knowledge is power” and if we live our lives clueless to the outside world, then how will humanity progress as a whole? Limiting us in what we are able to see by others not only allows for easier manipulation but leads us to live close-minded lives, not hearing both sides of a story.
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